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Some Details

During Microsoft's 2006 E3 press conference on 9 May, it was announced that Rockstar Games will offer exclusive episodic content via Xbox Live for the Xbox 360 version of the game. This had been confirmed by Rockstar, announcing two extra episodes. On 20 February 2008, it was announced that the extra content will be introduced starting August 2008.

Peter Moore, the then head of Microsoft's Interactive Entertainment Business division announced that Rockstar Games is working on two GTA IV downloadable packs exclusively for the Xbox 360, which will be released after the full game. Moore described downloadable content as "epic episode packs", and not just extra cars or characters. A press release during the conference said that the packs would add "hours of entirely new gameplay" to the game. The official Xbox website states that these episodes will last a minimum of 10 hours. Details on the pricing of these downloads have not yet been revealed, though it would almost certainly not be released for free, as Take-Two Interactive's former CEO, Paul Eibeler, have said numerous times that these downloads would provide "additional revenue streams" to the company.

As part of a conference call following the release of Take-Two Interactive's Second Quarter Fiscal 2007 financial results, the company's Chief Financial Officer, Lainie Goldstein revealed that Microsoft was paying a total of US $50 million for exclusivity of this content split equally between the two packs. The payments can be found referenced in the company's Second Quarter Fiscal 2007 financial results as "Deferred revenue".

Jeronimo Barrera, Vice President of Product Development for Rockstar Games, has said that they "are calling the downloadable content episodes" and added that they are experimental because they are not sure that there are enough users with access to online content on the Xbox 360.

Even though there is no formal word on downloadable content for the PlayStation 3 version, there has been increased speculation that some form of downloadable content equal to the episodic content would appear for the console. Barrera had recently been quoted in The Official US PlayStation Magazine as stating that Rockstar wants the game to "last for years", indicating that they do plan on making more episodes beyond the two announced 360 episodes. There has also been no formal announcement from Rockstar that any other episodic content for GTA4 would be platform exclusive.

Enviroment

* Niko's outfit can be changed throughout the game. However, it will not be possible to customise his physique or hairstyle as in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, as Dan Houser explained: "We want this installment to focus more on interacting with other in-game people other than yourself."

* Heavy fire will scar – and permanently destroy – parts of the environment. It is possible to shoot through walls with powerful weapons.

* When Niko goes to the hospital, he has to pay $100 and he will keep his weapons. When Niko gets arrested, he has to pay more than $100 and he will lose his weapons.

* In a police vehicle, Niko can use an in-car computer to access the criminal database and discover information about various criminals in Liberty City, possibly including himself.

* The player can hail a cab in order to travel to any address in the city. When riding, the player has the option of viewing the journey from the inside, or skipping it to arrive at the destination immediately. The player will be able to ask the driver to change the radio station by pressing D-pad left or right.

* Niko will make use of the Internet as a means of communication. Although the exact details of the role of the Internet in the game are being kept secret, it has been revealed that Niko can access the internet from various cyber cafés, one of which is called "TW@" (twat) in order to upload a resume for prospective employers. There are over 100 accessible, fictitious websites within the game. Although TW@ was seen early in Grand Theft Auto III, it did not give the player the option to "surf the internet".

* Every street in the game will have a name for the reason that some missions will require the player to go to a specific address.

* There is now an autosave that activates after completing a mission.

* A day in Liberty City is forty-eight minutes long, instead of twenty-four as in previous Grand Theft Auto titles (one game hour lasts two minutes in real time).

* Some meetings in the game will take place high in the buildings of skyscrapers, which will subsequently allow Niko to throw people off the buildings. However, Niko will not be able to access all the buildings in the game.

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IGN Interview

March 31, 2008 - Grand Theft Auto IV is less than a month away. Arriving on PS3 and 360 April 29, Rockstar's latest has the IGN office abuzz with excitement. While we know many of you share our heightened anticipation, we also realize many of you still have your doubts. It's going to be a few more weeks before we know if GTA IV can deliver on its promise.

Why is this the first true sequel to GTA III? How do you make a multiplayer component that still feels as free and open as the single-player of GTA? And what's Rockstar's take on downloadable content? We spoke with VP of Creative, Dan Houser and Rockstar North Art Director Aaron Garbut to get the answers.

IGN: One of the first things that I noticed when the game was announced is that you chose to call it GTA IV. Was that to say that this is kind of the first true sequel where you guys are taking as big a leap as you did from GTA 2 which was top-down to GTA III, which of course was of course 3D and open world?

