Grand Theft Auto IV, developed by Rockstar North and published by Rockstar Games

In our last, egregiously truncated Vs. Mode exchange on the PlayStation Portable game Patapon, the Level Up staff, our regular opponent Stephen Totilo and our commenters got into a spirited debate about the nature of the grind in videogames (click here to see for yourself, as it's well worth reading). This week, we're tackling Rockstar North and Rockstar Games' Grand Theft Auto IV, in a back and forth discussion that will also be featured on Totilo's blog Multiplayer. Totilo kicks off the debate by singling out his favorite moment in the game--a long drive with a woman who ought to go, go, go to rehab--before examining whether Rockstar North may have taken a wrong turn with this newer, more stately GTA. For our part, we defend the developer's refusal to be all things to all people with GTA IV and suggest that Rockstar North's planned downloadable content might be the best vehicle for delivering the wilder ride that a number of GTA fans are still looking for. Enjoy.

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Date: June 2, 2008
To: N'Gai Croal
Fr: Stephen Totilo
Re: The Addict And The Animal

N'Gai,

In my favorite mission of Grand Theft Auto IV, Niko Bellic doesn't kill anyone. He's offered sex, but he doesn't give in.

He's just a chauffeur, essentially. And he makes decision I don't think I'd make in a moment in which the game doesn't give me a choice--not like it does in several moments praised as the best in GTA IV.

It is indeed the little things that make Grand Theft Auto games so grand. The sequence I just alluded to is one of the littler details in the game. It's a mission involving a drug addict named Marnie, a character who you will only encounter if you bring Niko past City Hall in the game's version of Manhattan after a certain number of hours played.

And, spoiler, what she wants so very badly is for Niko Bellic to help her feed her addiction. She asks for money. She offers herself. And ultimately she accepts Niko's limited charity: a long car-ride to her dealer where no shooting occurs, just a small-time drug deal. The whole time Niko drives her there he tries to talk her out of it. He fails, but under the player's control, he drives her into temptation anyway.

What I just described to you both is and isn't the kind of GTA IV you've likely heard about. Yes, I've described a game about crime in the city. A game that features a man who can be controlled to do less than socially acceptable things. But I've also described a game that contains, below its heights of big crime fantasy, some sidewalk-level tragedy. There's a junkie girl. And there's this most violent of men, who has no tool in his arsenal that will help her kick her habit.

You and I have played dozens of hours of Grand Theft Auto games. We know them for the mangy untamed beasts that they are. We know that the only thing more impressive than the amount of polish Rockstar applies to each new cityscape of urban delinquency is the amount of these games that remains un-polished. The GTA games are incredible in scale and detail, deft in their portrayal of freedom's limits, aurally grand and as entertainingly violent, disruptive and calamitous as any games before them. Still, each game of the series pokes their players with rough edges: missions of awkward difficulty, controls that improve but can still frustrate, characters who don't seem consistent.

I'm left wondering what the developers of GTA should try harder with and what hopes for the series they should abandon.

These GTA games resist smoothing. They resist efforts to streamline them into a taut, refined experience. The cell phone that keeps Niko connected to his friends, the police computer that locates crimes, and all the other elements of IV that replace the contrivance of old games with greater realism are overwhelmed by the game-ness GTA can't shake. We're not playing a movie, not by hour 30 or even hour 15 when a player's choice or a developer's one extra set of missions sends Niko the game avatar to do something Niko the character would never do.

GTA is an inconsistent beast. And, to go back a metaphor, they make me think not just of an animal that may be both untamed and un-tame-able but of Marnie, the addict. They make me wonder if there's really any way they can ever get beyond their fixation with certain familiar ways.

This new GTA was made to be more sophisticated, more grown up, I think. It introduces moral choice. It skips rainbow afros and giant sex-toy weapons for a story that, initially, is a barely violent exploration of the eyes-just-shut start of the American dream. It's a more mature GTA.

Yet there's a guy at work here at MTV who is inconsolable over the exclusion of planes and tanks in GTA IV. He wants to wreak mayhem. He sees a GTA as the sandbox it was once hyped to be. He wants unhinged GTA. That GTA is in GTA IV, in any of the spots where rules are broken. It's not there as a cheat-code tank. But it's there when you ignore the game's orders and kill the character the narrative was discouraging you from knocking off. It's there when you ignore dating Kate or bowling with Little Jacob and piss them off. It's there when, even with just the reserved wardrobe of GTA IV you find to outfit Niko in a ridiculous ensemble.

