I’m still playing GTA 4 and the vigilante missions come across a bit questionable in 2025. In GTA 4, when you’re driving any police vehicle you can access the onboard police computer and either do repeating missions where you kill generic criminal NPCs or tick off a list of Liberty City’s most wanted criminals. Most of them basically just boil down to you pulling up somewhere in a cop car and eliminating black and brown people (though sometimes you get to shoot motor cycle gangs and Italian goombas)
As I was running over Spanish-speaking gangsters that were fleeing on foot in the militarised police Hummer belonging to the GTA universe’s version of ICE I had stolen I felt like I was stuck in some Grok-generated AI video on the White House’s Twitter account
It’s even worse because in GTA 4, most NPCs don’t die outright unless you kill them with a headshot, and instead they go curl up into an extended dying state where they slowly bleed out while they moan and beg for mercy. This doesn’t count as a kill for these missions, so most of them end with you going around and executing people as they lie on the ground
It’s all just throwaway extra content and not functionally different from the shit you do normally in the game’s missions but something about the cop framing makes it feel much ickier than murdering people for Russian mobsters or Puerto Rican coke dealers
Something tells me we won’t be seeing these missions return in GTA 6
Wait, are you telling me the grand theft auto video game series has senseless violence, power fantasies, and parodies of the police where you show up and gun down possible criminals?
Wild
being poc and playing any shooter is pretty much “I just keep mowing down brown people like me” had to drop uncharted for that reasonrockstar is and always has been run by really shit people. hope this helps
i have bad news about gta5
Did it also have vigilante missions? I don’t think I’ve ever played far enough to find out
there’s a mission where you torture someone to get information
Isn’t that scene supposed to be an intentionally over the top satirical parody or whatever of the kind of torture porn popularised in pop culture after 9/11 by media like 24?
Yeah, and ends with psycho Trevor releasing the victim so he can be a “torture advocate” and spreading that torture is just a thing for the torturer to enjoy and completely useless for getting information
Been replaying GTA V, just did this scene two days ago. It’s very clear that this is a bad thing that removed do and doesn’t work.
Edit: Woke Hexbear slur filter doesn’t want people talking bad about our brave intelligence agency agents
sp–k is also a racist slur
Yeah but as far as I’m aware the slur and the term for cops have no relation to one another.
no such thing as an anti
wartorturefilmgame
The game’s villain makes the most sadistic and unhinged member of the cast torture some random guy who’s fully cooperative but confused as to what they even want from him in order to maybe ID some other random person that the villain thinks maybe is doing something but he’s not sure what so that another member of the cast can just extrajudicially kirk him from a ridge by a house party he’s at.
Like it’s entirely set up as this pointless, monstrous act that’s being ordered by a fed who’s just going off vibes and casually hurting people because that’s what he does, and that not only was the torture unnecessary but also that there’s nothing to even establish that the target was anything but just some guy who was probably some comprador businessman trying to distance himself from potential consequences in his own country considering he was clearly rich and taking shelter in the US. The feds are just there committing crimes against humanity using plausibly deniable assets to murk one of their own compradors out of pure racist vibes.
in the mission the FBI blackmails criminals (the player) to kidnap and torture an innocent man for information he was willing to give without being tortured, which is somewhat accurate to what U.S. agencies do irl. out of all the things in gta v, for example the transphobic (now removed npcs) to the anti-union stuff, to the fact that not a single female character is written in the story outside of being a feminist parody or a love interest. “by the book” isn’t high up.
There’s also a few missions where Trevor works for the literal ICE then later kills the ICE agents but after the damage was done, which at first thought what you were talking about.
Throwaway side content almost never gets analysed, it also never really gets pushback internally in companies because “it’s just filler it doesn’t matter much” is pretty true. Nobody remembers it.
technically speaking, vigilantes are criminals. i don’t think the game is saying, “getting in a law enforcement vehicle and pressing R3 morally justifies what you’re about to do”. it’s more like, you’re activating the “do reactionary murder missions for cash.”
this is a game series where, if you’re wanted for anything, including bumping into a cop car, the cops try to force your vehicle off the road with no regard for public safety and unload firearms at you even if you’re unarmed with your back to them and there are civilians around. the game generally presents US law enforcement as trigger happy, racists, incompetent, and corrupt from top to bottom, so i don’t follow the logic that ostensibly doing their dirty work in side missions is being endorsed as good or ethical. i’ve always interpreted the game series as deeply satirical of US institutions like the military, policing, and their abject failure to mitigate poverty or promote public safety.
as far as i recall, the vigilante missions first appeared in Vice City (though they could have been in GTA3, but i believe VC was the first to have a significant reward) and were optional, but required for 100% completion. once you advanced to a certain level in them, it was all heavily armed mercenaries in multi-armored car convoys so it was basically impossible to do the 20-in-a-row (or whatever) without the Hunter. which, really gives it away that the vigilante missions purpose is to be a maximum collateral damage killer.
I’m not saying the vigilante missions are intended to be unironic copaganda. They just end up feeling kind of iffy looking back on them almost 20 years later, probably mostly unintentionally- it doesn’t seem like Rockstar put too much thought into them.
GTA Online had the bounty hunter expansion which is essentially the same concept but done in a way where it makes a bit more sense in the context of a GTA game
What do you mean iffy? The cops are evil and you’re volunteering to be their dog.
Yeah, when you’re playing as a criminal element of some race/ethnicity, and you’re offing other criminals of various ethnicities, it feels like a “don’t hate the player hate the game” situation. Whereas the vigilante missions break the “criminal element” feel and create a sense of the violence being structurally justified.
Hopefully GTA6 will bring back the corrupt cop angle from San Andreas.
To be fair, the game does have a corrupt cop subplot and the vigilante missions are about as detached from the game’s narrative as the 50 stunt jumps or the 200 hidden pigeons you have to shoot. They make no sense within the game’s fiction
Exactly. Russian mobster have more moral authority than cops lmao