Dan Houser: Yes, definitely. Exactly that. We certainly did our best to make sure that Vice City and San Andreas felt fresh and exciting, but the problem was GTA III was already pushing the hardware so hard. The improvements tended to be in production values and scale... We wanted it to feel like the transition from 2D to 3D was seismic. We wanted a transition that felt as seismic, that felt as big this time.

IGN: Do you think people outside of the industry, that the general readership, get that yet? That people understand that change yet. Or is it going to take them actually play it before they get that?

Houser: Yeah, I think they'll have to play... When you see it running, I don't think it's difficult. You go out [with Niko] and go, "Look, we can go to the cabaret, we can surf the Internet or we can do all this other [stuff]." When you start to see that, I don't think it's difficult to get your head around.

We knew this was going to be our first big game in the lifecycle, so we wanted it to be a game that if people were buying the hardware to play, they'd know why they bought the hardware... It's not a single bullet point that is easy to reduce as it was the difference between GTA 2 to GTA III, but I believe that it's still kind of obvious once you see the game being played for more than about a minute.

IGN: And I think there are subtle things, too, that you would notice when you play it. If you just walk the streets for five minutes and then get into two different cars and try to make sharp turns you get a sense of how different it is.

Houser: I think definitely if you play the game for more than 10 seconds. We always wanted a game that you can pick it up and you can have fun, control the character, control the vehicle and have fun in three seconds flat. But there is enough depth that it is still a test of skill and there is still fun to be had after hour 15, 20, 30, 100, whatever it might be. So there's going to be tons and tons of tiny things that you'll notice over time that'll make you go, "Wow, that's pretty cool; I've never seen that kind of thing before done in a game," but you still have to have that early wow. You weren't like, "Ah, it's a little bit better." It can't feel like GTA 3.5.

IGN: Yeah, it doesn't.

Houser: Well thank you. [laughter] Otherwise the last three years would've been very miserable for nothing.

IGN: How was it making GTA IV for multiple systems simultaneously?

Houser: There have been challenges with both systems. Now we're at the point where it's is looking great on both. So we feel pretty pleased about the decision. We've never done simultaneous releases before off the lead SKU. We've done like the PC and the Xbox at the same time and other things like that... It is a challenge for the technical guys on the team (which is thankfully not me -- or thankfully them). [laughter]

It's definitely a challenge keeping that stuff in line, but I think we're now at the point where it was the right decision. We're pleased about that approach. It's not like we made any significant compromises to either version by doing them. Which was always the thing we were nervous about doing in the past, that one would feel very dumbed down or that one would feel like it could've pushed the machine a little harder. We think we've pushed both machines very, very hard compared to what other people are able to do at this point in time.

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IGN: GTA games on the PS2 couldn't show things at a high level of realism, just by the nature of the console. But now you have systems that can show a truer version of the world. So how do you balance the line of creating a sense of realism without making things so realistic it becomes off-putting?

Aaron Garbut: We make GTA by chucking things in as quickly as we can and refining till they are as good as we can make them. This worked in the same way. We went through a number of styles right at the start and what we ended up with grew out of that. Where something seemed out of place, it was changed or removed.

Houser: We definitely wanted to step out from cinema shadow with [GTA IV]. We wanted to do our own thing, set in place we knew very well and set in a time we knew well. As we hadn't done a contemporary game since 2001, it felt [like] enough time had passed that we could do that without repeating ourselves.

IGN: Do you think the heightened realism is going to make the anti-GTA politicians even more vocal?

Garbut: I think regardless of how the game looked or what it contained the politicians [would] be just as vocal. GTA is an easy target for politicians and journalists to pick on. It doesn't really matter what we do or don't do. It's an open experience that allows players to do as they choose in a realistic environment. As these sorts of games become more and more sophisticated and the choices and abilities open to the players increases it will become easier and easier to sensationalize a particular aspect of it and at the same time become more and more ridiculous [about it].

We're seeing it already with the drinking in the game. There is no drunk driving minigame, there's just drinking and getting drunk. Combine this with the ability to enter cars in the game and people are able to drive drunk, but that's a choice they have made based on the abilities we have made available to them. It's just as valid for them to walk home, but that doesn't make for such interesting headlines.

