Now that number IV is out in the wild, I thought it might be a good time to have a little think-fest on the series as a whole. Personally I sort of enjoyed the first game (a bit), but all of the modern three dimensional efforts have left me cold.
I was trying to describe why I don't engage with them to a friend yesterday. The best I could come up with was that "GTA is like Monopoly, but with the dice and player pieces removed; you could make a game out of it, but isn't it more fun to just play Monopoly?" This is my usual default position on GTA: the sandbox style of gaming doesn't do it for me because it's too loose.
Having read a review of GTA IV it seams the have fixed some of the main problems with the game. Notably the combat is meant to be much better this time around, with a Gears of War style cover system and setup. I'm interested enough to want to play it, but not bothered enough to buy it.
The hype is deafening at the moment, but that is mainly down to the volume of people queueing up to go buy it yesterday, I guess.
I'm sort of intrigued by it, but the press coverage is mostly awful. I always seem to get bored extremely quickly by GTA, the missions themselves just don't seem to be much fun. I didn't have a proper look at San Andreas though, I quite liked the additional emphasis on building your character in that, but it wasn't enough for me to give it another go.
There are a few interesting things in 4, I'm curious as to how far they have pushed the relationship angle after Bully, and getting into trouble with San Andreas. I noticed one of the 360 achievements was called 'warm coffee', which is good. The volume of activity (apart from casual street violence) making the city buzz sounds pretty amazing, but I'm not sure how long that would hold up. If the city's liveliness is as good as people are saying at the moment that would be enough for me to want to take a look.
Fundamentally there is still the problem you mention about the lack of any real gameplay. I thought the Penny Arcade update yesterday captured that angle pretty well, or at least the editorial did:
http://www.penny-arcade.com/2008/4/28/
At the moment I'm worried GTA4 would suffer the same problems as before, once the initial excitement of the virtual city dies down.
Yeah, I got as much as wanted from the GTA demo on the PC back in the day... once I got into a car and drove as fast as I could and couldn't see where I was going, it folded for me.
GTA3 on the other hand I completed with a buddy of mine... its such an idling experience, there isn't much to it, you patter through the story get from A to B, kill people at B then go from B to A again... it should be called Grand Theft Bus Ticket. GTA3 specifically had such crushingly busted controls it was amazing... and it had to load between mythical islands. Dunno how we got through it.
Still its the concept I like, a hive city, and a certain freedom, but a steering story line... kinda like Zelda games really. I really really like Body Harvest on the N64, its kinda a mind blowing scale issue.
Vice City I got halfway through I think, the controls finally killed it for me... San And I didn't touch.
I have however bought GTAIV, and so far in terms of structure it is exactly the same as GTA3, except the controls work, the cars drive with an interesting enough amount of weight and the combat both physical and projectily alot more manageable.
In fact there is a nice parkour type shooty mission across the rooftops early on that show the potential of the engine, its a tiny bit Tomb Raider in the controls, but its totally doable. Nothing has particular angsted me control wise.
So much like COD4 being the pinnacle of the FPS on dual analogues it would appear so far that GTAIV is a similar deal.
I'll let you know.
Interesting impressions Jib. I think part of me wants to be able to enjoy this game and from what you've written 4 sounds like it might, just might be able to hold my interest. If they'd set it in Hong Kong and stuck Chow Yun Fat in it as the protagonist I'd be all over it like a rash
Can you co-op on a single box or is it Live linkup only? The living city does sound really cool, but it's going to take a lot to topple Shenmue from the memory banks as THE way to do that sort of thing.
I've never really been crazy about GTA. The only one I really liked was Vice City, mainly due to the 80s kitsch.
Beyond that, the series tends to grow old very quickly. Not helped by the fact that virtually everyone I know who owns a GTA never actually bothers to play more than 2 or 3 missions, spending the rest of their time running or driving around causing mayhem.
On one hand, the freedom offered by the much vaunted sandbox gameplay speaks volumes in terms of immersive potential, but the fact that most would rather piss about than play the game properly suggests there probably isn't much of a game underneath all the freeform gimmickry.
I also thought San Andreas was ::too:: big.
