Xbox 360 Official Magazine: Typed Content

[geomy]

Contained herein is the Typed Content from this month's Official Xbox Magazine's article.

Thanks to Loose Head for the scans, and OXM for the news.

 

 

 

"Perhaps here, things will be different"

So speaks Niko Bellic, Eastern European immigrant to Liberty City and protagonist in GTA IV, Grand Theft Auto's first next-gen outing, which is going to put a shell-suited elbow through your HDTV and steal your life this October. You've probably seen the stunning trailer already. If not, stop right now, [fire it up on your Xbox 360 from this issue's playable disc,] and knock it back like a short, sweet shot of bootleg vodka.

 

Until now, this was all the world had seen of the next GTA, in development for over two years, but we've flown over to New York (Liberty City) to meet Dan Houser, Rockstar's VP of Creative, for a real-time, tantalising taste of the awesome treat in store this autumn. So read on for the world's first real details and exclusive Xbox 360 screens of a far grittier GTA than we've ever played before and [turn to page 52 for] an exclusive and revealing interview with Dan Houser.

 

So now you've seen the GTA IV trailer. you can see what we mean about Liberty City's far grittier look, amplified by Rockstar's decision to base it more closely than ever before on the real New York, landmarks and all. Already criticised by New York officials for >>

Edited May 9, 2007 by geomy

[geomy]

 

 

The facial detail powered by the RAGE engine is awesome up close.

 

 

ASK A CABBIE!

 

WHAT THE LOCALS THINK ABOUT GTA IV...

On our way to the demo in one of New York's famous yellow cabs, we quizzed our 50-year-old Italian American driver on how he felt about GTA IV's setting in a close approximation of his own city. He was surprisingly clued up on Rockstar, parent company Take-2 boardroom dramas, the San Andreas Hot Coffee controversy and reckoned that New Yorkers unhappy with GTA IV just didn't that you are now rewarded for killing cops, but actually punished in the additional heat it brings down on your character. It pleased us that New York's citizens seem much more enlightened than some of it's civic representatives!

 

 

He's an Uzi-lover, but that's where the Phil Collins similarity ends.

 

 

TAKE ME DOWN TO LIBERTY CITY!

(WHERE THE WATER HAS A SHEEN AND THE DISTANCE BLUR'S PRETTY)

 

Now in five of nine GTA games (including GTA IV), Liberty City is the most featured location of the franchise, right from the original Grand Theft Auto, where it appeared as a level. In the GTA III series it was originally the main setting, also appearing in Grand Theft Auto Advance, briefly in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and obviously in Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories. GTA IV is Liberty City's closest resemblance to New York since GTA appeared in 1997, with familiar landmarks modelled closely on their actual counterparts. The Statue of Happiness (Liberty), Broker (Brooklyn) Bridge and the Getalife (Metlife) Building all feature in Liberty City. In the trailer you can briefly glimpse a sign that asks you to visit Vice City, GTA's version of Miami, fueling speculation that this could be part of a 2008 Xbox Live episode download.

 

 

The density of detail is an astounding leap.

 

 

Niko can now escape the LCPD by entering brownstone tenements.

 

>> setting its franchise in a close approximation of their city, Rockstar does stress that while it "embodies the oppressive, stifling feeling of the real New York City, Liberty City did not reap the benefits of the economic boom of recent years." So this is very much current day, but alternate New York - one still ridden with poverty, crime and ruthless opportunists. And Niko operates within that bracket.

 

Niko Bellic is an Eastern European immigrant (not Russian incidentally, although Russian gangs will feature), whose shady dealings back home have landed him in hot water with local gangs, possibly the Russians, and he's come to [New York] to join his ex-pat cousin, Roman. Roman's a nice bloke apparently, which is fortunate for his health, because he's also a big fat liar, emailing Niko with grossly exaggerated and wholly inaccurate reports of his success in achieving the American Dream. But, on arrival, Niko finds that the swish apartments, hot tubs and girls are little more than Roman's fantasy front and he's actually operating a failing taxi depot in the rundown Liberty City borough of Broker (based closely on New York's Brooklyn).