I seem to be ranting but my point is we don't allow what...a politician might think to be an issue. We just make a game that is as good as we can make and as beautiful as we can make. I really loathe the idea of self censorship.

IGN: One of the things we've seen in the first two years of the 360 is that even though you're paying more, most companies have upped the resolution but haven't done much more. We haven't seen a lot of games yet where I've said, "You know, graphics aside, you could never do that on a PS2 or Xbox."

Houser: Well, I certainly feel that too much... I don't really like to talk about other people's games, because I know how hard to make games... It's intimidating. Making the art at this level of resolution is intimidating. So I can understand where some of that conservatism comes from. We've chosen not to do that, but I don't blame other people for doing that. Fundamentally, if you want to expand the audience of people who are playing videogames, it can only be through evolving the medium. Other people are saying, "Well that's through making things very simple." Our approach is the opposite by saying, "No, it's through making things vibrant and alive in a way they couldn't be previously" and that will drag new people in.

Liberty City PD stands no chance.

IGN: We saw when GTA III came out that it sort of launched the idea of an open world as the new standard. You saw a lot of people copycatting what you accomplished and that became the natural thing. Now that we're heading into the new generation of consoles, open world is an obvious thing, everybody does it. It's become a standard. So what's the new thing for this generation? Is it cinematics? Is it story that's going to become the big thing? Is it AI that's going to be the big thing for this generation?

Houser: I think it's detail... As you say, in the previous generation it was doing 3D in an open world because that gave you this idea of the playing environment -- the set, all the living world, whatever you manage to achieve -- actually existing in some way. That was something that was cool that games could do, but by the limitations of the machinery, there wasn't that much detail... We were conscious [that] this will be our first big game on these new machines and we're going to have to justify in our own minds why someone's going to spend $500 to play this game.

So for us it's got to be about detail, it has to be hi-definition and that means everything has to get better. On the last generation you could fundamentally do anything that you wanted to do in a game, but you couldn't necessarily do it with that much precision and detail. And now it's making stories that are more alive, making characters that have more resonance to them and making physics. The physics is an obvious example of something that's just leapt forward.

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IGN: On the detail part, I remember the very first time the game was shown to us and I saw someone drive around and one of the very first things I noticed was, "there's a pothole in the street." It's not just like, "We made streets." It's that, "We made this street and this street hasn't been cared for in a long time."

Houser: Again it's where I come back to why I think the art guys are so great on this game. That was something we were playing around with even on GTA III. You load GTA III in about three seconds you'll see newspapers blowing around and a little bit of roadwork. But you can do it infinitely better now. And it's not to say that there's no new innovations and we're just trying to redo old ideas, because we are looking at all aspects of the process and doing it a lot better than we ever did in the past. And just doing things you couldn't do previously. Detail will give the whole thing this visceral, immediate quality it couldn't have before.

We only scratched the surface of that [during] GTA III/Vice City time, but it was really interesting to us. We were like, "Wow, this is really powerful... when people postulate games are going to be the next mass form of entertainment, this is the kind of thing they're going to be able to do." You don't really realize that that's what's so cool about it. Yes you can have -- and we love -- strong narrative but you can have that inter-related to the whole experience in quite a new way. That was something we tried to keep developing, because that seemed like a very exciting idea.

Niko knows no bounds.

What we couldn't get while doing that on PS2 or Xbox 1 was a great deal of detail and a great deal of depth. You know, it was still like a road map. And now you're able to go a lot more granularly and see the guys with their heads in their hands and see tears on peoples' faces. Things like that that just gives it this kind of power and have tons and tons of variations in the conversations and the physics to match. It was keeping all of that stuff coming up to the same level. What I thought we did very well on previous games was the kind of consistency. Even on GTA III -- and we kept that going on the other ones -- it felt like an integrated front. You could be playing a side game, unlocking a safe, going on a dance, parachuting out of a plane, listening to the radio, doing a wide variety of stuff by San Andreas and it felt like one game. We always felt that was important. So if we're tonally moving, we tried to shift the whole tone up a generation this time.

IGN: I think that carries over into multiplayer, being able to jump in using your phone.

Houser: The phone was a great piece of design. I remember when the designers showed me that and I was visiting the office and I was like, "That's brilliant. You did an amazing job with that." We've had a phone loosely since Vice City, but really then it was just for the writers, because then we could move the story forward. It was just a good way of not always making someone have a cut-scene. It was a really good device for that, but it didn't really affect the flow or become such a great navigational tool.

