[jcl]

Reminds me a bit of Jeff Vogel's blog post about the first Red Dead Redemption:

"What was more surprising, though in retrospect it should not have been, was how instantly attached my eight year old daughter became to the game the moment she caught an unlucky glimpse of me playing it. Of course, it makes perfect sense. This is a game where you own a horse, ride your horse, take your horse out into the brush, find wild horses, capture and tame wild horses, and make one of those horses your new horse."

http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2010/12/red-dead-redemption-a...

[Buttons840]

Rockstar should consider breaking their games down into sub games. They could build a G rated game about caring for wild horses and sell it for kids; they'd only have to remove content. In the full RDR2 game my daughter might have fun caring for horses, but she might also witness a random murder, pick up new words I'd rather her not repeat, witness a rape, who knows. I haven't actually played RDR2 but all of those thing seem like possibilities in a Rockstar game.

[patient_zero]

Heck, all they'd have to do is release the toolkit à la Bethesda. Allowing players to mod the game is the best thing that shop ever did. Skyrim has an avid following with player-made mods still trickling out to this day, and it was released 7-8 years ago.

[jcl]

Exactly! The taxi, ambulance, and firetruck missions were some of my favorite parts of the GTA games, and featured relatively nonviolent, legal activities. They could easily be standalone games... One could argue the taxi missions already are, if you count Crazy Taxi.

[chrisweekly]

I always thought Rockstar should've made an EMT / first-responder version of GTA where the goal was to help rather than harm.

[asark]

War Zone Taxi Driver (GTA: San Andreas with cheat codes "everyone has guns" and "everyone's hostile to everyone" applied, and me in a taxi running missions) is a really, really good game. I'd absolutely buy and play a whole game of just variations on that.

[haldora]

In Blood, Sweat, and Pixels by Jason Schreier, I think he was also quoted as saying his daughter's insatiable habit of repeatedly mounting and unmounting the horse caused a serious bug, which they would not have found otherwise.