Changing GTA's boring "restart mission" structure

[Gui 2]

Hello everyone,

While I'm very interested in the franchise, I've never stuck with any of the GTA games for very long.
There are a few reasons for this, but the most notable by far is the whole "restart mission" thing.
Like many other users, I don't like the amount of driving I have to do for nothing if I fail a mission or die.
I also dislike the number of continuity problems resulting from this bizarre structure.

I would like to know if there ever was a mod created for either GTA III, VC or SA, that attempted to alter the "restart" system of the retail versions and turn it into something quicker and more reasonable.
Even San Andreas' "skip trip" feature does not represent a satisfactory improvement in this regard.

Ideally, I'd like to have a checkpoint at the start of each mission's purely action oriented segment.
If I failed, I wouldn't have to drive back to the beginning and trigger the same mission planning cutscene over and over.
And if I died, I wouldn't be sent to the hospital. The game would only reload the last action sequence. The hospital should be kept only as a place where I can go on my own will to replenish my energy.

Basically I'd like a quicker checkpoint system, you know... Like in pretty much every other game.

Another cool thing would be:
Instead of having to go to a hotel/safe house to "rest" your character and save your game, you could basically save in any car.
You take a car, you stop it. You save your game and switch off the PC.
When you load your game the next day, you find yourself in the car you had, where you had stopped it, with a few more hours on the clock. Period.
If the car is a convertible, you could even have a little animation showing your character waking up on the backseat.
After all, who's never taken a nap on the backseat of his car? You don't always have to go to the friggin hotel.

All that would be sooo great. But most important would be the in-mission checkpoints.

I dont' know if anything like that would be possible. If such a patch/mod already exists, I'd be most grateful if someone could tell me how it's called.

Thanks a lot for your attention.

[T-Virus]

I kinda disagree. The player should have a certain "punishment" for dying. Not to mention that the safehouses would be pointless.
I think it adds realism to it when you have to drive back, it makes you more careful on a mission. But it's nice to have the taxi cutscene which were used in SA and VCS sometimes.

[Gui 2]

I hear your point, but to me that's too extreme, all those things you have to do to get back to the point where you had failed/die.
I think there could be less costly ways to make you "pay" (at least in terms of wasted time).

For instance, here's a "middle of the road" idea for San Andreas.
If I recall, you have to periodically go to a training facility in order to stay in shape and even become stronger.
Maybe one could imagine a concept where, if you have to restart from checkpoints more than x times over the course of a mission, you would lose some of those "bodybulding" points you collected while training.
It would echo the toll taken on your body by those "rocky" missions that you needed several tries to compete.
And it would still be much less brutal than what is forced upon the player in the retail versions.

When you say the retail versions represent a more believable vision, I beg to differ.
If you go out of the hospital after being shot, how come you go back to your employer and trigger the exact same cutscene, without any acknowledgement of you initial failure?
The mission will then unfold exactly the same way as the first time, despite the fact that the badies confronted you and "wasted" you in your initial attempt. They will be back exactly at the same point.

Same thing even if you don't die.
Say you are engaged in a tough pursuit and lose the vehicle you were supposed to chase. The mission thus ends in a failure.
But you have to actually drive your car all the way back to the starting point of the mission you just screwed up.
The amusing thing in this case is, when you "arrive" at the home of your contact to listen to your assignment (for the 2nd time or more), you often do so in a car that's already wearing the stigmata (bullet hits, missing parts...) of a mission that has not yet been exposed to your character, since you are starting it all over again.

In Vice City, I even encountered this problem: one mission required me to lead a friendly AI car to some meeting point (a car park). For some reason I can't remember, after we made it to the place, that AI car suffered damage and ended up exploding - ending my first attempt at this mission.
So I went back to the beginning of the mission, and naturally in a replay of the cutscene, my boss presented me with a second version of the car that was supposed to follow me to the car park.

However when myself and car n°2 arrived to the place, I discovered that the destroyed version of that car, the one from my first try, had not disappeared.
Unfortunately the AI didn't think much of it, and drove car n°2 right where it was scripted to stop, which was of course the exact same place where the burnt chassis of car n°1 was located.
And in a time paradox worthy of Back To The Future, the two cars from my two tries ended up superimposed.
Needless to say, it was an eye opening introduction to the GTA franchise and its mechanics.

Which is too bad because those games have so much to offer...
That's, in part, why I believe the mod I described above would help to create a more relaxed experience playing GTA.