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GOURANGA! Forums > General > Off Topic > Why do we need new GTA's now?
Post 1 | New
Posted February 8th, 2007
2na
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So sandbox is it?s own genre now, any developer can churn out a large city game were you run around and shoot at people.  Hey it?s great fun, but it?s like playing a arcade racer, they are a dime a dozen.

I?m sure Rockstar can still be innovative and put out more quality side projects (that I end up enjoying more then 3D GTA games) - The Warriors / Bully / Manhunt / Midnight Club.  But do we really still need to bang on about the next GTA installment?

Anyone? Am I the only one who is getting bored of the genre?

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Post 2 | New
Posted February 8th, 2007
Lobster Martin
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You're right, the sandbox city thing has been done, and I find myself not really looking forward to the next GTA in the same way as I have done previously.

For example, in the lead up to GTA3, I was just so hyped up - after all, it had never really been done before. An open-ended crime game, with 3d graphics.

However, there are lots of these games out now (although none of them are as good as the GTA games), and we need something new. The genre is kind of boring - drive and shoot. That's all it is really.

San Andreas was phenomenally good I thought, because it added enough to the game (albeit very small aspects) but they added up and the game was great. Largely it was down to a few good new features, slightly more interactive, absolutely massive (and detailed) world.

I'm not sure where you go from San Andreas. Obviously you improve the graphics, which is always nice. But what else...

I think there are ways to make a new GTA better. They became a bit cartoony. I think more realism, not just better graphics but improvements in things like physics.

You don't really get much joy from the actual driving aspect. Some cars are faster, handle differently etc but it's not exactly like playing a driving simulation.

I'm not sure what else to add to the genre.

I feel that more RPG aspects *COULD* work. Have you ever played Oblivion? It's not everyone's cup of tea and it's a bit too RPG for your casual gamer, but there are elements that just make it really good, like AI, and the fact that every one in the game is an actual person, not a randomly generated person that appears. If you start killing people, there are only so many you can kill before there ARE no more. Shops empty, and you become infamous.

Cooperative play (not deathmatch, that's shit). Story-drive cooperative play, over the net. That would be a massive addition IMO.
Post 3 | New
Posted February 8th, 2007
Will
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Oblivion was fun. I killed an entire town. But some people you couldn't kill.

In STALKER, you can just kill anyone and the game story adjusts. It's the game I am looking most forward too coming out.

GTA4. What to do. It is a big question, but I hope R* have some good ideas. They've done top down. They've done 3D pretty much as far as it can. I have no real big ideas, but one thing I *do* want is them putting back in the top down view option. GTA3 was great fun, going into top down mode and just going on a mssive crime spree. In 3D! At last cars could be rolled. At last, a decent perspective for a top down GTA. Why did they take it out?!

They could I guess do something more with the missions. Instead of all the "You go from point A to B, deliver/kill/blow up/ steal object C" that made up most missions, we could go for something deeper - maybe even being able to continue of you fuck it up, but this has consequences furthur on? Like if you are doing a Bank Heist, and you don't get a Van, then you just have to run and gun in instead of being stealthy. Don't get any guns, you MUST be stealthy, or no bank heist will happen.

Maybe as Thresh said, some RPG-esque elements. Like in SA, the gym/fat etc stuff. Also the ability say, to pull off random side-quest bank jobs when you like, say you need some cash, get a gang, go rob a bank. You can do these say, with mission style criteria. Stealth? Steal a bank truck and uniforms. To get them, you could covertly take them, kill someone and take them, and so on. Or just run 'n gun it, but get massive police attention.

And I hope to god they improve the AI.

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Post 4 | New
Posted February 8th, 2007
Azz
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I'd like to see a proper learning environment. Like Will says, something reactive to the player. So simple example, you steal lots of cars near where you live. Crime rate goes up, property values tumble, you turn your neighbourhood into a ghetto. You fire a few shots then for the next few days there is an increased police presence.

Learning of skills would be nice too. Sort of like learning to steal cars in Mafia, but more advanced. The martial arts training in SA didn't seem to have any effect on your fighting ability (correct me if I'm wrong). And granted I'm not target audience (ie American), but if you gave me an automatic rifle or a missile launcher I wouldn't really know how to use it. Or how to drive a tank. Or fly a figher jet ffs. In SA you're supposed to be this down to earth local hoodlum type, and suddenly you're James Bonding it around in a jet pack?