 

Still, you have to start somewhere, and in any case, we're told that it's not such a rags-to-riches story in GTA IV, Houser describing your progress through the game's story as more: "Rags-to-slightly less rags!" You are not going to end up as Liberty City's ruling crime lord this time. Our in-game demo, running on an Xbox 360 in front of us so we can see they're not cheating or anything, starts off with Niko at Roman's Broker taxi depot. It's a decrepit converted warehouse garage and the grimy detail is immediately apparent. A stale cup of coffee sits on a crate, spoon standing in its murky depths. Rags and tools litter the oil-spotted floor and dirty early morning sun treacles in through the filthy industrial windows. A battered radio sputters Eastern Bloc pop and chatter. This is a real interior rendered in stunning next-gen detail - textures, sound and lighting all cohering to present a contemporary world that gels perfectly.

 

This is more real, more naturalistic than anything we've experienced from Rockstar before and the tactile success extends to Niko's superb character model, every detail of his cheap man-made fibres, bad haircut and bristled jaw saying something about his immigrant, outsider status in the alien Liberty City. We notice immediately that his animation is worlds away from GTA III. His body has a proper center of gravity as he walks and runs, leaning naturally left and right, jacket flapping with perfect material physics. Facial detail is equally convincing and it's great to see the protagonist is no chiselled shaving-ad chump, but t5he sort of nondescript bloke you might see selling cheap sausages, Duty Free fags and dodgy DVDs from the back of his van at a Saturday market in Ashford. GTA IV uses and expands upon RAGE (Rockstar Advanced Game Engine), developed by Rockstar San Diego for Table Tennis, where it first demonstrated its bleeding-edge character animation. Control of your character is more fluid and natural than ever before, really enhancing connection to and immersion within this massive and dense-with-detail game world.

 

Niko is steered out of the warehouse door onto the dawn streets of Broker. A graffiti-tagged elevated subway train rattles past in the distance, traffic noise and the muted bass of car stereos assault the ears and early morning pedestrians stop to chat ("The real estate prices are insane," "You're so right!"). More importantly, we note that the interior-to-exterior transition is utterly seamless. Rockstar reveals that there will not be a single loading screen >>

Edited May 9, 2007 by geomy

[geomy]

 

 

GANGS OF NEW YORK

 

BUT ONE BOROUGH HAS GONE MISSING!

Four of the five New York Boroughs have been adapted for GTA IV's Liberty City. Only Staten Island (Staunten Island in GTA III) has been left out. Read the interview [on page 52] to find out why! The featured boroughs are Broker (Brooklyn), Algonquin (Manhattan), Dukes (Queens), Bohan (Bronx) and Alderney (New Jersey).

 

 

Niko had watched every episode of Knight Rider on cable TV as a child.

 

 

The elevated subway is an iconic piece of New York infrastructure really brought to life in GTA IV's Liberty City.

 

 

Nice trakkie, Niko!

 

 

NO PLANES, TRAINS AND AUTOMOBILES

 

BUT GTA IV WILL BE GETTING ITS CHOPPER OUT AGAIN!

Vehicles we have seen or know about so far include ships, boats, cars, elevated subway trains, helicopters and a cable car. Oh, and a rollercoaster, if that counts! Rockstar says there will definitely be no planes in Liberty City this time and for a full explanation from Dan Houser, read the interview [on page 52].

 

>> from GTA IV's start to finish. With Liberty City roughly the size of GTA III's massive San Andreas, but packed with tons more detail, this is truly impressive and again boosts the naturalistic and uninterrupted experience of a living, breathing game world.

 

We are shown again a world without joins as Niko opens the door of a brownstone tenement and enters the dark, wallpapered hallway, pulling a pistol as he does so, which brings us slightly closer over his shoulder and pulls up a crosshair that's currently a simple black cross within a circle, fixed at the center of the screen. Niko proceeds cautiously through the tatty house, past tables with wilting plants and chooses to exit via another door at the rear. We envisage World's Greatest Police Chases IV scenarios, where Niko will escape the cops by bursting through such houses, couch potato occupants screaming as he tears through the back yard and over a chain-link fence, helicopters whupping above him, shots pinging off metal and tearing into wood. But we're just fantasising and drooling now, so on with the actual demo...

