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Grand Theft Auto 4's a comin'

 
  

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iamus
21:31 / 29.03.07
Race ya.
 
 
Bear
21:38 / 29.03.07
Well you´ll beat me with an amazing download rate of 3kbs which has just gone down to 0. Spoiler tags if you get to see it pretty please. It´s on piratebay too (torrent of course) and the stats for it are jumping by huge amounts seems the news is travelin.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
21:40 / 29.03.07
Also currently working here (link shamelessly stolen), but may not be for long once gametrailers realise people are sneaking directly through to the file.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
21:41 / 29.03.07
Um, that should be "apparently working" - I've not yet downloaded it to check and take no responsibility if it turns out to be porn.
 
 
Bear
21:44 / 29.03.07
It´s named the same as the torrent file so I´d imagine it´s real and much faster too so far.
 
 
petunia
21:49 / 29.03.07
Yep. That link works fine and isn't porn.

I'm not really sure what to think, but i'll wait a while til discussing.
 
 
iamus
21:54 / 29.03.07
Um....


Hmmm.

Right.
 
 
iamus
21:56 / 29.03.07
Somebody's been watching Koyaanisqatsi at any rate...
 
 
Phex: Dorset Doom
22:02 / 29.03.07
Didn't he fight Godzilla?

(currently waiting on the download from the link above. Told you it'd break the internet).
 
 
petunia
22:06 / 29.03.07
Yeah, i spotted that...

Um. Never sure what counts as a spoiler, but just in case


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Apart from the obvious HD, is there anything the trailer shows that makes this game stand out from any other of the series? Am i missing something?
 
 
miss wonderstarr
22:08 / 29.03.07
Visually pretty stunning ~ conceptually a little bit meh?
 
 
iamus
22:11 / 29.03.07
Continued Spoilers....



I was hoping for something really pop and not so serious.
Comic ultraviolence doesn't sit so well with that kind of tone.

Early days.
 
 
miss wonderstarr
22:13 / 29.03.07
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Actually, as New York is such an incredibly rich and visually potent city, I don't think GTA III exhausted it at all. If I was a Rockstar creative, I'd want to go back and do NYC properly before I looked to the B-list. It is arguably the city of cities, especially for a series so grounded in Hollywood myth and crime fiction. With graphics like that, with the potential to make your game look like a movie, it'd be frustrating to focus on Glasgow.

And I assume the protagonist is meant to be Russian? which is a bit of a variation. I really think we could have had a female lead by now.
 
 
miss wonderstarr
22:19 / 29.03.07
S
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Actually, I'm assuming we're looking at the entire 5 Boroughs. The Screamer ride is presumably the Cyclone on Coney Island, Brooklyn.
 
 
miss wonderstarr
22:27 / 29.03.07
Also, maybe you've got a main character who wants to go straight. I don't think that was the case with CJ.

Interesting details in the backgrounds. "I Slept With Your Mom" movie ~ Max Renda make-up ~ and no sign of the WTC towers, which does (there's also a poster in one street of some heroic looking cops standing nobly against a sunset NYC skyline) suggest it's set post-9/11.
 
 
miss wonderstarr
22:30 / 29.03.07
Does anyone know what kind of geographical location this street would be on?
**
 
 
Mug Chum
05:36 / 30.03.07
Is it fair to assume the game will go terrorist instead of just urban crime? I can't see how a "want to go clean" approach could go for in a game, specially a GTA game. It'd be like Godfather 3 (a crappy GTA game?)? If they go for a superserious and realistic stand, it'd be what? "Do me this one favor (mission)/pay your dues and maybe I'll let you off" and "they pull me back in" etc etc? "Kill less"? I really can't see it.

At this point I was hoping for something more international. If it wasn't global**, it'd be restricted to Japan, or a vague South American country, or civil-tribal rural-urban wars in Africa or something... When I saw the vague-accent on NY, I thought it'd be at least a cross-world international (/anti)terrorist scheme.