I suppose it's taking the eating = fat idea that was on the periphery in SA and making it more the main thing. If you had complete control over your environment you could easily build missions around that. Different mission paths would be nice, in a Fahrenheit style. You play the entire game as a homicidal maniac you end up in scarface style bloodbath, you play it as a high rolling suave criminal you get rich, or whatever.

Too much time in the GTA games feels like aimless wandering. If every action was tied in, then it'd work better. No more ineffectual running around if you can't be chuffed having the 15th go at that bloody mission you keep failing. There should be other routes of progression. Personalised experiences, adaptive techniques, constructivism and non-diadactic approaches. Er, no wait that last one might be more about my job.

But yeah. A game with balls, not just a ballsy idea. Something that if you want to play again, you don't end up redoing the missions from the start, you just go and change your environment and find new things to do. And no bloody percentage complete, for some reason that really narks me off.

End of rant.

Oh and shouldn't this be in the GTA board? For once we have an on topic post and it's in here? bah

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Post 5 | New
Posted February 8th, 2007
Maindrian
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Azz wrote:
And no bloody percentage complete, for some reason that really narks me off.


Cor, I thought that was just my little personal bug. GTA is perhaps a lesser offender, but I hate it when a game tells you how much further you have to go. Bully did that. Every time you'd go to save, it'd come up with a percentage in your fucking save file. I don't want to know how much of the game there is left, thanks.

I look forward to GTA4 with an open mind. I don't think it'll be all that. I just want it to be good fun to mess about and so on. Touge had some great ideas that I'll leave him to discuss. And no, they didn't involve being able to rape women.

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Post 6 | New
Posted February 8th, 2007
Mad::Matt
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Its been said many a time before, but more realism, and in these topics I do tend to bang on about it, and interation, but shit, more realism and interaction!

Now I'm gonna have to do these in bullet points, if I can work them out, and some may come back to other points further down the list, but thats just my thoughts tumbling out.

Where are the bullet points?

Nyeh..

 - Different damage maps. Its all very fun smashing up cars, but each car of that model smashes the same, few different damage maps (do they exist?) would be fun, different dent styles etc.

 - Still with damage, hanging stuff. Wings, boot lids and bonnets for example are not held at just one point, wings have three or four bolts, you smash something and a few bolts are ripped out, then the wing (for example) should hang off, scrape on the floor and stuff.

 - Properly crushable cars, if I roll a car, I want the roof to cave in, the chassis to bend and stuff, similarly same with monster truck rampages or the tank.

 - Talking of tanks... tracks!!

 - Visible bullet holes in cars, enviroment.

 - More chances for arsing about, sure the plots all good, but I (very sad this) take great pleasure from doing random personal quests, if anyone remembers my other post about things for GTA, I mentioned about tying ropes to fence panels and then to the back of NPC cars and being able to hold on and going car-fence skitching.
Random yes, but hours of fun. I'm sad like that.
More physics like that, ability to do stuff like that, mindless things that keep people amused for hours (or me at least, I have great fun putting motorbikes in the back of pick-ups in Just Cause and driving around)

 - Ability to weld stuff. Be hard to do, but welding cars together? Yes please. Could even fashion it into Transfender like places, bolt/weld/nail stuff to stuff/cars. Take an estate car and chop out the back, redneck pick-up truck.

Rambling now...

 - Destructable enviroments. Self explanitory.  Dig it up too.

You get the gist of the stuff I would want, and what would make the game  more appealing. Pointless stuff really.

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Post 7 | New
Posted February 9th, 2007
2na
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I really didn?t think much of SA, and I wanted to like it so much, I wanted a huge landscape, I wanted the 90?s and I wanted customable cars, but everything was just pulled off so piss poor.

The graphics were OK, but so often you would find yourself in a big empty space with nothing but a green grass sprite repeated for as far as you can see (which was not the horizon so it had mad popup)

The car customizing was OK but the models were so weak, if you can pull it off so slick in Midnight Club 3 why not in your flagship game?  Fitting 8 different generic wheels and flat color paint to a low polly GT40 clone, mmm.