We love the phone and we knew we wanted the phone and wanted to do introduce text messaging and SMSing as you call it in your country. Then they were like, "Well we should just do everything through the phone." Early on we [knew] we wanted to build out male friendships as well as girlfriends, and make the girlfriends a lot more detailed. So we use the idea [that] you can go on a mission or hang out with a friend and that felt like a good thing. When the phone came in -- that's how you were going to propel all that stuff -- suddenly it was like, "We can run the multiplayer through the phone. Just run the whole game through the phone." Even though there is a bit of the element of the breaking of the fourth wall when you start playing multiplayer through it, it feels very subtle and you barely notice it. And it's a lot better than seeing a menu at that point.

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IGN: And that's one of the main differences in our world from 2001 when GTA III came out to now is that our lives are built around that phone now.

Houser: We started to see that games can do things you couldn't do in other mediums. The phone is a fine example of that. This actually replicates the sensation of being alive, at least in a city today. You couldn't do that in a movie or a book, it wouldn't really make sense. In a game, you are run by your phone in a certain level. In real life and in the game the same thing -- your phone controls you. It felt fun as that came together. It turned something that felt like a menu into something that felt very immersive and organic.

IGN: I think, actually, one of the things that changes the flow when you're in some of the missions is just having that cover system. Was it ever a concern that it might slow things down too much? How early on did that cover system evolve and become part of the game?

Houser: Well, the targeting was something that we realized we'd now have the power to be able to make it the way we wanted to make it. We'd be able to get the AI good enough to justify it. That was being worked on very, very early on. San Andreas finished in October 2004 and then the guys at North have a month off when a game finishes and then we're rolling into this. The ball starts pretty reasonably gentle. Making a game's like climbing a mountain; it gets worse and worse as the air gets thinner and thinner -- as time starts to run out.

But on the very earliest lists, we knew if we're going to go next-gen and we're going to take the time we want to improve the targeting system because that's something we can do properly now. And as soon as that began to get played with the cover system became a natural addition. So I can get the targeting and then we need to add cover and you need to make sure all the weapons work in that way, [are] the blind fire bits a lot of fun?

IGN: Oh yeah. Blind fire with an RPG may be the greatest thing ever.

Houser: When they got the art right with the RPG, it was like, "Okay, that's pretty out there." But yeah, that was earlier and then after that we went on to improving the hand-to-hand combat, the fighting. And again it was, trying to still keep the game very playable for the average [gamer]... GTA's got a broad range of people that play it and you want it to still appeal to the hardcore and yet also appeal to someone who's not a hardcore gamer by any means. I think that's the sweet spot we've always tried to hit and I think we still hit it, but it's always a danger if you focus too much on targeting as being too technical. People can't play it anymore.

Cover is a significant change from previous GTA games.

IGN: GTA IV adds verticality and a cover system. Does that affect the art process at all? Do you have to think about building the city any differently because of this?

Garbut: Our programmers wrote the climbing and cover to be very flexible. In many action games, the cover is predetermined and placed in the world in a very rigid sense. Our system dynamically finds cover wherever its available. Even if it's a moving car or crate. For the player it means there's loads of flexibility and real world common sense dictates whether a piece of cover is useable. For the artists creating the world it means that for the most part they don't need to worry about it.

Obviously in an area of map or interior where a specific fire fight takes place we get a lot more structured and consider where cover is needed. But throughout the rest of the world we just make an interesting map and leave it to the cover system and the player to use what we've built. It's not really too possible to do much else when everything is so freeform. The same city block could see firefights played out in a huge number of ways so we just let nature take its course.

We encourage the verticality in various ways, from ladders to adding entire stairwells within a lot of the lower level buildings that allow the player to reach the rooftops from inside buildings.

IGN: There's lots of hidden things in GTA IV -- well, there's always been lots of hidden things in these games. Is that stuff organic where people at Rockstar just randomly go, "You know, it might be cool if we had this in the game," and it just sort of happens? How does that work, do you guys come up with a wish list of stuff you want to throw in there and build from that?