**(fuck going from neighborhood to neighborhood, it should be country to country! Next-Gen, dammit! Rockstar should be pleased I'm not asking for GodSandBox, from Spore, to GTA3, to HL2, to animal kingdom, to Sims(cities), to Superhero Neo jazz, all the way into planets, time, physics and Supercontext Godspheres in just one game! Although, on a serious note now, next-gen IS lacking what 6-7 years ago GTA3 was to games 6-7 years before it)
 
 
Phex: Dorset Doom
07:45 / 30.03.07
It looks like the GTA series is growing up. I have mixed feelings about this: on one hand games really do need to start dealing with more mature themes, on the other a slow-paced story of redemption wouldn't work when your primary means of transport is a stolen car driven at high speed while playing hi-larious spoof radio stations.
My guess is we're seeing a small sliver of GTAIV in the trailer. Probably only one character and only one city out of several.
 
 
Janean Patience
09:39 / 30.03.07
Oo, I almost said that it was going to be New York when I thought it was going to be in the 70s. (70s New York would be great; urban decay, Taxi Driver and other crazed 'Nam vets everywhere, performance artists) Rockstar used it up by accident doing Liberty City, which was much more generic than the cities that followed and just contained everything they could cram in. A Vice City-like take on New York will be way better. And that screenshot above looks to me like Brooklyn.
 
 
---
09:51 / 30.03.07
Hah, anything other than modern times would've made me feel sick, solely because the radio stations would've probably sucked. This looks brilliant from the trailer though, and I'm sure that the detail and quality of the game will seperate it way, waaay past anything GTA related that's been before it.
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
10:36 / 30.03.07
Y'know, I wasn't really bowled over by the concept for San Andreas when it was announced. When it came out, it all made perfect sense.
 
 
bjrn
11:09 / 30.03.07
I don't really see a 'want to go clean' theme working. I can see this being a "Oh, I hope things are different here. Oh, they're not. I'd better clean this place up.", or something along those lines. I wonder if/when it comes to the PC, stupid console-only releases.

By the way, was anyone else besides me a bit dissapointed at the length of the trailer? I would have liked to see just a little bit more than 50 seconds.
 
 
EvskiG
13:20 / 30.03.07
Looks great to me!

Looks like it'll focus on the Russian mob in Brighton Beach.

(Everyone should rent Little Odessa and Lord of War in preparation.)

I assume it's going to be all five boroughs and parts of New Jersey (think that ferry building is in Hoboken). That could be huge.

Coney Island, Times Square, Wall Street, Midtown, the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, the Statue of Liberty, the Met Life Building and all sorts of other fun stuff.
 
 
Phex: Dorset Doom
14:14 / 30.03.07
But no forests and mountains for miles, no desert for half a continent away...
 
 
EvskiG
14:31 / 30.03.07
The NYC boroughs (Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Staten Island, and Queens) are huge, and have pretty substantial wooded and hilly areas. And that's not even including most of Long Island or New Jersey.

Plus (I'd assume) subway tracks and tunnels, manholes and steam tunnels, the Roosevelt Island skyway, a huge waterfront, a harbor with islands (Liberty Island, Ellis Island), and an almost unimaginable number of distinct neighborhoods from Harlem to Wall Street to Bensonhurst to the Lower East Side to Brighton Beach.
 
 
Janean Patience
14:31 / 30.03.07
That's bothering me slightly. There have to be these enormous, unpopulated open spaces surely? They added so much atmosphere. But I don't guess you get them in New York...
 
 
Janean Patience
14:32 / 30.03.07
xpost sorry
 
 
EvskiG
14:40 / 30.03.07
Most people think of New York as Manhattan, but it's a lot bigger.

8.2 million residents

303.3 square miles of land (785.6 square km)
165.6 square miles of water (428.8 square km)

Three major airports, if you include Newark Airport in New Jersey.

Here's a map of just the five boroughs.

With those islands, it looks perfect for a GTA game.
 
 
EvskiG
16:43 / 30.03.07
Does anyone know what kind of geographical location this street would be on?

That street could be in any of the boroughs. But I'd guess Brooklyn.
 
 
Baz Auckland
22:26 / 01.04.07
For non-urban areas, you have giant city parks, and huge cemetaries too...
 
 
Triplets
15:42 / 02.04.07
As always, sometimes the speculation is better than the first tidbits. I would have so loved IV to be GTA: TOKYO in a loving pastiche of Beat Takeshi, Kill Bill, Battle Royale and, yes, Black Rain with some bits stolen shamelessly from the 'on-the-beat' parts of Ghost in the Shell.