I really don?t know what you?re all on about with the whole RPG thing, I don?t see how going up to a fast food place and choosing what you want to eat was any different from GTA: Vice City?s fast food places (only in SA you might have to click enter a few more times)

The side missions were all dick, while playing the main story I was always bugged by my mobile phone, and ofcouse whoever was on the phone was on the other side of the map which was always a boring and bug filled drive.  Plus I was doing the same fucking missions from Vice City, only with black people.

I really liked Oblivion, but any ?gansta? game can not be a RPG, comon.

For GTA to evolve, I really think they need to move the game out of America, I have had enough, I want English, because when they swear it?s not offensive just hilarity and everyone loves the british, Lock Stock, Snatch, Irish car bombings, football hooligans, all of my favorite things!

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Post 8 | New
Posted February 9th, 2007
That Shit Touge
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Post 9 | New
Posted February 9th, 2007
Lobster Martin
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2na wrote:
I really didn?t think much of SA, and I wanted to like it so much, I wanted a huge landscape, I wanted the 90?s and I wanted customable cars, but everything was just pulled off so piss poor.

The graphics were OK, but so often you would find yourself in a big empty space with nothing but a green grass sprite repeated for as far as you can see (which was not the horizon so it had mad popup)

The car customizing was OK but the models were so weak, if you can pull it off so slick in Midnight Club 3 why not in your flagship game?  Fitting 8 different generic wheels and flat color paint to a low polly GT40 clone, mmm.

I really don?t know what you?re all on about with the whole RPG thing, I don?t see how going up to a fast food place and choosing what you want to eat was any different from GTA: Vice City?s fast food places (only in SA you might have to click enter a few more times)

The side missions were all dick, while playing the main story I was always bugged by my mobile phone, and ofcouse whoever was on the phone was on the other side of the map which was always a boring and bug filled drive.  Plus I was doing the same fucking missions from Vice City, only with black people.

I really liked Oblivion, but any ?gansta? game can not be a RPG, comon.

For GTA to evolve, I really think they need to move the game out of America, I have had enough, I want English, because when they swear it?s not offensive just hilarity and everyone loves the british, Lock Stock, Snatch, Irish car bombings, football hooligans, all of my favorite things!


Hmm. When talking about RPG elements, I really meant the things like the gun skills (which were good IMO, and actually made a difference), and lesser so the things like driving skill, how long you can sprint, etc. Buying food was pointless. But there could be other rpg elements as well, like customised weapons or something, or how about special cars (cars are all worthless in GTA games as once they blow, they're gone - if there was some way to restore a car automatically and easily, perhaps by just leaving it and it goes back to your hideout [as if it were towed and repaired whilst you were away or some such bullshit - impossible to justify tbh but would add 'worth' to the cars which are, atm, worthless]). Excuse the bracketing.

The inventory is pretty shit in GTA, if you could steal stuff from people you kill, and sell it, obviously not on the scale of an RPG, but if you kill someone you could at least steal some jewellery or whatever to sell. Who knows. It's a possibility anyway, if done properly. More stuff to STEAL, after all it's a crime sim.

I agree about moving the game out of America. I wouldn't want it in England though, to be honest. Getaway was alrite, but I've had enough of that shit. Some European country would be alright though, but failing that America it has to be.
Post 10 | New
Posted February 9th, 2007
Maindrian
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Actually, if I had one surefire wish, it would be that they didn't soften the lead character next time around. I mean, for gods sake, CJ was almost cuddly. What I mean is, don't give the lead any motivation other than just the fact that he's/she's a complete shit, intent on blagging as much as possible, and to hell with anyone who gets in the way, man, woman or child.

On the theme of RPG like elements, perhaps you could choose to play as a different class of criminal. The typical mafia heavy, the sexy ninja cat burgler lady, the whacked out psychopath, or maybe even the big fat shady bastard. Bring back Bubba!

And sure, beef the physics of the cars up, fine, make them smash really nice and all that bollocks if you like, but for christ sake, lets just have them as a useful way of getting from A to B or murdering the shit out of someone, rather than putting more of that modding bollocks into it.