Houser: No, it's not as loose as that. On some level yes in that we come up with a wish list of things we'd like to do, of course, and things we want to redo. San Andreas was a very, very broad game so a lot of it was like, "Well, we just want to totally redo this part." It's not like we're adding fighting, we just want to make it more responsive. Something [new] is the cabaret. You can go to a cabaret in the game. (cnt'd)

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Houser(cnt'd): Unfortunately, everything is a load of work and particularly working on these machines the one thing we've found is that, just as with actors and Botox, making video games and assets is a lot more work than it used to be because things are very unforgiving. Suddenly how you move between one state and another has to be beautifully animated and everything requires beautiful camera work and every asset is a lot harder to make even if you can make a lot more of them. So we can throw ideas in the pot but everything ends up being a lot of work. Everything has to be written, everything has to be recorded, mocapped, whatever it might be.

Cabaret really works because it's New York, and because he's hanging out with a load of Russian gangsters. You go out to Brighton Beach and there's loads of supper clubs out there, that was kind of what inspired us. We had some other ideas that we were playing around with, but it would work for this character in this city. With the radio stations we always wanted to expand the concept of media, so Internet was the easy one to add.

In some ways we wanted a more focused experience than San Andreas in this game; slightly smaller world, much more detail-obsessed and that had to not just be about animation and lighting, it also had to be about activities. New York was a broad canvas in some ways... [There were things] that we might have toyed with doing like rural activities. We weren't going to put in the Catskills and have you skiing. Fun as that would have been, it wouldn't have felt right for this game.

Looks like someone got their wanted level to 4 stars.

IGN: You mentioned the Internet, and I love that idea of being able to get in a cop car and search for someone's name and see their known hideout. I love that you have a network built within the game itself.

Houser: There's a bunch of little databases like that. I mean, the police one is the obvious one. The thing that people are going to get really interested in -- particularly on the second or third play through -- is all the news media. As you play the game, you're driving around and you hear on the radio the news change. It changes tons and tons of times as the story progresses. You can go on the Internet and read the same news. And you can read it from a Left Wing perspective, a Right Wing perspective or like a centrist hysterical "the world's gonna blow up" type perspective. They all bounce off each other.

Those kind of details, where there's always going to be things to discover was something -- we wanted it to be a really fun game to play through once and then a really fun game to play through again. We noticed, particularly with San Andreas, because there's been a long gap between games, people are still playing that obsessively and making up myths for themselves and finding new weird details. We wanted to really reward that kind of long, long play. Not that you have to do it, but if you do do it, there's lots of things to still find.

IGN: There was an RPG element to San Andreas that's not in GTA IV. What was the decision to take that away or scale back from that?

Houser: I think it was just a question of time and we took that out so early... We wanted to improve the animation so much and the character changing shape would not allow us to do that. It'd be arms passing through your own stomach and that kind of stuff. You wouldn't really notice it in the previous games or you'd [be] a little more sympathetic and we didn't want to do that this time... [Niko] has things to do. Rather than doing weights he goes bowling or you go to the cabaret. We definitely wanted to put a lot of stuff into that "hanging out in the world" side of the game, but we wanted it to be more activities rather than the gym.

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IGN: Are there any rules you keep in place when designing the different outfits that players can choose? Are there limits to what you offer for customization so as to keep Niko from looking like a total fool? And if not, is there any concern that allowing players to dress Niko in ridiculous outfits breaks the narrative in any way?

Garbut: While it's fun to be able to design your own look for the [character] I don't see how it can coexist with a convincing story. We've avoided a "create your own" [character] for that reason. We want to tell an amazing story, that's not possible if the [Niko] can look ridiculously out of place. I don't think Goodfellas would have been such a great film if Ray Liotta had played the entire film in a dress with a clown nose and green skin.

We keep the clothes available to the player consistent with his character. There's a great deal of variety, but he'll always look like Niko.

IGN: One of the things we notice from some of our readers is that there is a disconnect in the idea of the pure, technical visuals of something and art. The two actually exist together. I think most general consumers only see the technical part, but don't know how to consider the artistic part of it at all.

Houser: It's a complicated thing, because a videogame is constantly moving. In every way. The guy's moving, your hands are moving, the worlds moving around. You can't reduce that to a screenshot. You can't even really reduce that to a video. It's hard sometimes to reduce that to the written word, to explain what's good about something or what's missing. What's intangible that makes this experience not all that it could be. It's an area where we're like, we're focused on the experience. I don't think this an experience you could possibly have thought that you would ever have on a PS2 or Xbox 1. So if you bought one of these new machines, hopefully this is one of the games you go, "Thank God I spent that money, because this is what it's all about."