 

Our navigator boasts that the old GTA catchphrase, "Go anywhere, do anything" has never meant as much before as it does now in Grand Theft Auto IV. And while it's no Crackdown in this sense, there are vertical aspects to GTA IV, which Niko kindly demonstrates by climbing a telegraph pole to gain a bird's-eye view of the waking borough street. Climbing hand over hand, using alternating metal grips that stickle the wooden caber, we watch Niko's real-time shade ascend the shadow pole that stretches across the road in the low, 8am sunshine. Shadows are fantastic in this demo and earlier we see how Niko crosses a wide grating in the pavement, his shadow breaking perfectly as it casts across and into the well below. We also hear his footsteps change to metallic clangs as he crosses the grate.

 

From the telegraph pole, we can see another elevated subway train approach, appreciate the incredible detail of a sign for the 69th Street Diner and glimpse a stretch of the iconic Broker (Brooklyn) Bridge as it yawns across the twinkling water, rivets sparkling as the sun rises. we notice a subtle distance-blurring effect that heightens the natural look and feel of the wider city. We're told that Niko will also be able to climb and descend exterior fire escapes and that some meetings will take place high in skyscrapers, which you will be able to throw people off. Although not demonstrated, Rockstar says that hand-to-hand combat is undergoing a thorough overhaul and will feel much more natural in GTA IV.

 

But Niko's tired of walking and as this is, after all, Grand Theft Auto, he decides to boost a parked car. He runs across the street, looks around to see that there aren't too many people out and about yet (it's still only just after 8am) and in a new animation smashes the driver side window of a generic red saloon before hotwiring it and taking off down the Broker streets. The streets and sidings are stunning in their textural detail, with faded road markings, rough blacktop, graffiti walls, market stalls, purposeful and idling pedestrians carrying shopping [bags], or just chatting. A blue and white LCPD police car cruises past in the opposite direction in a tense moment, but Niko is driving sedately and there's no trouble. For now. Niko flips the car radio to another Eastern European-sounding dance station and we just cruise the BOABO neighborhood (Beneath the Offramp of the Algonquin Bridge Overpass), soaking up the sights and sounds of a waking city. we're shown that you can camera views to follow the car from a much closer angle, something Rockstar is still experimenting with to give better control and immediacy when driving. The vehicles still have that classic GTA look and feel, but the experience is lifted by a far more advanced and brand new physics package. Our driver claims that GTA has the best cruise and chase driving dynamic of any game and while we're not behind the wheel ourselves, it >>

Edited May 9, 2007 by geomy

[geomy]

 

 

Pedestrians now carry shopping [bags], which you'll no doubt plunder!

 

 

Time of day will affect the numbers, and behaviors, of pedestrians.

 

 

TRAILER SPOTS!

 

Don't forget that [the official GTA IV trailer is on this issue's Xbox 360 playable disc and] you can see the game in action right now! See if you can spot the cable car, the Sprunk, Cluckin' Bell and Burget shot adverts, the Vice City sign, the Getalife Building, the Screamer rollercoaster and the Statue of Happiness (Liberty).

 

 

This is the famous sugar factory in Broker (Brooklyn). Looks sweet!

 

 

Is he just wearing loads of layers, or does Niko have a really tiny head?

 

>> certainly looks like a smooth ride and the physics seem convincing.

 

Niko parks down by the blue collar docks and exits the stolen saloon. He walks right up to the waterfront, past a building called Twitchins, which is a version of Brooklyn's landmark Domino's Sugar Factory. An idling animation raises his right foot forward and sets it on the broken concrete wall of a wharf as he looks thoughtfully across the water. Broker Bridge spans the expanse to the left, stretching across to the slightly blurred Manhattan skyline, which curls across the wide horizon from uptown to downtown, familiar skyscrapers glowing as the sun hits. Seagulls hawk and scream as they swoop for fishy breakfasts and Niko takes it all in, a stranger in a strange land that's familiar yet unexplored. It's an exciting prospect for him, as for us, and the promise in the air is tangible. Apparently satisfied with his outlook, Niko pulls out a cell phone with a broad PDA-style ble screen. A larger version of the cellphone pops up in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen, so that you can actually use its address book and functions. In perhaps the most significant part of the whole demo, Niko places a call.