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Post 11 | New
Posted February 9th, 2007
Azz
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I actually quite liked the idea of car modding in the game, but it wasn't really flexible enough. Performance effecting mods would be nice, ie big wing increases grip n so on. Either way it doesn't really matter until they fix what thresh was talking about. Cars in the gta games are just tools, so you want to get over there you just nick a car, drive over, dump the car. Take a different one to get back. Which is fine, but it'd be nice if there was more intrinsic value attached to the cars. So you could keep them. Perhaps in a monster GT4 style garage. Or a shed, covered in dust.

One thing that needs fixing, and has needed fixing since GTA3, is the persistence of environment. Or more accurately the lack of it. Aargh there's a group of gang members over there who are going to shoot me. But if I spin round three times they disappear. Few. Oooh there's a car I need for te docks mission, no can't keep up, I'll cut it off through this alley. Bollocks. And so on.

I still think a proper living breathing environment would be tasty. How about actual people doing actual jobs. So you stalk some women from her house in the morning, she gets the bus to work, then at 5pm goes home. They could do some really cool rockstar humour with that. Follow the bloke from his family home and spy through he window as he boinks his mistress. Or his boy toy. Whatever.

Realism isn't the be all and end all for me, I'm not that bothered how bits fall off cars and so on. But it has to be realistic. Suspension of disbelief can cover things like that, you KNOW it's not a real car and make allowances. But shallow people, altering environments and a general lack of solidity to the world ruins the whole effect for me. I want to feel like I'm part of a city, one I can impact as I mentioned before, but one which will quite happily go on without me.

Anyone read/seen the Langoliers? Think it's a stephen king. About a group of people who get stuck in yesterday. Anyway, that's how the GTA worlds make me feel. Like as soon as I go around a corner it stops existing, and when I go back it's an entirely different world, pretending to be the same one. I half expecting to see the characters running into position from a fag break, Truman Show style. I know the world can't physically go on without you, it'd murder any pc, but it has to feel like it. So at 5.34pm I round a corner it's not just a random selection of 15 people. It's Ped 5467 who is headed home from the fast food store where he serves chicken. Ped 324663 who is planning to mug some little old lady. Ped 3456 who is actually stalking me, but trying to look nonchalant.

I want to feel like I'm part of the world damnit. Perhaps it'd be easier just to leave he house? bah

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Post 12 | New
Posted February 10th, 2007
Will
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I'd agree with what Azz said there. A proper functioning world would be great.

To see how this would work out, we should all watch STALKER when it comes out - this should be the first game with a proper, working, independant world which you can impact upon.

It'll either be ace, or pants. I know what you mean - you feel like hte langolier's world. (The film was a bit pants, but rather good - alot better than the film of Christine.) it does feel detached and very "unreal". It is obvious it is a game. With terrible AI and awful bugs.

I thought GTA3 was buggy. Vice City fixed alot. How the hell did San Andreas end up so bad?! Same bloody engine!

R* can do alot with GTA4 now we aren't using the PS2 now. The power of the PS3 and PC opens up whole new areas to go to. Working, living, game world. Or at least one we can connect to better, that feels more real. Even a world like Oblivions that partially is functioning, where people don't exist in shops 24/7, they go home and to bed. Where you can mug all thier stuff.

And of course, I hope they bug test this one better, so I don't die because  a police car falls out the sky onto my head as I go to save the game.

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Post 13 | New
Posted February 10th, 2007
Lobster Martin
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Regarding stalker being the first game with a proper working independent world, I feel that's already been done.

Most recently (and best IMO) by Oblivion, where it IS as Azz describes - there's ped 2563 who is on his way to such and such a place, or ped 9874 who just locked up his shop and goes for a stroll before heading home.

Why this can't be implemented in a GTA game, I don't know. Oblivion has a very big game world, nothing like the size of San An (although it's hard to compare as travelling in San An is very fast, as opposed to running or on a horse in Oblivion), but still big.

It should be possible, especially on a newer platform. The PS3 for one has a fuck load of parallel CPU processing power. It has to be done. As Azz said, my BIGGEST disappointment of GTA3 (and the lack of a fix in subsequent games) was the 'turn your back and you're fucked' problem, with people and cars just appearing. Really shit. Really really shit. Definitely one of the poorest aspects of the game.

