Hands down, our favorite mission in Grand Theft Auto IV was the one centered entirely around the events before, during and after a gigantic midtown bank heist. We'd start out in a car, picking up our collaborators on the way, and then pour into the bank spraying bullets at anything that moved in an attempt to escape from walls of police officers before exiting through the subway system to safety. We don't need an entire game where the pacing dial is kicked up to 11, but doing something as menial as delivering a pizza or dropping off a dump truck seems pointlessly trivial in comparison.

GTA IV dabbled with the concept of a branching storyline with decisive choice moments throughout the game, but ultimately they meant little in the story's grand scheme. The most memorable decision was made when Niko is tasked with deciding the outcome of two rival gang leaders. On one hand you could make $25,000 for killing Forge, but if you kill Playboy you're gifted with a luxury penthouse as a safe house. From those obsessed with the story to those just wanting a mindless, murderous sandbox to play in, GTA is rife with ethical and moral decisions like that one.

We've seen this sort of "every action has a reaction" type of gameplay before in Heavy Rain, a game that ultimately gathers every choice you make throughout the story and weaves them together into an elaborate montage at the end. It had our entire office buzzing with wild descriptions of how each one of our outcomes was unique and what we did or said throughout the experience to get there. Given the nature of the Grand Theft Auto series, GTA V could certainly benefit from an evolving quest that changed the game every time we played it. We would be able to exchange our own particular endings amongst friends and have the ability to replay the game as positively or as negatively as we wanted, over and over, with an entire gray scale of variants in between.

Game developers know that if they put something in a game for us to collect, we'll collect it. Why? Because it's there and that's how our minds work. It's the old donkey to carrot metaphor, and we're huge suckers for it. You could probably fill Liberty City with actual carrots and we'd even collect those. Need proof? GTA IV was littered with hundreds of pointlessly hard to find and equally worthless little pigeons, hidden in obscurity, yet millions of gamers went out of their way to find them, all for a reward that could be unlocked with a quick button combination.

To expect gamers to exercise such banal labor is one thing, but to barely compensate them for their efforts is just cruelty. We propose an incrementally tiered system that actually rewarded players with some sort of tangible statistical boost or weapon upgrades. Spot ten pigeons, level up, spot ten more, level up again, all leading up to one giant reward that actually made the otherwise tedious hunt worth your time and effort. Rockstar knows how to create a beautiful, living, breathing city, now let's have them give us an excuse to explore every inch of it. A similar system worked really well for Red Dead Redemption recently, and we'd like to see it return for GTA V.

Remember that part in your favorite movie car chase scene where the main character stops mid-shootout to take phone calls from some girl he played darts with a week ago? Neither do we. The friends and relationships angle in GTAIV was interesting in practice, and certainly helped bring in a heightened sense of connection with the otherwise soulless meat sticks that walked the streets of Liberty City, waiting to become bumper lunch, but in the end the only served to be trivial and annoying.

Developing relationships with double-crossed villains would be something else entirely. Imagine swarms of gangs stalking your every move and attempting to put the hit out on you everywhere you went until you took them out for good. A cryptic phone call saying "I'm gonna ****ing kill you, Niko Bellic" would certainly heighten the terror of an already insanely dangerous car chase, assuming he wasn't talking about taking out your bowling score.

Despite its cartoonish presentation and decidedly throwback game design, GTA Chinatown Wars introduced one of the grittiest elements to franchise: a robust and, dare we say, addictive drug dealing sub-game. Neighborhood dealers played host to all sorts of dangerous narcotics, and like a mini stock market, buying and selling them to the right people in the right places at the right time could potentially net your character hundreds of thousands of dollars.

But with the reward came the risk of your average fender bender resulting in a police chase that ended with a massive drug bust at your expense. Escaping from the local fuzz in your average Grand Theft Auto game is an everyday given, ultimately to the point where it almost loses its allure and becomes a secondary afterthought. Throw a half million dollars worth of cocaine in the trunk and it immediately escalates the situation in to something far more perilous. Juxtapose the same concept to the realistic, large scale mayhem associated with the console GTA games and you have a recipe for massive, citywide drug wars complete with everyone from dealers to kingpins and everything in between. At the least, it'd be the closest approximation we'll ever get to a video game based on The Wire. Man, we miss that show.

Grand Theft Auto IV presented us with grandiose sandbox the franchise had ever seen, but with most of the world filled with uninhabitable buildings, locked doors and inaccessible shops, the ambitions of having a vision of such monumental scope ended up feeling more like a missed opportunity. It seemed that block after block was populated with prop buildings that served little purpose but to assist in the illusion that players were actually driving through a living, breathing city when in reality, most of the buildings that players could actually interact with were few and far between. Let us kick in doors, break windows, set up sniper shop in a random apartment and the chaos will go from feeling streamlined to, well, chaotic. An open world is what the franchise has always been known for at its core. Now Rockstar just needs to open it more.