 

This has massive implications for GTA IV's mission structure, meaning that for the first time in the franchise, you will be deciding who to contact, when to set up meetings, whether you're going to hook up with shady friends, or pitch for 'jobs' with gang contacts. It looks like your mobile will be the hub of your peripheral mission structure, a core feature that will give you even more freedom to explore Liberty City's boroughs, ganglands, skies and waterways, following your own paths off the central story missions. No more racing to ringing payphones to accept handed-down objectives. This time you are making, as well as taking the calls. And that's a very powerful feature. With multiplayer confirmed, but no details divulged beyond "No Massively Multiplayer", we imagine this could be a great way to contact Friends in the Xbox Live game world for co-op and possibly even versus missions and bust-ups. The possibilities are manifold and we can't wait for more revelations. In the meantime, join the GTA IV threads on the [no advertising] forums, where the speculation is already running wild!

 

Edited May 10, 2007 by geomy

[geomy]

 

 

Rockstar Games' Dan Houser

 

Dan Houser is VP of Creative for Rockstar Games and invited us to a New York penthouse to get a real feel for the Liberty City skyline,

while he gave us an exclusive interview and in-game demonstration of Grand Theft Auto IV,

revealing loads more about this stunning sequel...

 

Why is GTA IV set in Liberty City once again?

 

We've always wanted to do New York properly. With GTA III, we were dealing with so many technical issues and design issues about making a game like that, that we didn't really think that trying to make somewhere like a real place was important at the time and then we discovered later that that gave an added element of content to the place. We've got a full time team of researchers and photographers in the office in New York who get emails from the artists in Scotland saying, "Hey can you find out what this building's like, or what the traffic flow's like around here?" or the designers want to find out how the law systems work. We wouldn't be as confident doing a next-gen game the way we wanted, somewhere we didn't have a base.

 

From what we've seen so far there's a more sombre, grown-up feel to the game. It's less of an immediate playground and more tentative and edgy.

 

I'm not sure I'd quite use the word sombre, but I know what you mean. I suppose it's slightly more naturalistic, but it's not like it's gone deadly serious. It's darker, but there's still plenty of black comedy in there. Getting that right is a balance that we're trying not to completely change, but if you want to make it seem a bit fiercer at times, and some of the threats a bit more threatening, then it has to get a bit darker in some ways and some of the bad guys have to be more rounded and believable and less caricatured, yet still capable of doing worse things. Equally there are still plenty of larger-than-life characters, but even with them the way they speak may be a little more natural.

 

What are the main advantages to GTA IV of the Xbox 360? What has technology opened up for you?

 

I think really it's power, it's freedom. The nature of making videogames for everyone is about compromise. There's the world; how are you going to make a game out of it? On a less esoteric level it's compromise because you want to do all of these things, but but you can't do them all because you don't have the space - the disc space and the limited pipeline to put all that through and process it. And now we have far fewer limitations, so on the one hand that gives us a lot more freedom to do the things we want to do, and try new things, and ont he other it makes things a lot more expensive [laughs]. Not just that a building that looks looks much better requires a lot more work to make it, but also a character requires more work, the animation has to be better, the AI... once you take that all through, every aspect, every section of the team needs to get exponentially bigger.

 

Was Table Tennis useful as a technology tool for GTA IV?

 

Certainly for the RAGE engine, yeah, completely. We like to do very big games. Not just GTA. Midnight Club was three times the size of any racig games in terms of the number of races and things you can do. We just like making big epic experiences, because they're expensive for people to buy so you might as well play them for a long time. But we needed something small and fucused [Table Tennis] just to see what would work and what wouldn't work and get everything tight for the GTA stuff.

 

Is GTA IV's Liberty City a bigger city than before, or just more detailed?

