There's always going to be a bit of a disconnect when it comes to doing more and more over-the-top crime dramas whilst retaining characters whose motives are believable and more so, relatable. GTA III worked a treat because Claude was mute, letting you project yourself onto his blank slate and do... whatever the game's quest-givers asked. It was a simpler time for games back then, with nowhere near the amount of scrutiny titles these days get in terms of "Why am I doing this?"-type analysis, but it was believable. Rockstar have since experimented with a number of approaches; with the latest being one of the worst, as although Franklin was a retread of CJ's loveable main thread, Michael and especially Trevor were downright despicable human beings. Of course everyone just goes 'Well Trevor's actions were meant to represent the average GTA player' and therein lies the rub - killing and maiming everything in sight is something whose appeal is directly tied to how exposed you are to the open-world genre in the first place. As soon as you're playing as characters whose in-world lives you don't care about, are watching something like implied rape between Trevor and Floyd, seeing Michael be a bumbling fool whose past criminal ways have destroyed his family - it doesn't make for the most welcoming sensation when you take over. GTA's greatest asset is to exist as a black mirror on society, showing everyone their potential dark side whilst highlighting the hypocrisies and underlying negativities of a hyper-mediated world. You simply can't do that if you're looking into a cesspool of nothingness with no one to hold it up.