Re: Grand Theft Auto V Play Market
Indira Rossetto
I recently watched a video showing me that if I ignored all of Lester's assassination missions until after the big score, I could make a ton more money. The first step after the big score was to invest all of the money you had into Debonaire Cigarettes, which should give you a huge return after you complete Lester's next assassination mission. I put all 41 million dollars I had into Debonaire, and it all disappeared. It said my portfolio was empty, and I only had $68 left. Luckily I turned auto save off, but can someone explain this to me? The only thing I can think of is that this is rockstars way of telling people not to exploit the stock market. ( Playing on Xbox One)
Stock market portfolios are not shared between characters. It is possible you swapped characters between making the investments and reviewing the profits. While character Franklin has $500,000 invested in Debonaire, Trevor does not. It is also possible you are looking at the wrong investment portfolio as there are two portfolios: LCN and BAWSAQ. Looking at the LCN portfolio will not show you investments made in the BAWSAQ portfolio.
Another potential reason is that you invested in the wrong company. You might have unwittingly put your stock into Redwood while thinking it was Debonaire Cigarettes. Unlikely, but not impossible; you could have tanked your own shares and now can only be recovered for a fraction of it's original value.
Lastly, you may have encountered a glitch. Rockstar games have a solid reputation for producing glitch-free in comparison to, say, Bethesda Softworks but that does not mean it can't happen. Other players have reported losing their investment money while playing Lester's assination missions. It could be possible it happened to you too. In this case, your only options are to load from saved game, check for any available updates, restart your console and hope for the best. Sorry about that...
The first thing that occurred to me when I found out that I was going to get Grand Theft Auto V a few days before its release was that I should play it all in one sitting. I don't know why. It's not the way you're supposed to play the game. It's not the way you're supposed to treat the game. It's not really the way you should treat any big-quantity thing in your life.
But is there even a "right" way to treat GTA V, the fresh behemoth that Rockstar Games has today delivered into the world after a half-decade, quarter-billion-dollar gestation? Should we treat it formally, purely as a game, in terms of graphics and gameplay and multiplayer features? That's a good place to start, but it ignores the fact that this series has, over the past 15 years, become a genuine cultural touchstone, a shorthand in American life for both the best and the worst that games have to offer. OK, so should we treat it as a cultural phenomenon with a uniquely loaded past? Well, it's that too, but as any old gamer can tell you, the foremost thing about these games is that when you strip away the outrage and outrageousness, they are really, stupidly, surpassingly fun and totally in love with the possibilities of gaming. Should we treat it as an entertainment product? Sure, and it will probably make more than a billion dollars, but it's far too weird, too risky, too funny, and too beautiful to be considered a Call of Duty-style cash cow. So how about talking about it as a work of popular art, done by a game studio of unparalleled ambition? That's closer, but, I mean, this is still a thing in which you can switch between boobular camera angles during a virtual lap dance.
Anyways, I got it home; I got it out of the envelope. Then, against the plangent whimpers of a more primal part of my brain, I put the case away and opened a book. I needed to wait for a new day. You see, I had gotten this idea in my head, maybe foolish, that a game as massive and ambitious as GTA V needed a massive and ambitious response, a test of endurance, a personal investment. Somehow, picking an "angle" or "angles" felt insufficient, against the spirit of the thing: a game that recreates an American region mote by mote needs not deduction but induction.
7:45 a.m.: I feel great. I have had eight uninterrupted hours of sleep, a strong cup of coffee, and a bowl of granola, fruit, and yogurt. My mind is fresh and my fingers are wiggling. Let the game begin.
10:00 a.m.: You can, in Grand Theft Auto V, take selfies. Your virtual smartphone (the "IFruit") comes with a digital camera that can be flipped around, true to life, to include your character's face. There is no way to do a duck face. I discovered this feature during the funniest mission early in the game, which involves the sabotage of the product launch of a Facebook-style startup by its Zuckerbergian founder. The mission has an appallingly violent and mean-spirited punch line that made me, and two of my coworkers, selflessly over at my apartment to "check on my progress," scream with laughter.
