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My (Late) GTA IV Take
Stephentchel
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Like most people, I was beyond ecstatic the first time I stuck GTA IV into my trusty 360 and loaded it up. And my first view of the new and improved Liberty City was absolutely amazing. It was so big, so beautiful, and had so much potential that I spent a lot more time playing GTA IV than I should really have been doing, considering I was also in the middle of SWO School in the Navy. Whoops. But now, having come to the end of the game and gotten 100%, I’ve gotta say it: I’m disappointed. I know I’m not the first one out there to walk away less than blown away, and after some time I’ve finally figured out what it is about IV that I don’t like, and why I’m convinced that the earlier GTAs, specifically III, are better than IV.
First, there are going to be the obvious accusations of bias. Since III was our first introduction to a 3-D GTA game, it will continue to occupy a place in our minds and hearts and whatever that no game can take. But for my own part, VC was the first GTA I played, and SA was the first GTA I got 100% Completion in. So I don’t have any particular loyalty to III. Still, I think III was the epitome of the GTA game, and every game since has lost a little more.
With III, by the time you got 100% you knew every square inch of Liberty City. Even if you used a strategy guide, you’d still have been down every little alley and back corner at one point or the other. You had to. And everything in Liberty City had a purpose. Every alley was guaranteed a weapon or a hidden package or a heart or pill or Rampage or bribe or something. If it didn’t have one of those, then it was a useful shortcut. If you found any – any! – area that seemed like wasted space, then there was a vehicle you could climb into somewhere nearby and play one of the four mini-vehicle missions. It continues to be one of the most perfectly designed game worlds ever.
VC, for all its other assets, was just a bit too flat for my tastes. And let’s face it – the western half just wasn’t as much fun as the eastern half, except for maybe the airport. And while I love SA more than anything, don’t get me started on the amount of irrelevant space there. I’ve played it through about ten times, and there are still roads and even highways that I never go down. I don’t need to.
That leads me to the most significant gripe I have against IV. When you first pull out that map, all sorts of story ideas are open to you. There’s Francis International over there – who knows what shit will go down there? Middle Park is freakin’ ginormous, and the Aldernay State Correctional Facility practically demands a big rescue mission where Niko breaches the walls to bust a comrade out or something. I would have put money on it. Thankfully, I didn’t.
First thing’s first: Francis International. Except for introducing PS3 owners to SIXAXIS, you never, ever have a reason to go there. EVER. In fact, for some goddamned reason Rockstar saw fit to give you a 4-star wanted rating when you drive onto the tarmac. What the hell? They even gave it real, tangible planes (a Francis International first), several vehicles scattered about, and a wide-open playing space, and then they don’t give us a single fucking reason to go there. How many hidden packages were at Francis International in III? Like seven? How many missions took you to Francis International? In III, the airport had a purpose. Some big missions took place there. When you went out onto the end of one of the landing strips and gazed out into that blue-gray horizon, you felt like you were at the edge of civilization. It was atmospheric, god dammit.
The Francis International of IV is useless. There are no planes to hijack, no Flying Rats, no missions, and no reason for it to be there at all. The same goes for Middle Park. Off the top of my head, I can remember there being a Hidden Package (maybe two), a contact point, and a mini-vehicle mission at the Middle Park of III. There’s one or two Flying Rats and I think only one mission (with the queer guy) that occurs in Middle Park in IV – that’s it. And the damned thing is almost ten times larger and a billion times more detailed! Hell, it’s not even fun to jack up your wanted rating and escape into the park on a vehicle. It just tears me up how irrelevant Middle Park has become. You can’t even access the rowboats.
Then there’s Aldernay State Correctional Facility. To give you an idea of how useless THAT place is, I once took a helicopter and landed it smack dab in the middle of the prison. A PRISON, for Christ’s sake, and I didn’t get a single wanted rating. The cops ignored me. But I once shot a pigeon with a gun, and I had about eight of those motherfuckers on me. However, if I take a helo and land it in the middle of a STATE PRISON, that’s not reasonable cause for alarm.
That’s what is so disappointing about the new Liberty City, and the newer console GTAs in general. The gameplay hasn’t increased with the size. In many ways the state of San Andreas was guilty of this as well. I tend to forgive SA for this though, because the vastness of the playing map was necessary to fit the story. SA was about Carl Johnson expanding out of the ghettos of Los Santos and getting a better idea of the world around him. When Tenpenny and Pulaski first dumped you into Angel Pine and you looked at your in-game map, it really felt like you were in the middle of nowhere. The desert wouldn’t have been as impressive if Las Venturas had been right next door. Area 69 doesn’t come across as much of an isolated facility if you could spot it from San Fierro. So, for the purposes of the story, I forgive SA for its large areas of pointless space.