 

Well it's bigger than any single city we've done before I think, but I don't really look at it in those terms - the detail is the big thing. It's not as big area-wise as San Andreas. But size was not the problem before. You can keep getting stuff on the disc if the disc is big enough, but it's how quickly you can get it off the disc and how much detail is there. That's what the new engine and machine [Xbox 360] collaborate to give you.

So did you start with a rough map of New York and choose areas of detail?

 

The map is pretty similar to New York. It's four of five boroughs and Jersey. We don't have Staten Island because we've got the same thing from Jersey and it just didn't have anything interesting to say. And we go through the boroughs neighborhood by neighborhood and go "this neighborhood is interesting culturally, and this one is interesting architecturally" and maybe we'll combine a bit of both and get what feels to us like a good approximation that keeps the core things we want in there. What would be called Greater New York, Metropolitan area, that's what the game world is. There's more or less any major landmark in Manhattan that you could think of. Big structures won't necessarily be 100 storeys big, but the skyline is pretty cool. What you saw so far was Brooklyn, although we renamed all the boroughs so that's called Broker in our version. But the skyline is pretty amazing - the Statue of Liberty, Central Park, it's all there.

 

You've talked about picking culturally different neighborhoods. Can you reveal any of the gang cultures apart from the Russians?

 

I can't reveal gangs too much yet, but one of things that appealed to us about a) this character (who isn't actually Russian, he's eastern European, although there will be plenty of Russian gangsters in there) and b) the story and the world, was that New York definitely feels like the world's capital and once you're used to being there, you get ethnic enclaves of all kinds of people, even more than London and certainly more than anywhere else. It's just so many different people still living in their original way. Capturing that variety of behaviour and appearances is something we really spent a lot of time doing.

 

Your central character starts off as such an outsider and that's a great way to enter a game, particularly if you don't know New York so well.

 

We've always done it deliberately. You're right on that. The character's always turning up in town, or coming back from a long time away because of the simple thing that otherwise if you start playing you'd ask. What was I doing yesterday?" "You were seeing your friend", "No I wasn't!", "Go to his house", "Bit I've never been there before!" You're trying to create these relationships in these games between you as a player and your character and obviously you're not the same, but you're sharing the same experience, and you want to try to get that as tight and close as possible, so one of the things is you need to explore and discover the world together. We've done it every which way - guy gets out of prison, blah-de-blah-de-blah for Americans in America, and we thought, What could be new and what is going to feel fresh?" and we figured out we wanted to set the game in New York.Liberty City and look for a new angle, something innovative, and move beyond, "It's like in that movie, that TV show" to "Let's do the immigrant story." This was a) because eastern Europe is generating some scary hard men at the moment who are good for our needs and b) I think they are probably scarier and harder than Italian American mobsters, who are significantly softer than someone coming out of eastern Europe, with the lives they've lived. So that seemed like an interesting, good, criminal hero/anti-hero for us. A lot of the people involved in the game have moved to America and lived one half of that experience. Not the crime side obviously, but the immigrant from Europe experience, and trying to recreate that we thought would be fun and not something other games have done. Trying to innovate on that stuff is as important in moving the medium forward as innovating on per-pixel shading or other stuff.

 

Is there any crossover with previous GTA game characters?

 

Not really, no. Some of the brands have crossed over, things like Sprunk, or Clucking Bell, because they were so cool. there were the last vestiges of the old GTA world. In terms of characters, there are two bits of thinking behind the decision to start from scratch. We've done five games with those characters and it's a bit done to death. And loads of the ones we liked are dead. we want to get some new fans for the game ideally and a new audience, not just keep the old ones happy. In terms of pure narrative, we want everything to feel like it's the same, like everything is integrated and the characters belong in the world. It just made sense to start again because we wanted more rounded, diverse, richer characters.

Is it too early to reveal any voice talent or music? Is there anyone you'd love to have on board if you had free rein?