In GTA games, every person and every car is just like a grain of salt. They spawn, pretty much in front of you. It's like a death match. It's complete bollocks.

You can't have the kind of fun you want from that. You don't feel like anything has happened when you've run someone over. You might dent your car, but that's all it'll really mean to you.

I'm going to make another comparison to Oblivion (because I've been playing it recently at it's a refreshingly good sandbox game) - when you kill someone in that game, you genuinely feel like you've done something 'wrong' in a sense, or if not wrong, something 'big'. You'll also get people ganging up on you, and you have to run, you can't always just fight everyone.

I think in a sense that's another problem with GTA. It's too easy, and there's no real challenge. I suppose there's no way to fix that though, since guns are involved - if you shoot someone, they die. And nobody likes a game where you die after being shot twice.

A feature (did someone mention this?) that would improve the interactivity with the game world would be having your actions affect an area. So if you commit a lot of crime in an area, it could have a lot more police and such activity (a pipe dream would be things like murder investigations but that's a bit ambitious). On the flip side, lots of crime and killing police and citizens could turn an area into a bit of a ghost town, cordoned off by the military and just with empty streets with burnt out cars from riots and crime and shit. Fuck knows, I'm aware how hard this would be to pull off, but it wouldn't be impossible.

I've started rambling. I think we're all in agreement, and we all know what we want from GTA (which I suspect is what we've always wanted, ever since GTA1) - and that's a realistic, persistent game world, which reacts to your actions. Everything else is gravy.
Post 14 | New
Posted February 10th, 2007
That Shit Touge
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What I would like is for the next GTA to just not have that shitty limitation on how many different models of car are on screen at once. So you spend ages looking for one particular car, get it, then every other car turns into one.

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Post 15 | New
Posted February 10th, 2007
Inky
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*grabs Saints Row*

...

*crosses out title, adds GTA IV with big white marker*

Ya know, I think if GTA looks/plays like Saints Row (but with the usual Rockstar attitude) then we'd have a seriously nice game. Oooooh oh oh, but of course with a fucking storyline! Yeah that's right, I'm talking to you Saints Row - fucker, what a god awful storyline and acting. SanAn's was pretty shit too, but still a lot better.

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Post 16 | New
Posted February 10th, 2007. Updated February 10th, 2007
Cerbera
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GTASA is such a big game, it's easy to forget how much of this stuff was in it. It had a lot less "turn your back and it's gone" than GTAVC or GTA3. But yes, the world stops persisting when you get ~300 metres from it.

GTASA did have stalking, in a way. That crazy bitch Millie Perkins who lives in North Las Venturas and becomes on of your girlfriends. You meet her while staking out Caligula's Casino whilst planning a bank heist. (Along with intimidating rival gang members by tying them to your car and charging around the city doing handbrake turns on the freeway, aquiring a bank van and suchlike.)

But anyway, you follow her home and find she messes around with a guy in a gimp suit. So you get yourself one at a sex shop and go into the fitting rooms to slip it on. Head back and she lets you in. You're a big hit with her, so she invites you back and it all gets a bit "The Sims" for a while. Take her to restaurants, go bogey at the discoth?que, buy her romantic gifts like flowers and double-ended dildos. Eventually she gives you the key to access the bank and you're good to go.

If you treat her badly on a date, you lose progress with her. So your relationship with the girlfriends is a kind-of persistent world feature.

But this is just one little part of one mission. San Andreas was bloody amazing with this stuff compared with the earlier games. And it kept things funny.


I can see GTA4 being online in a big way. The multiplayer for Liberty City Stories and Vice City Stories seems like a refresher course for their developers, cutting their teeth. I imagine GTA4 will mix single-player with multiplayer, so you can gain stats and cars at your own pace then hook up with your buddies online as and when.

I doubt it'll go fully MMORPG. You can't snychronise enough stuff to be as action-packed as GTA, given current broadband technology. That's why MMORPGs tend to be medieval technology with procedural gameplay: to bring the pace down. That would ruin GTA. Even in GTA2, any more than 4 people and you can still get desynchronised with modern connections.