That's what we wanted; that's what we set out to make. We looked at that in lots of different ways. Everything had to get better but feel like this integrated experience. And use the power to make it more integrated, not less. The design has to be progressive. It's not like you're throwing everything away. There are still bits of the old game design definitely there. The game still feels like GTA.

In rain or sleet, Niko delivers.

IGN: Aaron, do you feel that the "art" of graphics is largely unappreciated in the GTA series?

Garbut: I think it's always been difficult to stand up technically to direct comparisons with more contained "on rails" games. We build worlds that can be interacted with in a huge number of ways, that are drawn kilometres into the distance and that can be entered and viewed from inside or from 500m in the air. We have to balance the detail you need while walking slowly about exploring, driving past at 150MPH or hovering over in a helicopter. It's always about compromise. A balance of how fast the game can run with all the stuff we want to put in it and how much we can squeeze into its memory.

We populate our worlds with a huge number of characters and vehicles and again this has always been about compromise. There's always a finite amount of power and memory for us to utilize. Do we have three incredibly detailed characters onscreen at once or do we have 50 less detailed? Similarly due to the sheer vastness of the world and the amount of stuff populating it compromises have to be made. But we've always created compelling, beautiful worlds that have a distinct style and work as a cohesive universe which is a very hard thing to get right.

I've spend countless miserable hours of my life torturing myself reading what people have to say on various forums. I've had to develop quite a thick skin to cope with it all! But I believe that you can't separate game play, art, code, audio, music or the story. People experience a game as a whole. (cnt'd)

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Garbut (cnt'd):I've read so much in forums about the [crappy] graphics in GTA, but the same people will talk about spending countless hours exploring the world and getting lost in the experience. The artists here have made that world and been part of creating that experience. Every compromise that we've made in visual fidelity has been to improve that experience in some way. I think creating a world that people can get lost in with characters that people remember and identify with and making that experience so cohesive that it starts to feel like a real place is far more important than whether our characters hands had all their fingers or the number of subdivisions in our car wheels.

I think we're all part of a collective that makes an experience, creates a world, a story, and the people that inhabit it. And makes it engaging enough to keep people interested. So I suppose what I'm saying is that no, I don't think the artwork is underappreciated. I think people love it; it's just that they don't consider it to be the art.

IGN: So, you created this massive world with tons of hidden goodies that will likely take more than 100 hours to fully discover and enjoy. And then you throw in a gigantic multiplayer component.

Houser: We couldn't do that before, because the machines couldn't -- The very base thing, the very entry point was, "Can we have the world running and play multiplayer?" And you just couldn't do that before. And now you can, so it was like, "Okay, now how do we make this feel, still, like GTA and not go to the way that a lot of multiplayer games end up feeling like a costume party."

What we're trying to do, I suppose, with the whole game is give you a cinematic experience but then extend that... So it's like you're the gangster, but you're not just the gangster in the bank job, you're the gangster of the full experience. That's what the single-player is trying to be like: put you as the star of your own TV show. And I guess the way that we look at multiplayer is you can't -- and we're still trying to figure out aspects of this -- recreate the full narrative experience. Instead you can recreate aspects of that, like how you can get a really cool car chase. So Cops 'n' Crooks is a great mode because it's a felling like you and everyone are getting the gangster experience. Now obviously, it's a section of a film rather than a whole narrative, but it does give you those movie experiences.

Multiplayer is all about Cops 'n' Crooks.

IGN: Yeah, when we were bumbling around as crooks I kept thinking, "Man, it's like I'm reliving Reservoir Dogs."

Houser: Yeah, which is brilliant. That's something that, I think, multiplayer games have been crying out for. In terms of accessibility, in a lot of first-person games which tend to dominate the multiplayer arena, there's a skill set barrier to entry that I think we kind of... you still obviously have got a skill based game, but it's going to be easier for people to get in and have fun and not feel quite so intimidated [in GTA IV].

IGN: What really impressed me is that you managed to keep the idea of an open-world game in multiplayer, which is something most people seem to lose. GTA Race, in most games you'd be stuck in a car, stuck on a track. But f I want to jump out of my car, jack a new car or just shoot people or set up a road block, I am free to do what I like.