Anyway.

What we've got, coming from Rockstar, could very well be ace.

As someone said upthread the strength of the GTA games is to pull from established crime fiction. Vice City is the best example of this to-date, being a complete homage to coke and guns crime cinema and general 80s life. What's IV going to pull from? If it's the bad guy going good (possibly), they have a treasure trove: Leon, Sin City, The Sopranos, Prison Break, The Shield and on

Does it look a bit boring now? Yes, because I think Rockstar have, in trying to keep us in suspense and most of the game underwraps, not really gotten the hook out yet, let alone gotten it in us.

Oh, and yeah, it's so time for a female protagonist.
 
 
Phex: Dorset Doom
20:08 / 02.04.07
Agreed. I'm hoping that since there are multiple mission packs coming out over the internet after the initial game comes out- so the game isn't just a sandbox for players but one for the developers where they can try out new gameplay concepts- one of which will be a female protagonist, hopefully one will be a non-violent heist where you don't even have the option of throwing a punch (that big Casino heist in GTA:San Andreas was a dungeon crawl with guns and a whimper-not-a-band parachute jump at the end). Remember this well: there have been five Grand Theft Auto games so far and they're calling this one Four- sure, it's the fourth 'era' in the franchise's history- but it could also indicate four protagonists. Maybe.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
20:34 / 02.04.07
Nah.

Vice City and San Andreas are, in effect, GTA III: Gaiden I and Gaiden II - they're side stories that take place within the same universe as the main game. That's why it's interesting to see Rockstar make the decision to finally give the honour of the IV to this game - it's got to be a dramatic move forwards for the series if it's to earn that right, based on the naming pattern to date (2 is hated by a lot of people, I know, but it did make a big shift in terms of setting and also introduced the concept of playing sides).

Conceptually, Vice City and San Andreas are to GTA III what London was to GTA.
 
 
iamus
02:36 / 03.04.07
And have been stated as being as much by Houser, I think. Whether it's true or not, he said they always envisioned III, VC and SA as a trilogy of sorts, with those particular locations and settings. Regardless of that being the intention from the beginning or not, it was quoted in an interview taken when he would have known full well the direction this game was taking.
 
 
Phex: Dorset Doom
08:55 / 11.04.07
Psst! Grand Theft Auto IV info. Don't tell anybody:

From Kotaku:

# The protagonist's name is Niko Bellic - an Eastern European immigrant who has come to Liberty City to live the "American Dream." The game is set in Liberty City in 2007, but it is bigger than the Liberty City we saw in GTA III.

# The GTA 4 equivalent of the Statue of Liberty is called the Statue of Happiness... Broker is the GTA IV equivalent of Brooklyn, Manhattan is now called Algonquin, Queens is now Dukes, the Bronx is Bohan, and New Jersey is Alderney. The map is smaller than San Andreas, but considerably more detailed. No countryside or desert, we are led to believe.

# Rockstar is giving its players more freedom, more choice, and more sense of control over their destiny — the structure of GTA4's storyline is quite different to it's predecessors as it can be told in a number of different ways. You can talk to people in person, by cell phones, and there are a bunch of other ways of giving the player information... In previous GTA games you were like a slave because you had to constantly take orders from people when doing missions. There is still an element of that in Grand Theft Auto 4, but you can also choose how you want to spend your time...

* There are no planes in GTA IV because there is only one city, and Rockstar want the game to seem realistic. That means there will be no rollerblades, no unicycles, probably no jetpacks and indeed no planes. Rockstar are giving choice and variety which feels right for the character. However there will be motorbikes.

* After an initial load sequence, the game will never load again. Not even during exterior-interior transitions (and vice versa).

* Both versions of the game (Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3) will likely be identical, but the Xbox 360 version will have exclusive downloadable episodic [sizeable] content. Rockstar have now spent over 3 years developing the game, and Dan Houser compares the leap from GTA III to GTA IV, to the leap from GTA to GTA III.

* GTA IV will have multiplayer, but it's not going to be a massively multiplayer online game, says Dan Houser. They are trying to make something that is interesting, fun, progressive and which goes along nicely with the single-player game.
 
  

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