I can see GTA4's online world as using a "tame world" for MMORPG socialising. Buildings would represent servers and you could enter their lobby to find out what the game being played was, how many people were in it, what gangs were represented, etc. If you carried on into the building, you'd enter the "action world" for that particular game with those participants.

Each "action world" could be one district of a much larger city city, something like GTA2's multiplayer-specific levels. Gang wars and the various game modes in the LCS/VCS games would likely feature. Street racing and car modding could also feature. Maybe they'd even get over Hot Coffee and support real game modding, like Unreal Tournament. The game automatically downloads any mods you don't have when you enter an "action world" which needs them.

Stunt challenges (Tony Hawks style, but with vehicles), aeroplane racing, even full-blown war games with tanks and jets could be done. By using seperate "action worlds", you won't have some 13 year old in a Hunter fucking up your street race.

The classic Assault/Capture the Base style of FPS games could be reinvented as bank heists.  The crooks are few in number by well armed, playing against loads of cops who are lightly armed. The cops could be AI (in which case you'd add SWAT and FBI for a challenge) or they could be human players and you cycle between roles with each game.


The "tame world" could also feature the GTASA mini-games, like pool and gambling. "Beat the Cock" triathlons and stuff. You could trade things from your single-player gaming (remember GTASA's burglary side-missions?). You could go to supermarket carparks and show off with your mates.

The "tame world" could be non-lethal, so there's no weapons and you survive being hit by cars. Or you could have a police officer gang who keeps law and order, but whose weapons only damage players who are causing damage to other players. The server could keep a count of the damage caused by each rogue player and grant police officers more powerful weapons to deal with them as required.

A big enough group of lamers could cause a full-blown riot! So the cops would go back to HQ and kit themselves out with military hardware to take on any "tame world" spawnkillers. Humans who were part of gangs could join the police force temporarily when times got bad.


I think the possibilities of rich online play are what will make GTA4 as trailblazing as previous editions were in their time. I expect it will also feature stellar single player stuff as well. The biggest mistake they could make is having it console-only.

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Post 17 | New
Posted February 10th, 2007
Fragdieb2
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To be honest, I'm not really sure if I'd like a GTA with even more freedom than SA had. The thing I liked about the recent GTA versions (and the part I felt was missing in GTA2) was that they had an actual plot while still offering a pretty big amount of freedom. Oblivion for a comparison offers a far better world implementation with persistence and many little details, but when I played it, I always felt like "ok, another cool feature, but where's the story? Oblivion seemed to simulate not only the intersting aspects of a world, but also all the boring and nasty stuff, which is on one hand a good attempt at building a persistent world simulator, but on the other hand not really the thing I want a game to be. I stopped playing Oblivion because after 5 hours of walking around and doing random stuff, I hadn't found anything that seemed relevant to me. The thing I fear is that too much freedom, a 100% persistent world and many RPG elements will make the game pretty boring to play or distract way too much from the plot for my liking.

The other question I'm always thinking about is how much realism a game and especially GTA should have. The thing I fear is that too much realism will turn it into what conservative politicians already claim it is - a simulator for senseless killing frenzies, mayhem and an especially good training for psychopathic youth to turn them into monsters. I don't want to say that R* shouldn't add more realism to shut those guys up, but I think when they overdo it with realism, they won't keep all the violence in GTA ironical or at least comical, it will just get plain disgusting.

Another thing I hope R* can reintroduce is the thing SA lost: style. The big thing that Vice CIty had and SA lacked was a stylish main character in a really dense atmosphere. Vice City seemed to be made out of one piece to me, whereas San Andreas felt like being just random bits and pieces sometimes., and compared to the smart and stylish mafiosi Tommy, CJ seems like a dumb thug with the IQ of a piece of bread.

2na wrote:
Anyone? Am I the only one who is getting bored of the genre?