In playing GTA IV I was reminded that GTA is at its most fun when it's tweaking, when it has the shakes, when it can't abandon the violence, the transgressions, the subversions of its own rules. The other style of GTA --the one that bottlenecks its story, that keeps Niko moving forward and lands him with a bunch of mobsters, that picks your vehicle for you sometimes, that tries to keep characters consistent and deliver a moral over the course of 30 hours, this classy, more respectable, more constrained, more cleaned up, rehabilitated GTA--doesn't feel like the GTA I've known. Or at least the one I like telling friends about. That GTA has always been there, but it's been subdued. With GTA IV, though, it may be on the rise. Is this the new GTA and one that we want?

I played Grand Theft Auto IV with the feeling that it's the game on which its creators tried to exert their tightest grip, making all the more tantalizing the moments it slipped away. I enjoyed trying to subvert it all the more. To use both of my metaphors again I felt the developers were trying to harness it and clean it up in the service of telling an important story, of being a transcendent cultural work. I feel like they've gone half-way to something new, to a different GTA than we've known. And I'm wondering if they should complete that step or if they should hold back.

I'm rooting for more street-level tragedy and comedy, for something messy, for something that isn't built to someday be smooth, mended and gracefully operatic.

What do you think? Do you like the new, restrained, refined GTA? Or is it time to bring back the 'fros, the sex-toy weapons and expectation that the story more-so than the gameplay will mean something big? What do we want our Marnie to be and what help do we hope they'll give her?

-Stephen

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Date: June 13, 2008
To: Stephen Totilo
Fr: N'Gai Croal
Re: Liberty City Is a Platform

Stephen,

It's so tempting to ignore you and write about my favorite moment in Grand Theft Auto IV. But I'm feeling oddly generous after such a long layoff between Vs. Mode battles, so I'll engage you. Even if I'm a little surprised at your response to the game. After all, you're Mr. Innovation Bias. Shouldn't you be wildly applauding the shock of Rockstar North's new vibe rather than expressing your conservative longing for past Grand Theft gameplay, masked as a call for the subversive over the sublime? Eiji Aonuma does the same ol', same ol' with Phantom Hourglass; you say you're getting bored. Rockstar North attempts something novel; you say you miss the way things used to be. The only thing left for you to do is urge them to remake the previous GTAs using the latest tech, amirite?

Besides, weren't you the one who advanced the theory that multiplayer was where we would find the bulk of the sandbox-y pleasures of GTA IV? You want Rockstar North to roll it for you, when perhaps what they've done is given you the Philly and the Purple Haze so that you can roll it yourself.

Or maybe I'm the one who's been too easily satisfied by Rockstar's more stately, better-controlling opus, while more experienced fans grit their teeth. Take poster Shimuro on NeoGAF. In the thread titled "Final Thoughts: Grand Theft Auto IV and OOT apologists," he opens with a litany of praise for the game before presenting a laundry list of complaints, including:

The game was good, no doubt, but it entirely forgot about its roots. Grand Theft Auto is a sandbox game and that sandbox is pretty damn weak. It entirely forgets a certain group of people in favor for people who only care about story. People like me who appreciate both the story and the vast amount of things to do. There is little f---ing around in GTAIV, it's mostly all serious business. The problem with GTAIV isn't that it's "back to basics", because that's false - GTAIII has more content and things to do than GTAIV. It's just a step back in general, lacking the creativity, variety that made the past 3d GTA's memorable....

Summary: Sandbox game this is not. GTAIV, while doing a lot right entirely forgets its genre roots in the name of "realism" and because certain things were "out of Niko's character" as publicized by Rockstar Games. I dearly hope this is not the direction they plan to take the series in, or I'm going to have to stop playing one of my favorite series and pick up another open-ended series.

If I didn't already know your GAF handle, I'd swear that Himuro was you!

I can't share Himuro's perspective, because I wasn't a connoisseur of the previous games the way he clearly is. But it sounds as though he's articulating a lot of your concerns. For a relative newcomer like myself, the streamlined formula sounds just right, and I've recently learned that one of Rockstar's aims with GTA IV was to make it more accessible to newcomers. But in doing so, is Rockstar permanently leaving its most loyal, most die-hard fans behind?