Houser: That's what I was saying where the world has to run, and then you have to design around that, because that's what the game is. You can't throw away what the core ideas of the game are just to make something. Well you can, but it's just a different game at that point. If you want to make a GTA game with multiplayer, it has to feel like GTA. It can't be, "Here's a series of side multiplayer modes that have some loose resemblance to this game." It has to feel very similar, but there's living people running around.

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IGN: Why isn't there's co-op throughout the campaign? Is that something were co-op is too much of a limitation to the story?

Houser: Yeah. We toyed with it and we felt we came to a compromise by putting in a separate mode that was designed and scripted and driven with more elements than the main multiplayer but less than the main story. Off-story elements that gave you both, but if you were saying that you would have to run around, make the whole game co-op, then the single-player game would be massively compromised. And I haven't yet played a game where that wasn't the case.

IGN: Why do you think that is? Obviously co-op is going to be a big part of gaming moving forward. Do you think there is a solution and that someone will find a way to tell a good story with cooperative play?

Houser: I'm sure someone will, but I'm also sure that at the moment you can't design a level using AI and then take out the AI and use another human being and have the level perfectly balanced for both. It depends on what you want. The game is either going to work better one or the other or you have to make two separate things, which is the path we chose to go down.

IGN: In our multiplayer session we've already perfected the art of the rocket jump.

Houser: Yeah. I think that the kind of loose in the world hang out mode, long term, will have a lot of life in the multiplayer world. Early on it will be the more structured games and that will come to the fore a few months in.

Choppers exist in single-player and multiplayer.

IGN: It will be interesting to see how that evolves.

Houser: I know. What people respond to. The only thing we've really done multiplayer-wise as a company was Midnight Club. By our standards very much a genre-based game. It clearly existed in a genre, with [it being the] first ones doing the open world stuff, but it still is a racing game. We set to make a racing game that was fun and progressive, which is more genre style than we normally get into. But we found from doing the multiplayer with that that after time just the free roaming around the world, becomes very popular, even in a car.

IGN: That's kind of how the single-player works too in GTA. Your first five hours, you're following the story and at some point you say, "I'm just going to wander around" and then you get lost in the world for five days.

Houser: I think creating that experience in multiplayer, that's why we put in [a free roam] mode. It would be the same kind of thing with like, "Well we can just go and hang out there and then we decide we want to beat up our friend over there, so let's go chase him around the world." It has a nice loose structure to it. That alongside all the structured modes I think is a good balance. The multiplayer is -- we're really proud of it. It's going to be a lot of fun for us seeing what people respond to. We've done a lot of work to balance it, to make it fun, to make sure every mode works. We've got a few ideas up our sleeves for future modes, but we want people's responses to what they like and what they don't like. We've never really done that before, so we did as complete a job as we could manage. We put a lot of modes in there, because we wanted to cover all the bases. Some bits are going to be incredibly popular and some bits not and it's going to fun watching that.

IGN: And that's one of the benefits of being able to modify your game after launch with online downloads.

Houser: Yeah. We're actually consciously not a focus-testing company. This is different to that... We definitely look at message boards, but we don't sit there scouring for this is the thing that everyone likes. We try and make games people haven't yet thought of. Stuff where people aren't going, "Oh, we should have that." Because then, well, that's not going to be amazing then is it? Our job is making things people haven't even thought of yet. In multiplayer, you're asking the player to be enough a part of the experience that you've got to see what people like.

==========

IGN: One of the other big pushes for this generation is downloadable content. I know you probably can't talk about the downloadable content for GTA IV, but in general what is your view of extending the life of game through downloadable content?

Houser: Don't sell things that aren't worth selling. We've always focused on value for money. We're very conscious that games are a very expensive media product. A book costs about 12 bucks, movie tickets are like 10 bucks on Fandango, CDs -- if people even buy them anymore -- are $12 and a game's like 60 bucks. So we've always been conscious of it's a big financial outlay.

We can't guarantee people will love any of our games, but we do our utmost to ensure they will know they have been lovingly put together. The production values are high. We'll lovingly select every single song in every single game. We'll be throwing out one's we like because it doesn't quite match the tone in the game. We try out every voice. We try to make sure the voice of everyone acting stands out. If the guy's got a crap voice, we ditch the actor. We really try and do that stuff with attention to detail. Every mission, every mechanic -- we focus on the fact that it's a big commitment for someone to spend a bunch of money and a number of hours of their life [playing] this. We can't guarantee they're going to love it, but we can guarantee that they're going to know it wasn't us just trying to rip money out of their wallet without giving anything back.