I played this (GTA4) earlier today for a couple of hours and it's definitely the definitive version of the GTA3 concept. But like many others, I felt time has not been kind to this series in terms of gameplay - which in most respects remains virtually identical to previous games.
Granted, they have addressed a number of common complaints but it falls under a list of refinements as opposed to innovation. To me it seemed as if the spectacle revolves more around the sheer size of the city than anything else.
Yeah, I wasn't too impressed by it.
I was thinking about this some more over the weekend. Hell I even picked up a copy (of GTAIV) in my local GAME to read the back of the box. I actually got a small rush of excitement thinking about all the murderous posibilities avaiable to me on that 15cm plastic disk.
The thing is I know if I did buy it I'd end going on a madcap rampage through the gameworld for all of oooo 20 minutes before turning it off and never playing it again.
I really should dl the Crackdown demo and have a look at that as I feel it has more to offer someone like me than any of the GTA games.
My curiosity got the better of me and I caved in. All the cruddy features of previous GTAs are in full force here. The teeming city doesn't teem as much as reviews suggest, it still has no soul.
So you are left with... improved controls, same duff game, same duff dialogue and story lines (which are absolutely fine in a constraints-of-the-sandbox way, but still shit).
Waste of £40.
I quite enjoy the missionyness. No mission takes more than 30 mins of your time. The more entertaining missions seem to take an age to appear, like I say the whole first island is tutorial land, the second sub-island is where it starts getting heavey and the 3rd and 4th island are where it starts giving you boats and helicopters and so on.
The curve is too shallow and long for us people who know how to use a dual analogue controller, and there is no way of accelerating the progress as the game, and the game mechanics and difficulty curve are so directly linked.
For instance, no idea how long I've been playing, but I've got to the final island and its just let me use a rocket launcher for the first time... I'm not sure how or if I can get one before then as the Gun shop wasn't exactly obvious or letting me buy one.
Structurally the missions are very similar.
The most interesting aspect that they hinted at utilising was parkour city rooftop running, the grabbing onto things and vaulting over stuff and rolling and continuing with flow, at the moment seems to be an afterthought... the mechanics are inplace and the environments allow quite a bit of freedom, and the animations are nicely realised, but there only appear to be a tiny sprinkle of these foot based missions over roof tops so far.
Major gripes though are the twelve fingered button layout and the understandable but esoteric button shifts depending on the environment and the situation.
For instance, now you have the phone thing, if some calls you whilst you are driving, you can't handbrake turn, you answer the phone, if you're mid carnage... there are alot of these quirks littered throughout the control scheme.
It could be argued that the controls are a byproduct of over ambition, but then you slide into the whole, game vs ambition vs the whole freaking point of the game.
Anyways, at the moment I am blatting it on, hammering a couple of missions out, marvelling at the scope of the enviroments and the quality of the graphics (at least in terms of lighting and art direction) then turning it off.
While I'm happy at the moment racing fire trucks online and sounding the siren...
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When's 'Wii Carlton' coming out?
you're not the only one, almost one of my favourite games ever. overall clunkiness, loneliness and ugliness kept it from absolute supremacy.
never been too fussed with gta, i've got san andreas and scarface here relatively untouched, the gameplay mechanism just doesnt grab me.
Racing firetrucks does sound like a lot of fun
especially with Sirens XD
@Jib, The difficulty curve is the fault of the design. It's the juxtapostion of completely scripted missions within an environment that promises so much freedon.
The obvious fix is to let you as the player go wherever you like and do whatever you like. This ofcourse breaks the existing mission paradigm: you hanging out of a helicopter with a rocket launcher 20 minutes into the game is going to break a lot of the scripting! They'd have to change it around so the mission aren't scripted and the difficulty scaled dynamically based on the situation. e.g. if you're in a helicopter then the enemies break out the rpg launchers. I think they'd also need to have some careful balancing of weapons and vehicles instead of the constant chain of upgrades to bigger and better that characterise the game as is.
Alternatively do away with the faux freedom and script the whole thing as one gigantic cinematic action fest. But then it wouldn't be GTA anymore would it, more Pursuit Force.