 

Absolutely not. In some ways there will be less of that than before and we'll do it in a more interesting way. We've never sold a game on voice talent. No-one's ever known the voices before they went in to the game. To us the talent is the people making the game, not the voices. They added a filmic quality we found fun, but we might try a totally different approach this time. In fact we will. We found Phillip Glass when we were looking for some music for the trailer that felt very different from the stuff we've used in the past, which tended to be pop music-focused. First we thought they wouldn't want to work with us and we called them up to see if they might be in England and they said, "We'd love to work with you guys - we're two doors down! Come over in 20 minutes, show us what you want and we'll record it for you and get the timing exactly right." Music-wise, we're working really hard to make some really cool stuff. We're certainly evolving the way the radio works.

Edited May 10, 2007 by geomy

[geomy]

 

There are some very detailed interiors as well as exteriors. Does more take place inside now?

 

In the old games, because it was technically impossible to do it any other way you had exterior, load... interior. They really were two very different things and you couldn't even carry a mission between the two - it felt a bit contrived when you did that. The fluidity you see in GTA IV interiors is such that you can walk into the garage, get a car and drive out, or shoot someone through a window, or run through a house and out of the garden. It's easy to see how that will translate into a much more fluid gameplay experience and much more immersive overall experience. So that was more important than us going, "Here's 40,000 interiors." If there's a point to them, we're building them, but you're definitely not going to be able to go into every building because that provides no purpose.

 

We've glimpsed some vertical aspects: the ability to climb telephone poles. There are some very large buildings in New York, so will you be able to go inside and up skyscrapers?

 

Some of them, definitely. I don't know if you'll necessarily going to be able to go up the Empire State Building, but there will definitely be office buildings you'll have to go up for meetings, loads of fire escapes on smaller buildings, trying to make the verticality part of the gameplay experience as best we can in all ways, with really cool new physics so that people falling off buildings looks really amazing as well. There are no planes in the game because it's one city, so there's nowhere to fly to, but there are helicopters. When you live here you see that people don't take planes around the city but they do take helicopters and it felt like a much more sensible use - trying to put content in that works for the game we're trying to make. There will also be good fun with boats. Waterways have always been a big part of Mafia folklore in New York and the boat handling is really nice.

Talking of handling, we're told the car physics has changed quite a lot and you are experimenting with new camera views for driving. How have the basic controls and combat controls changed?

 

We've done a huge amount on targeting from day one and on hand-to-hand combat and for us it's been quite a hard thing to explain, but it's the feeling of the character in the hand. Videogames are a tactile experience and the feeling of control in Table Tennis, for instance, felt really nice and the fluidity with which the characters is moved is the kind of feeling we want these games to have. Niko's much more fluid moving around the world than in previous games. All aspects of hand to hand-to-hand combat, targeting and driving we've reworked to make them fluid and feel how we think next-gen games should feel like. Not just look better, or sound better, or have better stories, but feel better. And that's a big thing that games need to move forward on and we've done a load of work there.

 

A big part of that fluidity will be getting the behavioural AI right. How's that progressing?

 

There are two core things that demonstrate the thinking. One - walking back to the hotel or whatever. In the old game, it was much more just here's a ped [pedestrian] walking down the street and, by the time of San Andreas, two or three other behaviours. We're now trying to get tons and tons more of those in, so people are stopping, asking each other questions, asking for a cigarette, someone's using a payphone, people have all the things they want to do, behaviours they want to follow, some carry shopping bags. They will react to you, ask you what you're doing, with way more ways to respond to your behaviour. Equally, if you pull out a gun there will be a far more naturalistic response, people running, screaming, that sort of stuff.

 

Do the police respond in a similar way?

 

Yes, but more so. But that's for a later demonstration. We are doing some cool stuff on that though, evolving it like everything else.

Will weapons be more realistic and naturalistic?

 

I can't say too much on that apart from there will be some fun ridiculous weapons, because we're not going that naturalistic. There's a balance with the stuff being more naturalistic than we had before and we certainly we spent a lot of time making hand-to-hand combat and focused gunplay a lot more fun. It's got to be a big game and ultimately a real criminal's life is quite boring. After a while there are about four things they can do, so we need to give you things that are slightly outside the scope of a normal criminal.

 

What sort of objectives does your character have? Does he want to own a New York penthouse apartment like this one?

