Game Stooge

IGN: 11 Page GTA4 Preview/Interview

• Scribbled on March 29th, 2008 by Jonah Falcon
• Filed in Action, Interviews, Microsoft Xbox 360, Previews, Sony PlayStation 3

IGN has a massive 11 page preview/interview with Rockstar VP of Creative Content Dan Houser and Rockstar North Art Director Aaron Garbut.

A sampling:

IGN: One of the things that I find really interesting about it is just the idea of those kind of relationships and how they work. I’ve only seen two examples so far: The first is the one on the first date. After the date, I actually pulled out a bat on the girl and I got that scene where Niko’s like, “I don’t know what came over me, baby!” Obviously that’s going to fundamentally change how she views Niko. The other one is where you get a call when you’re on the date from your cousin who’s in trouble, the loan sharks are after him. Where you can choose whether or not you want to stay on the date or help him out. Can you talk about how that works out, like is that going to be something we’re going to see thread throughout the game, those kinds of choices?

Houser: Well, not exactly like that, because we tried to build everything for each mission, but lots of different bits and pieces like that, yeah. We wanted choices in all kinds of ways to be part of the game. In some ways, without, again, wanting to criticize games that we loved making at the time and put a $#!@load of effort in — we spent a lot of time trying to massively overhaul what we’ve done in the past — the feeling was that maybe by San Andreas that some of the missions got too linear.

So one thing we wanted to do was put a lot of choice in how you did that mission. There are multiple ways of doing a mission, and then at the end of them, some of them, you have a choice, “what do you do or do you not here?” And then there are ramifications from those choices. [We're] trying to meet halfway between, trying to make the gap between the story and the non-story that always felt very defined in previous games. You’re either doing a mission or you weren’t, and we tried to make the distance between those a little bit closer.

So, I saw this guy in a mission — I don’t want to give away too many story spoilers. If stories are going to matter in games, then not talking about them before you’ve played the game is quite important, but as far as trying to talk about it theoretically. There are missions where you go and you have the cutscene and there’s a small character that’s out of it… you can bump into later walking around the world, and talk to him then or not. And if you don’t then maybe there are ramifications of doing that coming into the story.

It’s trying to do a lot of little touches that are quite subtle that the player would only realize if they played through the game, but rather than it feeling like in the old game it was very much like, “well I’m doing a story, or I’m doing this or I’m doing that.” [Now] it’s all kind of, “you’re playing as Niko in this world and here’s some things you’ve got to do for these people you don’t like, here’s some other people you don’t like, here’s someone you just met who’s a kind of bleeding heart, needs your help on the street, totally different type of character. Well go and help them.” We’re trying to use the nature of a game, which is wandering around this virtual space, as best we could to tell stories in a slightly different way.

Check out the rest of the interview at IGN.