I'm not sure if my opinion is biased by all the glory this game has been getting from reviewers or not, but bottom line is, this still my subjective opinion of the game. I really tried to like this game, and it really is quite 'impressive'. It's very large and the cities are always brimming with life. There's also like a million things to do, as well as three characters to choose from. Dialogue and writing is witty and the game is pretty. Seems like an immediate win right?
But for some reason, it just doesn't 'click'. Honestly...it's just not fun. And yes I did play from beginning to end. I can't rate the game poorly because it is actually quite well made, but as a whole, enjoyment just didn't exist. This was largely noticeable because I had recently started playing Witcher 3, which is just as big and detailed, but infinitely more fun to play.
I'm not sure what it is about the game, but it's a combination of things that ruin GTA V. First off, yes you get 3 characters, but none of them are really all that 'likable'. But this is the tip of the iceberg; yes the city is huge, and yes there are millions of sub-games, but none of them feel like they're fun. Yes you can drive to an airport and hijack a plane, and parachute off it. But...why would you? It's extremely tedious to do so, and takes forever. The payoff is underwhelming at best. Also, the infinite minigames; at most you play them once, are underwhelmed, and move on. Witcher 3 has fewer 'minigames', but ALL of them are fun, whether it is horse-racing or Gwent. In GTA V you can play 'yoga' if you want...I guess. But again, why would you?
The story is good, but when I was playing the game, even after patches, it would crash intermittently. This game is just 'unstable'; after playing Witcher 3, an evenly immense game with close to zero crashing (maybe 3 times total after 50 hours), this was unforgivable. Also, the layout for GTA V missions make a crash -extremely- annoying. It has few 'checkpoints' (you have to start over), no fast travel, and a slow load time. Add onto the fact that most of the 'missions' are 1. drive here, 2. kill this, 3. etc. The writing in GTA is clever, but the mission design almost always revolves around driving. And that's really just not all that fun. If I wanted that, I would just go driving in real life.
GTA V is a game that should be extremely fun on paper, but in practice, just left me frustrated and unfulfilled. Witcher 3, on the other hand, is almost completely opposite in this regard. I know it's weird for me to compare this game to Witcher, but really, it's because one let me down and the other exceeded by expectations. Both are vast open world games, but only one left me satisfied.