I don't think it's yet time for you and the other dead-enders to render such a judgement because, like you, I recently had a limo ride that blew my mind. Only this limo ride didn't take place in Liberty City. It began in Napa Valley, CA, following the conclusion of Ziff-Davis' Electronic Gaming Summit, where Valve director of business development and legal affairs Jason Holtman and I shared a limousine to San Francisco International Airport. During the 80 minute ride, we had a wide-ranging conversation, giving me a good handle on Valve's philosophy--and its relevance to action-adventure games like GTA IV which are designed for the integration of post-release downloadable content.

Take Team Fortress 2 for PC. The first couple of sets of downloads were additional maps. Then Valve integrated achievements into Steam and added an achievement path for TF2's Medic, complete with a brand-new melee weapon for those who complete it. Next up: an achievement path for the Pyro, three new weapons and one of Valve's hilarious intro movies, this time for the Sniper.

Most developers of action-adventure titles extend their games along a single meaningful axis (i.e. maps, vehicles and game types), along with perhaps a second, cosmetic axis (i.e. costumes, decals and achievements). Weapons generally fall under the meaningful category, but they're tricky to add--especially for competitive multiplayer games--because they can throw a game's balance out of whack. If, with every update, Valve can now simultaneously extend TF2 along multiple axes--two meaningful (maps and weapons) and two cosmetic (cinematics and achievements)--along how many more axes can Rockstar extend a narrative-rich open world game like GTA IV? Shall I list some of them?

• single-player missions
• multiplayer missions and game types
• co-op missions and game types
• characters
• interiors
• boroughs (show Shaolin some love, y'all)
• friend paths
• vehicles
• weapons
• clothing stores and clothing
• radio stations
• music
• commercials
• TV shows
• restaurants
• packages
• Web sites
• ring tones
• abilities
• everything else Stephen Totilo believes is missing

I'm sure I've allowed some aspects of the game that could be extended to go unmentioned. But I think you can already see the possibilities inherent in what I've laid out. And that's not even taking into account two final axes that Rockstar has already experimented with in its standalone console and handheld games: time and space.

With Liberty City Stories and Vice City Stories, Rockstar has already shown that it can tell stories in the same physical location at different points in time. Why couldn't the DLC packs let us play as Little Jacob or Dimitri when they first came to Liberty City; or Dwayne and Playboy X as they were coming up in the streets before Dwayne went to prison; or as a new character in events set after the events of GTA IV. As for space, if GTA IV can fit on a single Xbox 360 DVD-9 which holds seven gigabytes of data, what if subsequent titles like a new Vice City or San Andreas could be saved to the Xbox 360's hard drive to create a single Grand Theft America, a persistent world in which adventures can take place in multiple cities, located in multiple states and set during multiple time periods?

This is what careful game design, downloadable content and sizable hard drives allow. If Rockstar North producer Leslie Benzies is correct in his estimation that Grand Theft Auto IV cost $100 million to develop, then the company would be remiss in not exploring some MMO-like business models. (After all, the last game I know of that took four-plus years to develop and cost $100 million to make is World of Warcraft.) So if Rockstar has spent all of this time and money to establish Liberty City--a sprawling play space that can accommodate many more gameplay possibilities--it would behoove them to do so, not only with the two planned DLC packs, but well beyond them, as any MMO would do. And if this sounds a lot like the Everlasting Gobstopper of Interactive Entertainment theory that I advanced in our January Vs. Mode exchange on Burnout Paradise, well, it should.

I want Rockstar to take the possibility space that is Liberty City and keep building on it. They can experiment with tone: one expansion pack could be primarily comic; another tragic; another brutal; another frothy. They can set one in the 1970s; another in 2020. I said that Rockstar is showing its maturity by realizing that it doesn't have to be all things to all gamers, but let me revise that statement: it doesn't have to be all things to all gamers at all times. It's wiser to take a slice of what's possible and offer that initially, while gradually, with every content release, adding more layers on top of a very strong foundation.

So we've talked about what we'd like to see in the future, but I'd like to dig more into what's there now. You've said that Grand Theft Auto IV isn't your favorite GTA--why? What didn't you like? What have they already done better? And did the multiplayer game replace the sandbox as you hoped it would?

Cheers,

N'Gai

Next: In which Totilo reveals his favorite GTA and spells out exactly what he likes and doesn't like about GTA IV--and challenges us to do the same.

As for you, Dear Reader, do you feel as though downloadable content is the appropriate place for Rockstar North to both bring back the old and experiment with the new? Or would you agree with Himuro's subsequent declaration on NeoGAF that "If the dlc consists of the things that should have been in the original game, I'm not bothering. I'm not going to give them more of my money, I'm not falling for that trap"? Let us know in the comments below.