(*An aside: I went on a date, months ago, with an artist's assistant to a very well-compensated New York painter. Some weeks prior to our date, she told me, representatives of Rockstar had come into her boss's gallery and made inquiries about several of the paintings inside, paintings that cost many thousands of dollars. Did they want to hang them in the headquarters, or in the boss's office, she asked them? No, they said. They wanted to hang them in the game.)
11:10 a.m.: I have been playing for more than three hours. This is the point where, in a past life, I would have set aside GTA V for the day, having played long enough to feel like I'd celebrated a minor holiday while still maintaining my adult dignity. My two coworkers are still here, and I've given my editor, John, the controller while I take some notes. He runs Michael, one of the game's three characters, around the Venice boardwalk, trying to nonviolently spook people. He's giggling, and I feel weirdly jealous. I've been plowing through the game's early missions, aware that peripheral monkeyshines will count against me much later, when I will presumably be exhausted. John can futz around freely, while I've had to ignore so, so much: tennis, yoga, customizing cars, customizing guns, investing in the stock market, trying to nonviolently spook people, and so on, forever. I think the feeling I'm feeling is something like FOMO (dread acronym: fear of missing out), which is weird because I never have that feeling in real life. So much of the pleasure of the Grand Theft Auto games comes from picking a point in the distance at random and driving your tank into it. What am I missing?
12:00 p.m.: Grand Theft Auto IV was about a thirtysomething Slav named Niko Bellic who moves to America after witnessing atrocities in the Balkans. Previous GTA protagonists had basically been ciphers. Rockstar gave Niko a tragic past and a wisecracking good nature in service of what was a pretty radical experiment at the time: making a video game action hero sufficiently sympathetic that you didn't want to do inordinately bad things while controlling him. Though GTA IV offered all of the prostitute-murdering possibilities that made the series so controversial, they felt out of character, wrong.
This is probably the best time to talk about Trevor. Trevor is going to be controversial. There are going to be a lot of Reddit threads about Trevor. There are going to be a lot of image macros about Trevor. There are going to be a lot of upset parents about Trevor. We are introduced to Trevor in flagrante derelicto with a quasi-willing methamphetamine addict, whose intruding, quasi-jealous boyfriend Trevor proceeds to murder, brutally. This murder precipitates the second act of the game, an hours-long rampage of more murder, which is played for laughs, often effectively. The best way to think about Trevor is as the incarnated spirit of Grand Theft Auto pre-2008, when it was less narratively ambitious and more in love with its own nastiness. By the time Trevor, in a sequence that will inspire a thousand tortured thought pieces, tortures an FBI-requisitioned drug dealer and then lectures him on the ineffectiveness of torture as interrogation technique, it is clear that Rockstar is using the character as a way to lard the game with all of the chaotic impulses that some gamers grumpily accused them of leaving behind in GTA IV.
What complicates Trevor is that he is by far the most interesting character in the game, and clearly the character that Rockstar North had the most fun creating. He gets to do most of the flying in the game, which is a highlight, and he gets the one-liners, and he has the most interesting appearance, and the best voice-acting performance, and the funniest subplots, and the most compelling character arc. We're clearly supposed to have the most "fun" playing as Trevor. That's a point that will probably be ignored when people make the "but Trevor is just one of three playable characters in this multifaceted universe" argument, but it's an important one.
5:37 p.m.: The dock mission leads into the theft of a mini submersible, and my boredom lifts. The reason: I've started to notice the beauty of the game, which is considerable. The sub theft takes place at night. Whitecapped black waves break over the top of the yellow sub as the port lights glow on row after row of metal latticework. The game abounds with moments like this. Special mention must go to the sunset, which looks like it's made out of grapefruit sorbet. It's weirdly...melancholy? Much later in the game, in one of GTA V's bravura character switches, you wake up as Trevor, in a sundress, clutching a bottle of gin, on top of a mountain, with the sun barely risen in the background. Nothing about this should have worked, and yet I found myself mildly verklempt. The sincerity with which Rockstar approached aesthetics in this game is such a strange counterpoint to the game's abiding cynicism, and it's kind of touching.
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