GTA4: Initial Thoughts
May. 10th, 2008 08:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexxkayWhat with one thing and another, I haven't gotten as much time with this yet as I'd like; maybe 20 hours, out of what will probably eventually go to 3 digits. But I've got some initial impressions to put down.
The Good: Well, most of it. This is one of the rare cases of living up to the hype. The quality and quantity of content are both breath-taking.
Basic gameplay is pretty familiar. Steal cars, shoot people, do missions for money or story, explore the huge sandbox of possibilities. There are more minigames, however, many of which are linked to the new relationship system. You make friends with lots of NPCs over the course of the game, and in order to keep up the friendship, you actually have to do stuff together: go out to dinner, take in a show, go bowling, play darts, etc. Once they are friendly enough, they will do a variety of favors for you.
The story is more involving than previous iterations. While the strong humorous streak remains, there is a lot more realism and pathos. Your character, fresh-off-the-boat immigrant Nico Bellic, is trying to 'do the right thing', despite most of his skills and opportunities involving criminal violence. Also, major props for how *much* of it there is. Now that your character has a cell phone, there's almost always interesting dialogue during even the solo missions. The really amazing thing is the degree of *variance*. A few times I had to replay a mission, and the in-mission dialogue was *different*! That extra effort on the devs' part does a lot to lessen the pain of a retry.
In addition to a cell phone which lets you call NPCs at arbitrary times, you can also correspond over email. Liberty City now has internet cafes, where you can access an in-game web browser. In addition to emails, they've constructed literally hundreds of interlocking web pages, some of which have gameplay implications salted away within them.
The radio stations are back in even more abundance. I suppose I must be an old fart now, because few of them actually have music I like. Still, lots of fun ads, news, and talk shows. And the variety of genres represented is impressive: talk, rap, jazz, reggae, electronica, rock, et multiple cetera. Not content with audio, they now have hours of *television* content as well, that you can watch in your safehouse. This is a little weird, as it's almost completely non-interactive, but it can make for a nice put-the-controller-down break now and then, I guess.
Combat is generally improved. Lock-ons and free aiming both are smoother than previous editions. There is now a pretty good cover system. Firing from vehicles has been much improved as well.
The new system for police is also an improvement. When you become 'wanted', the cop(s) chasing you are surrounded by a large blue circle on the minimap. You need to get outside that circle for long enough that they lose you, without attracting any new pursuers in the process. The more Wanted you are, the bigger the circle you need to escape. It makes for excitingly dynamic car chases. At least at the low levels. It remains to be seen whether it works at high levels.
There's a new GPS system for navigating around the city, which is very handy (if a bit slow to refresh when you miss a turn). There are also taxis which can take you quickly across the city. I haven't explored that system much yet, as I'm still learning the layout of the city myself. But the ability to flag down a cab is a welcome shortcut to hijacking one!
The Bad: While the new Wanted system is pretty fun, it gets overused. There are a *lot* more cops on the street in this version, and almost any crime will get spotted.
If you fail a mission, you have the option to immediately retry it, which is very welcome. Strangely, however, this opportunity goes away after a few seconds. If you get distracted by the phone or doorbell (as happened to me), it's back to the tediousness of refinding the quest-giver. The lack of mid-mission checkpoints is also annoying in many missions which have lengthy (but simple) sections before you get to the actual challenging part. It's as if the designers are only reluctantly inching towards a 21st century approach to game accessibility.
The increased realism often leads to decreased fun. For example, though there are many more buildings you can enter than ever before, this only highlights how many buildings (and doors within buildings) that you *can't* enter. The realistic design means that you often overlook points of interest, because they blend in with the 'just decor' stuff that surrounds them. The former 'garage' system for saving vehicles has been replaced with hard-to-notice 'resident parking only' spaces on the pavement. Mission-critical objects are marked with a subtle grey chevron; it's easy to see when things are calm, but nigh-useless in the middle of a chase scene.
Plus, they now have toll booths. If you drive through without paying, it's an instant one-star offense. By itself this wouldn't be a bad thing -- but the ambient car AIs don't deal well with it. There is almost always a pile-up at the booth, making it difficult to get close enough to pay yourself.
The Ugly: The lead interface designer should be fired. Influenced by the recent fad for minimal interfaces, many fonts and icons are needlessly tiny and hard to parse. Many screens are missing vital control information (it was hours before I realized you could scroll their web pages). The stat screen buries important gameplay information beneath tons of pointless statistics, and doesn't seem to have any way of quickly scrolling through them.
Clothes shopping is now much more cumbersome. Instead of a menu system, you have to walk up to specific racks inside the clothing store. This might be more forgivable if the actual clothing available were better. The first few stores range from butt-ugly all the way up to almost-not-boring. I have yet to see anything I actually *wanted* my character to wear, even after I had thousands of dollars in discretionary funds.
The map screen, which is used incessantly, takes too many clicks to get in and out of. Although the game ships with a paper map clearly showing the locations of all points of interest, the in-game map often doesn't display icons for these until you have visited them yourself. This is strangely inconsistent as well; sometimes it will give you freebies, sometimes not.
