[QUOTE="subrosian"] Well... I agree in spirit, but you've failed on your research. GTA I & II were very different games, they were played from the overhead perspective, and were a bit more like Syndicate Wars in terms of balancing the gangs, et cetera. GTA III was the revolution for the series - taking it into the 3D FPS third-person "chase cam" view instead of overhead dramatically improved the gameplay, and just made the series more fun.
The problem with GTA IV is the same problem that plagued Vice City and San Andreas - it's the same game. If you enjoyed the "fetch", "eliminate", and "escort" quests - welcome to more of the same. For most people (myself included) the fun of the game was getting better weapons and going on sprees - the actual game itself is pretty shoddy. When you consider that Crackdown made the killing spree more fun than the limited "real person" GTA did, or that Oblivion let the hardcore "creative killer" go a lot further - well, there's not a lot left for GTA IV to do.
To set itself apart, GTA IV is going to have to do what GTA III, VC, and SA failed to do - stand more on storytelling, cinematics, and character development. Personally, I'm not so sure Rockstar can do that - I have never cared for anyone in their games beyond being another source of guns and ammo. I'm willing to give them teh benefit of the doubt, the hope that they can give this the intrigue that the source material (mafia movies) had based on strong characters, or this one is a pass.
11Marcel
Whoa, wait up. Rockstar already promised a great deal of change in GTA 4. As long as we haven't seen gameplay footage of it, we're not the ones to judge. A few changes doesn't mask the fact that it is, at heart, the same game we've been playing since GTA III. We're on the sixth game in the modern GTA line (3 on PS2 / Xbox, 2 on PSP) and the changes have only been incremental. Improving the graphics and changing "italian" to "black" to "russian" doesn't make a great difference to me. Rockstar promises me a living, breathing New York to act like a terrorist in - wonderful - but that's the same thing other sandbox games have been doing since then. Replace the italian mobster character with "superhero", "drug lord", or "black dude" and replace "New York" with "city / fantasy realm of your choice" and you have the genre down. The mass appeal of the game is running around like a lunatic, but I'm kinda done with that. It's like being drunk with friends "oh man, we should do this every friday, *hic* this is awesome!" - then you don't do it again for a year because you felt like crap the next day, and it's actually kinda lame / boring. Yeah, there are a few diehard frat boys who, I'm sure, would do that until the day they die - me? Not so much.
The sign of a good developer is knowing when to change. Bungie isn't making Halo 4 - they're making Halo Wars. Why? Pumping out Halo FPS after Halo FPS results in increasingly suckier products, no matter how talented they are at it. I've seen so much "non-linear free-roaming living-breathing-world" that I'm starting to crave a turn-based, linear game. After all - are we really fooled anymore? Sandbox is a nice term for "place with AI controlled characters who will all start to feel the same where you perform marginally interesting fetch quests".
The TC is right, GTA IV can't be what GTA III was, simply because we've already played GTA III - and the dozens of clones, since then.
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