GTA San Andreas’ gang war system had a lot of untapped potential.
In San Andreas, the Los Santos suburbs were divided into territories, each belonging to one of three gangs. The goal was to win territories for your gang until no more enemy-controlled areas were left to launch attacks against you. You killed a few gang members to start a war and then killed three waves of enemies to take the territory. You did this for every territory until everything was yours.
It was a simple system but repetitive. Fighting three waves of enemies became tedious after the first few times. There was no strategic difference between the territories – no rewards for taking one over another. The only effect taking a territory had was that the enemy gang members in the area were swapped out with your own. This was a neat instance of your actions having a tangible effect on the world – but being neat was all the gang war system could achieve. And considering your territories occasionally came under attack, requiring you to defend them personally or lose them, the gang war system could be frustrating. Whether or not you enjoyed San Andreas’ gang war system, it should be easy to see plenty of potential for improvement.
So what improvements could be reasonably made? It’s easy to brainstorm crazy ideas – but broadly speaking, I can identify three prominent areas of improvement that future GTA games or other open-world games with factions could make.
Gameplay Variety
The biggest issue with San Andreas’ gang wars is the repetitive process of acquiring and defending territory. Each turf war scenario is the same: fight three waves of enemies. Sometimes enemies will come at you in a car. There’s no meaningful variation here except the location of the fight. But the location doesn’t mean much when the unintelligent AI don’t use the environment to its advantage and instead opts to run towards you in a straight line and occasionally get stuck.
Special objectives could be added to break up the monotony of turf war scenarios. For example, a gang war could task you with capturing the rival gang’s drug stash and taking it to a safe location. Along the way, you could be chased by a pack of aggressive vehicles, sort of like a police chase but with far more aggressive drivers and guys with guns in the passenger seats.
Another objective could have you painting over the rival gangs’ tags, smashing all their cars, and throwing molotovs through their windows under a time limit while endless waves of enemies try to stop you.
One objective could task you with killing the territory’s top gang member stealthily and then planting false evidence to frame his death as an internal gang assassination so the gang members in the area defect to your side without a fight.
And what if, at the start of a gang war, you had to clear and occupy a building and then defend it as enemy gang members rushed towards it with molotovs? Horde modes can be fun, especially when the enemies’ numbers keep increasing, and the area you’re defending becomes increasingly strewn with wrecked cars and dead bodies.
I could go on, but you’ll have more fun if you imagine some scenarios yourself.
Strategic Decisions
No territories in San Andreas are special. There’s no reason to take one territory over another because none comes with notable benefits or drawbacks. This makes the decision of which territory you want to take arbitrary. People usually go with whichever is closest and which will make the territory map look more aesthetically pleasing.
To make the gang war system more engaging, the decision to take one territory over another should mean something. The game should demand you think strategically.
Variations in difficulty would be a good start. Some objectives should be more challenging than others. Varying objective difficulty would encourage players to question if they were prepared to take a problematic territory or settle for an easier one. This contrast in difficulty would encourage players to appreciate hard-fought-for territories more.
But difficulty alone wouldn’t be enough. Without a practical reward for taking territory, it would be arbitrary for some areas to be notably harder to take than others. Players might be thrilled to take a heavily-defended territory, but the thrill of victory would quickly sour once it became apparent they wouldn’t get anything for their trouble.
One solution would be to attach strategic benefits to each territory – manpower, for example. If each gang had a limited number of members, and each territory gained the winning gang additional members and replenished losses at a specific rate, gangs would be incentivised to take territories with the highest base supply of manpower and highest rates of recruitment.
Manpower management would allow players to strategically engage with the gang war system. Instead of attacking and defending by yourself, you could open the map and distribute your limited pool of men to the territories under your control, sending large numbers of them to protect valuable territories and smaller numbers to the least valuable territories. If you choose to order your men to attack an enemy territory rather than attack yourself, you would have to decide whether your gang can sustain the inevitable loss of manpower – a loss which could be devastating if they lose.
There could be other advantages to taking a territory too. Certain territories could unlock gang-wide access to better weapons and vehicles. If these resources were limited, it would force players to consider which territories they sent them to carefully. If gang members had randomly generated names, you could even bestow them on your favourite members and actually care when they die. Other territories could offer lower prices at the local shops or generate protection money for you to collect. You should be able to see your gang members on the streets, using the vehicles and weapons you gave them and attacking and defending territories in real time. Seeing your decisions’ effect on the real world would make the gang war system so much more engaging, even if you never personally got involved in the fighting.
Unfortunately, due to NPC intelligence limitations, expecting your gang members to engage in the more complex objectives I brainstormed earlier is unrealistic. So when you send your gang members to take a territory, the only realistic form of engagement would be a simple deathmatch. But that would be enough. It’s the spectacle of open gang warfare on the streets we want to see, with each man, weapon, and vehicle representing one unit in a finite pool of resources.
If you chose not to fight yourself, this version of the gang war system could be an enjoyable – if simplistic – strategy game. If you decided to do as CJ did and do all the fighting yourself, all the strategy mechanics would admittedly become irrelevant. But there’s nothing to be done about this. It’s a natural consequence of a game where the protagonist can kill hundreds of enemies easily.
Automated Management System
In San Andreas, you’d occasionally lose territory if you didn’t, or couldn’t, defend them. And that was frustrating.
An automated gang management system would be ideal for those who don’t want to bother with gang wars or are temporarily distracted by something else. If enemy gangs can manage their resources and decide when and where to attack and defend, that same AI management system could also be applied to your gang. No AI would be as good as a competent and attentive player, so people who wish to maximise their gang’s potential would prefer to turn the AI manager off.
Of course, your gang would still be overwhelmed under automated management. But at that point, you’d have to suck it up and give your men a hand.
They are your homies, after all.
Territorial Modes In Future Open World Games?
Considering GTA VI looks like it will focus on robberies instead of gang warfare, there’s no chance it will feature a gang war system. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a chance to see such a system in a GTA VI DLC. It’s unlikely, sure. But GTA VI will be getting DLC, apparently (according to leaks, but Rockstar could always change their mind). So for those who like dynamic faction warfare systems, there’s a tiny glimmer of hope GTA VI will get one.
GTA IV and V included gangs but didn’t include a gang war system; players therefore could not wage dynamic war with other gangs outside of scripted missions. It is understandable that Franklin wasn’t given such an option in GTA V – he wants to leave the gang life behind, so it wouldn’t make sense for him to fight for the Grove Street Families on his initiative.
In my opinion, however, Rockstar missed an opportunity to create a DLC for GTA V that allowed you to play as a Grove Street Families member whose goal is to bring the Grove Street Families back to their former glories. Such a DLC could have included a new and improved gang war system, dedicating far more attention and resources to its development than was possible with San Andreas’ barebones iteration.
But even if the Grand Theft Auto series never again tries a gang war system, seeing more open-world games featuring factions that include faction-based territorial conquest modes would still be interesting. It’s admittedly a considerable undertaking, so it’s not surprising not many games have anything like it. But it would be nice to see nonetheless, even if the systems are – like the one in San Andreas – extremely basic.