 

That's a good question. Your objective is to work through the narrative, I suppose, and maintain relationships on the non-narrative side - maintain friendships, or go hang out, whatever you want to do. But in the main story you've been a crook in a eastern Europe who's just got into trouble and things haven't quite worked out, so you come to America. you're Niko and your cousin Roman has been sending you emails telling you about the beauty of the American dream, five girls, four hot tubs, three apartments... it's all rubbish! He's in debt, but he's a nice guy, so you've come here in trouble together and you get sucked into the story and it turns out you can't escape some stuff from your past and you're trying to survive in America and get out of trouble. It's not as rags-to-riches as in previous games, it's more rags-to-slightly-less-rags! Working with low-level gangsters and high-level gangsters, but you don't get to end up being the boss of the town. That's the difference between this and the last game, because we've felt we'd done that a lot. We've got to keep evolving or die. Hopefully the demo you've seen shows we're not pissing about. The people who have bought one of these machines [Xbox 360] will be excited to play these games on them. With the Xbox 360 it's going to be "Wow!" to play this thing on it and think it was worth the investment. It's not just like the Xbox one. That's really important to us or the industry really is going to stagnate.

 

Is there multiplayer in GTA IV?

 

Yes there is. We're going to reveal full details later, but for now I'll just clarify in case you're interested that it won't be a massively multiplayer game. To me, it was never going to be, nor would we want it to be because it's not interesting. But we're doing some fun stuff that will come out later in the year when we've got fully finalized plans.

 

How linear is the game in story mode? Is it possible to get stuck ever?

 

There's far more to do. It's as possible to get stuck as previous games, possibly a bit less so. You'll always have a bunch of things to do - certain people to go and see for missions, and certain people to go see just to hang out with. At the end of the demo is a cellphone. You might have noticed that you're making a call, not receiving a call. That's a big way of navigating through the game world, which we've found very elegant because it replicates how people navigate through real life in a city nowadays and it felt like that was a cool way of replicating modern experience you couldn't do in a film or a book the same way. We feel videogames should be better than films or books in terms of recreating experience and here was an example of how you could do that and give you a really contemporary feeling to things and a sense of control over what you're doing.

 

That must be a gret feature for multiplayer too, to contact you Friends...

 

(Laughs knowingly) Possibly, yeah!

 

 

 

And we did ask Rockstar about GTA IV Achievements and the planned Xbox 360 expansion episodes for 2008,

but we didn't know how to write that much laughter.

Edited May 10, 2007 by geomy

[ZLCN90]

That's awesome, thanks for typing all that up.

[asmxxx]

thanks for typing that al up man ur a champ

[Hmmm nice bike]

Thanks for typing it, man

 

Claude94

[BlOoDStReAm101]

Thanks for this man. Now we all know, he's not Russian.

 

 

BlOoDStReAm101 Rates Topic Good.

[beanmachine43]

Indeed, thank you for the info. I didn't see any other article of GTA IV anywhere else except Game Informer, and this is much more in-depth. Have a cookie.

 

*Rates good as well*

[geomy]

beanmachine43 - In addition to this and the GI article, the Official Playstation Magazine also has some good information in it.

 

OPM: June

[Porkeedeeo]

 

Niko had watched every episode of Knight Rider on cable TV as a child.

 

That's me!!!!

 

LoL

 

They locked my topic in which Niko had the face of The Hoff!!! Great!! Great!!!!

 

 

 

[Mike0]

This is definately the most detailed preview and its good that they had the interview with THE MAN. Sam Houser.

[shaboobala]

That's some mighty thorough work there, quality stuff. Looks like inbetween smoking all that delicious crack you've got a lot of time on your hands

Edited May 10, 2007 by shaboobala

[Seddo]

Nice work once again Geomy.

[HERDIST]

AWESOME WORK! Great! Thanks! Topic rated good!

 

[Skyline_man]

Thanks for typing that up, much appreciated.

 

[archiebunker]

Awesome work, man.

[Comrade_Niko]

Good job indeed.

 

Rated good

[Snake Without a Tongue]

Great info! Us 56kers thank you.

[AndyGanteks]

great great great