In the Liberty City of III, there were four areas that seemed pointless: Middle Park, the beach behind Salvatore’s house, the cliffs around the beachside picnic area, and that goofy carpark. Okay – and the stadium. I’ll give you that. Of course, for each of those areas (except for the stadium) you could find a nearby vehicle and open up a hidden mission. And speaking of Salvatore Leon’s house, nothing in IV can compare the stark beauty of his mansion silhouetted against the sea, with a vast bleak cliff behind it. In fact, you could pretty much walk around Liberty City and tell where there was going to be some fun down the line. The mansion, with its gated access, Middle Park, the dam, the airport, Phil’s place, etc, etc. Since there is so much detail in IV’s Liberty City, you can no longer do that with any accuracy. This is why it’s so annoying that many of the places that DO stick out turn out to have no point whatsoever. For being so goddamned huge, the new Liberty City is pretty bland. There are tons of alleys and nooks and crannies that exist only to be alleys and nooks and crannies. Overflowing with atmosphere, to be sure, but with no reason to exist outside of atmosphere.
And I know that atmosphere is necessary. I really do. But we’re playing a video game here. Maybe they could have chopped Liberty City down to about half its size and added a few more missions or a few more characters or a few more SOMETHING and given us something more to work for. It’s easy as hell to get 100% Completion in IV. I really think it’s too bad they’re dumbing down the GTA formula to make it more accessible to the general audience.
And it almost – almost – seems like the developers new they were making something with more space than they knew what to do with. In fact it seems like they give you every opportunity to AVOID becoming familiar with Liberty City. Except for the Flying Rats (and those random strangers you meet), you are given few incentives to go out and explore. Pretty much everything is either handed to you via the cell phone, the taxi trip skip option, or removed already. Those mini-vehicle missions I’ve talked about? They’re gone. There are just too many cars parked in Liberty City for them to have a select few trigger a mission. Same for the fire truck and ambulance mission. All gone. At least the ambulance stills gives you the bit o’ health.
And the cell phone. I hate the cell phone more than I hated the cell phone in Dead Rising. It slows you down, you can’t fire a weapon, and you lose your hand break while driving. Plus the people will not leave you the hell alone! And – again – it practically GIVES you everything else in the game – at the least the stuff that hasn’t been removed. While Vigilante is still fairly fun, the taxi mission is a joke (and useless; it’s not counted toward 100%), and when you start the Vehicle Collection, they POINT YOU to the car you want to collect. Where’s the random sense of discovery? A beating heart inside the Statue of Happiness isn’t enough.
The problem is that the developers seem to think we want more realism. Quick – show of hands. Who here plays GTA hoping for an authentic criminal experience involving real people going through difficult times and having to make tough choices in a gritty World Gone Mad? Now who here plays GTA for the goofy, over-the-top missions, ridiculous characters, and snarky satire? It seems that even though IV has made amazing leaps forward in the two things that it desperately needed to improve on – visuals and combat – it’s taken a step back with everything else.
For example, I now hate riding motorcycles. They’re clumsy, dangerous, and they are rarely worth the risk of collision and death that goes with such a tremendous sense of speed. And I never thought Rockstar would find a hidden package collection more annoying than that damned graffiti you had to spray paint in Los Santos, but congratulations are due – I hated shooting the Flying Rats more than anything. Who at Rockstar thought it would be fun to shoot a bird, drive around for a minute or so until the resulting wanted rating went away, shoot another bird, wash, rinse, repeat, and then not really get anything cool for it? I don’t even remember the reward. Wasn’t it the Hunter? That’s not enough! There were TWO HUNDRED of those fucking things! And thanks to their newfound hard-on for a sense of reality, there was never a single driving-intensive mission as much fun as chasing a van dropping porn mags that would add a second to your time limit, or a relay race when you had to be the first to cross the majority of fifteen randomly-generated tags. Remember those missions? Remember using a fire truck to break open a full-body cast?
And how the hell am I supposed to cause statewide destruction when I can only carry 8 rounds in my grenade launcher and there aren’t any tanks? And Star Junction! Isn’t that place incredible? SOMETHING should have happened there. Something big. All this talk about Liberty City’s new sense of verticality means nothing when there’s no reason to go up there. I think maybe two or three missions involved going to the roof of a skyscraper, and that was just to play sniper. Hell, there could have been an entire other world up there. Remember the mission in VC where you had to take a motorcycle and drive around the roofs of the downtown area? Remember the first jump, which had you crash through a windowpane and land in the hole of that skyscraper? Wasn’t that fucking awesome? Now why the hell aren’t there any missions like that in IV? And why is this the first 3-D GTA in history without a stadium?