Now in terms of how that relates to downloadable stuff, the business model is still very, very loose. Often in games it seems to mature as a business before it's matured as an art form. And I think that's an area where there's a danger of that happening, so our approach is going to be for everything: If we're going to sell it, we're going to make sure it's worth buying. And make sure it doesn't unbalance the game or make the game unplayable for everyone online in the multiplayer environment. And in the single-player environment when adding stuff there, make sure it's worth whatever money someone's paying for it.

Rockstar won't discuss DLC plans... yet.

IGN: And I assume also to make sure it feels like a natural extension of the game as well, so that it doesn't feel artificial?

Houser: Oh yeah... In general, if it's a very tight story game, as opposed to an open world game, there's often nothing you can really add. Add an extra level. Why? It's done. It's a story. With an open world game there's a little more maneuverability there, but we're super conscious that we want the games to be treated as serious medium. We take it very seriously. We love what we do. It's up to you guys to say if it's art or not. We try really hard. We're not in it just to go, "Here's an extra way of making a dollar." That's going to make all the people who already spent $60, half of them feel redundant. If there's anything that we're selling, we want it to be useful for people.

The game that you buy on the disc is the game. The extra stuff doesn't exist yet, but it exists in our heads... It's cool stuff. It doesn't undermine the individual game.

IGN: There's already a lot there for your $60.

Houser: The multiplayer game alone is a huge thing. The single-player game is enormous and other stuff you can, if you want to explore in the world, there's a $#!@-load of stuff there as well... There seems to be this weird idea that single-player games can get shorter. They can get more expensive and shorter. I don't understand that approach. It's not our approach.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Our thanks to Dan Houser and Aaron Garbut for taking the time out to give us a high-level view of GTA IV. We hope to get you more in-depth details on specific aspects of GTA IV as we head towards its April 29 release.

Info on online multiplayer is in this image. Online free roam.

GTAScan6.jpg

Music

Philip Glass, the composer of the music used in the original trailer, is rumoured to be involved in the production of GTA IV's soundtrack.[citation needed] The soundtrack was described as "modern and suits the mood perfectly."[citation needed] Glass's "Pruit-Igoe" theme from Koyaanisqatsi was used for the teaser trailer.

Dan Houser has said that Rockstar is "certainly evolving the way the radio works". According to Official Xbox Magazine, one of the radio stations includes an "Eastern European-sounding" dancing theme. Other music announced as a placeholder for the press includes Russian and East Coast hip hop.[40] The range of music in GTA IV will span different decades and genres, the first track shown to the media was "Sorrow Tears and Blood" by Fela Kuti, and while there is no official word on whether it will be in the final release of the game[12]

Various media outlets have reported on the quality of GTA IV's advanced sound engine. One describes the realism of the traffic noise on the streets, noting the "varying volume and intensity of car horns and the constant hum of traffic", as well as "the frequent deafening rattle of trains hurtling through the subway."[12] As part of GTA IV's new physics, the player will be able to hear and feel the bass of vehicles passing by with their radio turned on.

There will be eighteen radio stations in the game.[41] The first two stations revealed were IF99 and Vladivostok FM, which are funk music stations and 'Post-communist community radio' stations respectively. [42]

DLC

As for DLC, Xbox360 will have exlusive DLC because when R* went to Sony and Microsoft for funding, only Microsoft gave money (50 mil). This DLC is rumored to be more missions and stuff like that (Episodic Content as they call it) to make the game totally different from the PS3 version, as R* has stated. Sony will probably have DLC also (Rumored to be cars) but that DLC will be on Xbox 360 also.

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BigRog Legend

BigRog

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I am looking into hosting an online smash em up session. I am planning on getting the game at the midnight release so if anyone wants to play, say that day or something hit me up for my gamertag. I won't be home that weekend though. I want to try to keep the online party 17+ seeing as it is a M game but C'est la vie.

Online free roam to have 15 people compatibility is just plain filthy :-D

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DJEagles Legend

DJEagles

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Because this is a baseball website, and that is a BASEBALL game.

We DO NOT NEED AN "OFFICIAL" thread everytime a game is coming out. Of course, a baseball game is going to take priority on a baseball website.

This is what the "OFFICIAL" video game thread is for.

Thanks for playing.

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