But its too easy to land a helicopter without doing damage to it and if its a small space just make sure the blades dont touch anything.
Yeah just practice a little with the chopper and you can land it easy. If you learn how to hover, you can learn how to shoot. Dogfighting is a completely different story, though. I'd rather ram into other helicopters than shoot them down. Also, parachutes are in The Ballad of Gay Tony, right?
Give me access to good cars almost immediately. There's no reason to make me wait till the end of the game to enjoy driving. Forcing the player to earn entertaining content is an archaic design philosophy and the sooner designers realize this the better. Copy entertaining combat from another game, just be blatant about it, I don't care, give me fun fight sequences. The beautiful sights of GTA are wasted, give me a reason to explore the city. Give me hidden items/locations that legitimately affect my game, not packages or birds or something that only affects some abstract point value. The people they've designed to inhabit the city are equally wasted. I feel like I'm walking through a world of Ghosts. Interacting with the NPCs in the game should not begin and end with killing them.
Leading into my first request with "driving is not fun until the end of the game" carries with it the heavy implication that I don't want to wade through boring gameplay to earn entertaining gameplay. Pulling "I'm against having bonuses in games" out of that is a pretty big stretch. Did you really not understand what I was getting at? Let me clear up anymore confusion. There are layers of design between "make me unlock everything" and "hand me everything". I'm drawing the line at "don't make me unlock the entertaining content of a key gameplay mechanic". If the designers want to make me search around for a good helicopter that's fine, I'm not spending half the game in a helicopter. But you know, don't make me run over 50 hookers before I can manually aim my gun.
Ramming other cars to get fuel? People would complain about that being unrealistic. Filling up the car with gas at gas stations would be a cool idea because if you drive away without paying, you would get a star. The cops should definitely be smarter, car damage should be more realistic, more boats, drivable airliners, larger map and something besides an island....etc