I’m going to let you in on a little secret. There are some days that I find myself ALMOST wishing we could go back the old rules. The early GTAs were simple. If you fell in the water, you died. You could drive into a Pay-N-Spray with four cop cars right on your tail, but when you emerged with a fresh coat of paint, they were none the wiser. Sure, any reasonable REAL human being could climb that wall, but if Claude or Tommy came across one they’d have to find a vehicle nearby to jump on first. Traditional hidden packages. Bring back the emergency vehicle import/export mission from III. SA had almost twice as many emergency vehicles, but no one thought that would be fun. And speaking of which, I don’t care how simple they are, when I climb into an emergency vehicle there had goddamned well better be a fire to put out, injured people to rescue, criminals to kill, or fares to find. And get rid of Girlfriends. (Except for Katie from San Fierro. She was hot.)
See, the rules have gotten too complex. It was the quirks that made GTA so much fun, and so damned frustrating. When the internal logic of the game caused something unbelievably random and stupid to happen, then you had witnessed a true GTA Moment. Somehow GTA III, VC, and SA still managed to be more creative than IV. I don’t know what’s next for the guys at Rockstar, but I can say this: if, when I’m finished with the main story missions, I find myself with little desire to return to the game to cause carnage or try out some stupid stunt or just hang out, something’s wrong. You’ve lost track of what’s important.
Of course, that’s just my opinion. I could be wrong.
First, there are going to be the obvious accusations of bias. Since III was our first introduction to a 3-D GTA game, it will continue to occupy a place in our minds and hearts and whatever that no game can take. But for my own part, VC was the first GTA I played, and SA was the first GTA I got 100% Completion in. So I don’t have any particular loyalty to III. Still, I think III was the epitome of the GTA game, and every game since has lost a little more.
With III, by the time you got 100% you knew every square inch of Liberty City. Even if you used a strategy guide, you’d still have been down every little alley and back corner at one point or the other. You had to. And everything in Liberty City had a purpose. Every alley was guaranteed a weapon or a hidden package or a heart or pill or Rampage or bribe or something. If it didn’t have one of those, then it was a useful shortcut. If you found any – any! – area that seemed like wasted space, then there was a vehicle you could climb into somewhere nearby and play one of the four mini-vehicle missions. It continues to be one of the most perfectly designed game worlds ever.
VC, for all its other assets, was just a bit too flat for my tastes. And let’s face it – the western half just wasn’t as much fun as the eastern half, except for maybe the airport. And while I love SA more than anything, don’t get me started on the amount of irrelevant space there. I’ve played it through about ten times, and there are still roads and even highways that I never go down. I don’t need to.
That leads me to the most significant gripe I have against IV. When you first pull out that map, all sorts of story ideas are open to you. There’s Francis International over there – who knows what shit will go down there? Middle Park is freakin’ ginormous, and the Aldernay State Correctional Facility practically demands a big rescue mission where Niko breaches the walls to bust a comrade out or something. I would have put money on it. Thankfully, I didn’t.
First thing’s first: Francis International. Except for introducing PS3 owners to SIXAXIS, you never, ever have a reason to go there. EVER. In fact, for some goddamned reason Rockstar saw fit to give you a 4-star wanted rating when you drive onto the tarmac. What the hell? They even gave it real, tangible planes (a Francis International first), several vehicles scattered about, and a wide-open playing space, and then they don’t give us a single fucking reason to go there. How many hidden packages were at Francis International in III? Like seven? How many missions took you to Francis International? In III, the airport had a purpose. Some big missions took place there. When you went out onto the end of one of the landing strips and gazed out into that blue-gray horizon, you felt like you were at the edge of civilization. It was atmospheric, god dammit.
The Francis International of IV is useless. There are no planes to hijack, no Flying Rats, no missions, and no reason for it to be there at all. The same goes for Middle Park. Off the top of my head, I can remember there being a Hidden Package (maybe two), a contact point, and a mini-vehicle mission at the Middle Park of III. There’s one or two Flying Rats and I think only one mission (with the queer guy) that occurs in Middle Park in IV – that’s it. And the damned thing is almost ten times larger and a billion times more detailed! Hell, it’s not even fun to jack up your wanted rating and escape into the park on a vehicle. It just tears me up how irrelevant Middle Park has become. You can’t even access the rowboats.