No, you aren't the only one. I'm getting more and more bored of those sandbox games as well. When the first GTA came out, it was (although being pretty average considering the technical aspects) a revolution of the whole gaming scene, with freedom as THE big innovation. GTA3 managed the same again, bringing this freedom to 3D for the first time. But now, as every publisher chucks out half a dozen pretty bad sandbox style games every year, it's nothing new anymore, they all feel pretty much the same, mostly feature the same main activities (walking around, driving around, flying around, riding a horse around, fighting/shooting etc). I think to make GTA IV the really big thing, they have to introduce something new and radical again, otherwise, it will just be a sandbox game with a bigger name on the box than it's identical twins on the shelf left and right to it. Unfortunately, I've got no clue what this innovation could be, but definitely not MMO, we've already got Second Life.

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Post 18 | New
Posted February 10th, 2007
Lobster Martin
hi

  • Joined: Feb '03
Good points, however I have to add that Oblivion does have a story. It's just very easy to get bogged down with what is essentially 'side missions'.

In fact, Oblivion has a good story system in my opinion.

The main story, is that the emperor of the land or whatever is murdered, and you have to help restore the new emperor (I've no idea what happens after this as I've not played it). This is equivalent to the main branch of missions in a GTA game.

Under that you have sub stories, which I suppose are things like the stories involved in the different guilds, which I believe are quite big storylines but I could be wrong; either way I wouldn't consider them side missions. They are similar to GTA's missions which are off the main story, but I think they're much longer, and there are many more of them. They're storylines in themselves.

Under that you have sub sub stories (these are what I would equate to GTA's off-the-main-plot missions), examples of which are speaking to some random guy in the street and doing some errand for him or investigating something. These seem pretty limitless to me. They are a bit random and serve the purpose of giving you something else to do if you don't want to follow a big storyline. I'd say this fits in with the boring/nasty stuff you mentioned?

I'd say the system in Oblivion is quite a lot better than (although perhaps inspired by?) the GTA games. It's just approached differently, and the storylines are much 'wider', with many more missions I believe.
Post 19 | New
Posted February 10th, 2007
Fragdieb2
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Maybe the storyline was too wide for me then, or the whole game was too slow for me, I like games really fast paced. Right now I'm playing ?bersoldier, and I can't really figure out why. From a logical point of view, it's a pretty average Return To Castle Wolfenstein ripoff with an even cheaper story, and absolutely linear gameplay, the only freedom you've got is which gun to chose. I think the thing that really makes me play it is that the missions are absolutely merciless, leaving you absolutely no time to rest, there's always an enemy coming through a window, hiding in a dark corner or coming from the next room because he heard the shooting, and it's pretty hard too, 2 direct hits from a sniper and you're gone. I think that's the thing I really missed in Oblivion, total exhaustion by too much action in 5 minutes, instead of total boredom by walking an hour to the next quest.

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Post 20 | New
Posted February 10th, 2007
Azz
the barbarian. grrr

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Surely the open plan real world thing we're all talking about doesn't have to be at the expense of a proper story line? I think it could make it much more interesting and vivid personally.

I mean they tried it with a few of the missions across the series, go here at 9pm because she'll be back from work or whatever. But a proper link. For example the kinky bint Cerb was on about. You go to her house, inevitably she's not there. But if you went to where she works, or the supermarket or the sex shop or whatever you'd be able to find her. Because she was real, and did other things when you weren't looking. The whole arbitrary nature of san andreas pissed me off really.

But yeah, storyline. The only game I've played to completion since the first GTA game (oh and GTA London) was Mafia. Gorgeous environments and whilst the world was paper thin, the story was strong enough to make you feel like part of it. However you never went off and did other things for the sake of it, since it was dull as dog shit. But a living world, with that strength of writing would be fantastic.

Personally I'm not after any huge technical revolutions. If they made the next gta mmo I probably wouldn't buy it, since you know, most people online are twats. I don't especially hanker for realsim of physics or amazing graphics that make me shit myself. I just want a game that makes me think "fuck me, where did the last three hours go?". Mafia did that. So did GTA. None of the 3d gta games have, simply because you'd complete a mission, then go have a cup of tea. Since anything you did outside the missions was essentially ineffectual, it soon became boring.

I really hope Rock* nail the next one. I think there's still room for one seriously kick arse game in this series and it'd be a shame to go out on a downer. Of course the games journalists will wet themselves whatever rockstar do, since it's cool to be contraversial, but I hope they really nail the bugger to the wall.

Oh and it'd better come out on pc, cos I'm not buying another console just for this series.

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