How much worse is it in comparison to GTA SA? I didn't feel too much anti drug feelings, and they smoked pot only every other mission. SA had some seriously crazy stuff, like trying to win that race against blind, or infiltrating a military base, or that harvester.
There's one big change to the car physics from GTA4 that I have mixed feelings about. In GTA4 the cars were much softer and could be bent into an undriveable wreck with one decent impact. The cars in GTA5 are significantly harder to damage. I actually really liked how the GTA4 cars could be bent and crushed easily, it was a really satisfying effect. You could take a large heavy vehicle and use it to ram a passenger car against a wall, and deform the shit out of it until it didn't look like a car anymore. That shit is just fun. In GTA5 the cars can withstand a lot more abuse and do not deform very much. In a way this is better because you don't have to worry about breaking your current means of transportation just because you hit a bump in the road too hard. I appreciate the change but I do miss the more easily deformable physics of the cars in GTA4.
I didn't play enough of SA to be able to make a good comparison. In GTA5 they make drug use as ugly and unappealing as possible, it's done in such a silly way that it actually draws your attention to it. When you choose to smoke weed or drink alcohol your character goes into a self loathing rant. (Also, LOL.)
San Andreas had the worst helicopter mission of all time though.
The RC plane mission. I never bothered to get past that part.
That's an optional mission and it's not even that hard, I always did it on first try on repeat playthroughs. Same with helicopter mission in VC.I will kill you, your family and your pets, burn your house down and piss on the ashes.
I think that mission where you needed to jump from a plane into another plane was worse.