Then there’s Aldernay State Correctional Facility. To give you an idea of how useless THAT place is, I once took a helicopter and landed it smack dab in the middle of the prison. A PRISON, for Christ’s sake, and I didn’t get a single wanted rating. The cops ignored me. But I once shot a pigeon with a gun, and I had about eight of those motherfuckers on me. However, if I take a helo and land it in the middle of a STATE PRISON, that’s not reasonable cause for alarm.
That’s what is so disappointing about the new Liberty City, and the newer console GTAs in general. The gameplay hasn’t increased with the size. In many ways the state of San Andreas was guilty of this as well. I tend to forgive SA for this though, because the vastness of the playing map was necessary to fit the story. SA was about Carl Johnson expanding out of the ghettos of Los Santos and getting a better idea of the world around him. When Tenpenny and Pulaski first dumped you into Angel Pine and you looked at your in-game map, it really felt like you were in the middle of nowhere. The desert wouldn’t have been as impressive if Las Venturas had been right next door. Area 69 doesn’t come across as much of an isolated facility if you could spot it from San Fierro. So, for the purposes of the story, I forgive SA for its large areas of pointless space.
In the Liberty City of III, there were four areas that seemed pointless: Middle Park, the beach behind Salvatore’s house, the cliffs around the beachside picnic area, and that goofy carpark. Okay – and the stadium. I’ll give you that. Of course, for each of those areas (except for the stadium) you could find a nearby vehicle and open up a hidden mission. And speaking of Salvatore Leon’s house, nothing in IV can compare the stark beauty of his mansion silhouetted against the sea, with a vast bleak cliff behind it. In fact, you could pretty much walk around Liberty City and tell where there was going to be some fun down the line. The mansion, with its gated access, Middle Park, the dam, the airport, Phil’s place, etc, etc. Since there is so much detail in IV’s Liberty City, you can no longer do that with any accuracy. This is why it’s so annoying that many of the places that DO stick out turn out to have no point whatsoever. For being so goddamned huge, the new Liberty City is pretty bland. There are tons of alleys and nooks and crannies that exist only to be alleys and nooks and crannies. Overflowing with atmosphere, to be sure, but with no reason to exist outside of atmosphere.
And I know that atmosphere is necessary. I really do. But we’re playing a video game here. Maybe they could have chopped Liberty City down to about half its size and added a few more missions or a few more characters or a few more SOMETHING and given us something more to work for. It’s easy as hell to get 100% Completion in IV. I really think it’s too bad they’re dumbing down the GTA formula to make it more accessible to the general audience.
And it almost – almost – seems like the developers new they were making something with more space than they knew what to do with. In fact it seems like they give you every opportunity to AVOID becoming familiar with Liberty City. Except for the Flying Rats (and those random strangers you meet), you are given few incentives to go out and explore. Pretty much everything is either handed to you via the cell phone, the taxi trip skip option, or removed already. Those mini-vehicle missions I’ve talked about? They’re gone. There are just too many cars parked in Liberty City for them to have a select few trigger a mission. Same for the fire truck and ambulance mission. All gone. At least the ambulance stills gives you the bit o’ health.
And the cell phone. I hate the cell phone more than I hated the cell phone in Dead Rising. It slows you down, you can’t fire a weapon, and you lose your hand break while driving. Plus the people will not leave you the hell alone! And – again – it practically GIVES you everything else in the game – at the least the stuff that hasn’t been removed. While Vigilante is still fairly fun, the taxi mission is a joke (and useless; it’s not counted toward 100%), and when you start the Vehicle Collection, they POINT YOU to the car you want to collect. Where’s the random sense of discovery? A beating heart inside the Statue of Happiness isn’t enough.
The problem is that the developers seem to think we want more realism. Quick – show of hands. Who here plays GTA hoping for an authentic criminal experience involving real people going through difficult times and having to make tough choices in a gritty World Gone Mad? Now who here plays GTA for the goofy, over-the-top missions, ridiculous characters, and snarky satire? It seems that even though IV has made amazing leaps forward in the two things that it desperately needed to improve on – visuals and combat – it’s taken a step back with everything else.