But hey, I complain because I love. This is a great achievement in gaming, warts and all, and I will no doubt keep at it for months. Hell, I haven't even begun to touch the multiplayer yet!
The Good: Well, most of it. This is one of the rare cases of living up to the hype. The quality and quantity of content are both breath-taking.
Basic gameplay is pretty familiar. Steal cars, shoot people, do missions for money or story, explore the huge sandbox of possibilities. There are more minigames, however, many of which are linked to the new relationship system. You make friends with lots of NPCs over the course of the game, and in order to keep up the friendship, you actually have to do stuff together: go out to dinner, take in a show, go bowling, play darts, etc. Once they are friendly enough, they will do a variety of favors for you.
The story is more involving than previous iterations. While the strong humorous streak remains, there is a lot more realism and pathos. Your character, fresh-off-the-boat immigrant Nico Bellic, is trying to 'do the right thing', despite most of his skills and opportunities involving criminal violence. Also, major props for how *much* of it there is. Now that your character has a cell phone, there's almost always interesting dialogue during even the solo missions. The really amazing thing is the degree of *variance*. A few times I had to replay a mission, and the in-mission dialogue was *different*! That extra effort on the devs' part does a lot to lessen the pain of a retry.
In addition to a cell phone which lets you call NPCs at arbitrary times, you can also correspond over email. Liberty City now has internet cafes, where you can access an in-game web browser. In addition to emails, they've constructed literally hundreds of interlocking web pages, some of which have gameplay implications salted away within them.
The radio stations are back in even more abundance. I suppose I must be an old fart now, because few of them actually have music I like. Still, lots of fun ads, news, and talk shows. And the variety of genres represented is impressive: talk, rap, jazz, reggae, electronica, rock, et multiple cetera. Not content with audio, they now have hours of *television* content as well, that you can watch in your safehouse. This is a little weird, as it's almost completely non-interactive, but it can make for a nice put-the-controller-down break now and then, I guess.
Combat is generally improved. Lock-ons and free aiming both are smoother than previous editions. There is now a pretty good cover system. Firing from vehicles has been much improved as well.
The new system for police is also an improvement. When you become 'wanted', the cop(s) chasing you are surrounded by a large blue circle on the minimap. You need to get outside that circle for long enough that they lose you, without attracting any new pursuers in the process. The more Wanted you are, the bigger the circle you need to escape. It makes for excitingly dynamic car chases. At least at the low levels. It remains to be seen whether it works at high levels.
There's a new GPS system for navigating around the city, which is very handy (if a bit slow to refresh when you miss a turn). There are also taxis which can take you quickly across the city. I haven't explored that system much yet, as I'm still learning the layout of the city myself. But the ability to flag down a cab is a welcome shortcut to hijacking one!
The Bad: While the new Wanted system is pretty fun, it gets overused. There are a *lot* more cops on the street in this version, and almost any crime will get spotted.
If you fail a mission, you have the option to immediately retry it, which is very welcome. Strangely, however, this opportunity goes away after a few seconds. If you get distracted by the phone or doorbell (as happened to me), it's back to the tediousness of refinding the quest-giver. The lack of mid-mission checkpoints is also annoying in many missions which have lengthy (but simple) sections before you get to the actual challenging part. It's as if the designers are only reluctantly inching towards a 21st century approach to game accessibility.
The increased realism often leads to decreased fun. For example, though there are many more buildings you can enter than ever before, this only highlights how many buildings (and doors within buildings) that you *can't* enter. The realistic design means that you often overlook points of interest, because they blend in with the 'just decor' stuff that surrounds them. The former 'garage' system for saving vehicles has been replaced with hard-to-notice 'resident parking only' spaces on the pavement. Mission-critical objects are marked with a subtle grey chevron; it's easy to see when things are calm, but nigh-useless in the middle of a chase scene.
Plus, they now have toll booths. If you drive through without paying, it's an instant one-star offense. By itself this wouldn't be a bad thing -- but the ambient car AIs don't deal well with it. There is almost always a pile-up at the booth, making it difficult to get close enough to pay yourself.
The Ugly: The lead interface designer should be fired. Influenced by the recent fad for minimal interfaces, many fonts and icons are needlessly tiny and hard to parse. Many screens are missing vital control information (it was hours before I realized you could scroll their web pages). The stat screen buries important gameplay information beneath tons of pointless statistics, and doesn't seem to have any way of quickly scrolling through them.
Clothes shopping is now much more cumbersome. Instead of a menu system, you have to walk up to specific racks inside the clothing store. This might be more forgivable if the actual clothing available were better. The first few stores range from butt-ugly all the way up to almost-not-boring. I have yet to see anything I actually *wanted* my character to wear, even after I had thousands of dollars in discretionary funds.
The map screen, which is used incessantly, takes too many clicks to get in and out of. Although the game ships with a paper map clearly showing the locations of all points of interest, the in-game map often doesn't display icons for these until you have visited them yourself. This is strangely inconsistent as well; sometimes it will give you freebies, sometimes not.
But hey, I complain because I love. This is a great achievement in gaming, warts and all, and I will no doubt keep at it for months. Hell, I haven't even begun to touch the multiplayer yet!