GTA4 Rockstar Interview Continued:
from ign.com
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.