For example, I now hate riding motorcycles. They’re clumsy, dangerous, and they are rarely worth the risk of collision and death that goes with such a tremendous sense of speed. And I never thought Rockstar would find a hidden package collection more annoying than that damned graffiti you had to spray paint in Los Santos, but congratulations are due – I hated shooting the Flying Rats more than anything. Who at Rockstar thought it would be fun to shoot a bird, drive around for a minute or so until the resulting wanted rating went away, shoot another bird, wash, rinse, repeat, and then not really get anything cool for it? I don’t even remember the reward. Wasn’t it the Hunter? That’s not enough! There were TWO HUNDRED of those fucking things! And thanks to their newfound hard-on for a sense of reality, there was never a single driving-intensive mission as much fun as chasing a van dropping porn mags that would add a second to your time limit, or a relay race when you had to be the first to cross the majority of fifteen randomly-generated tags. Remember those missions? Remember using a fire truck to break open a full-body cast?
And how the hell am I supposed to cause statewide destruction when I can only carry 8 rounds in my grenade launcher and there aren’t any tanks? And Star Junction! Isn’t that place incredible? SOMETHING should have happened there. Something big. All this talk about Liberty City’s new sense of verticality means nothing when there’s no reason to go up there. I think maybe two or three missions involved going to the roof of a skyscraper, and that was just to play sniper. Hell, there could have been an entire other world up there. Remember the mission in VC where you had to take a motorcycle and drive around the roofs of the downtown area? Remember the first jump, which had you crash through a windowpane and land in the hole of that skyscraper? Wasn’t that fucking awesome? Now why the hell aren’t there any missions like that in IV? And why is this the first 3-D GTA in history without a stadium?
I’m going to let you in on a little secret. There are some days that I find myself ALMOST wishing we could go back the old rules. The early GTAs were simple. If you fell in the water, you died. You could drive into a Pay-N-Spray with four cop cars right on your tail, but when you emerged with a fresh coat of paint, they were none the wiser. Sure, any reasonable REAL human being could climb that wall, but if Claude or Tommy came across one they’d have to find a vehicle nearby to jump on first. Traditional hidden packages. Bring back the emergency vehicle import/export mission from III. SA had almost twice as many emergency vehicles, but no one thought that would be fun. And speaking of which, I don’t care how simple they are, when I climb into an emergency vehicle there had goddamned well better be a fire to put out, injured people to rescue, criminals to kill, or fares to find. And get rid of Girlfriends. (Except for Katie from San Fierro. She was hot.)
See, the rules have gotten too complex. It was the quirks that made GTA so much fun, and so damned frustrating. When the internal logic of the game caused something unbelievably random and stupid to happen, then you had witnessed a true GTA Moment. Somehow GTA III, VC, and SA still managed to be more creative than IV. I don’t know what’s next for the guys at Rockstar, but I can say this: if, when I’m finished with the main story missions, I find myself with little desire to return to the game to cause carnage or try out some stupid stunt or just hang out, something’s wrong. You’ve lost track of what’s important.
Of course, that’s just my opinion. I could be wrong.
"The children are right to laugh at you."
Stephentchel on
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Posts
And you can handbrake while on the cellphone with RB.
Ugh. No. NO.
I actually fall into the first category - though I'm not looking for an "authentic criminal experience," per se, GTA is becoming an honest-to-goodness criminal drama these days, and I for one LIKE that. As a matter of fact, a lot of the things you named as being your favorite parts of the old games were the things that tended to turn me off to the series. Once I'd finished the story I didn't particularly want to spend my time searching for 500 tiny hidden items hidden randomly over an absolutely gigantic map. That doesn't seem like fun to me at all. The sense of humor is definitely a great part of GTA, but I think they showed with this entry that they can work can in a lot of cool dramatic/realistic types of things without having to sacrifice that satire angle. I like changes that they made. It was by no means a flawless game, but I think it's mostly a step in the right direction. I loved Niko's storyline. It was absolutely brilliant.
Also-
1. There is a second handbrake...RB. It's specifically there for driving while using the cell phone.
2. With Stevie's missions, you would prefer what?
"Hey Niko, I saw a blue Infernus that I liked the other day. Go get it for me."
That would be unnecessarily frustrating. I feel that there is still a good bit of exploration needed to find most of the vehicles, although a few were really easy. It's not like they pinpoint them, you get the area of the city it's in, and a picture of where it is. Not too challenging, but it's still not a handout.
In all seriousness though, motorcycles are so awesome. Your gripes seem both elaborate and nonsensical.
Sometimes people mix up the new thread button with the new post one. It's cool man.
Final Fantasy XI -> Carbuncle - Samash
NintendoID: Nailbunny 3DS: 3909-8796-4685
Though that goes with the added realism. Him complaining about that is like complaining about getting shot the fuck up when you don't use cover.
Cars are more dangerous in IV, too: you crash hard enough and, since Niko doesn't wear seatbelts, you go flying out the windshield.
man, a GTA with airbags would make for some cool crashes.