Slashdot Mirror
Rockstar Announces GTA San Andreas
Tickenest writes "According to a Yahoo-reprinted press-release, Rockstar Games has officially announced Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, the latest in the GTA series. The press release continues: 'Developed by world-class designers Rockstar North, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas will be available exclusively for the PlayStation(R)2 computer entertainment system and is expected to be in stores in North America on October 19, 2004 and in Europe on October 22, 2004.'" This confirms earlier rumors of (initial?) PS2 exclusivity and possible name for this much-awaited game.
I was looking forward to the xbox edition.
SIGFAULT
=P Seriously it would be awesome to have an earthquake in a game, I don't think any other GTA-style game has done something like that (i.e. disaster scenarios).
Is this console exclusivity or won't it be reaching the PC at all. They've been vauge in the past and having just released 3 & 4 for the xbox I expect that cash will speak the loudest words.
San Andreas? Where'd they get that name? How about Grand Theft Bicycle: Vatican
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
If you download your free copy of GTA 1 from the Rockstar web site ( here ) , you'll find that "Liberty City", "Vice City" and "San Andreas" are the names of the three playable cities from that game.
Oh yeah, I hope the game is fun too.
blarg.
Do they make tools for building your own world yet? It would be fun to cruise around your hometown a la Doom.
Stay tuned for new sig...
San Andreas sounds rather based on L.A....
"You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy in all the galaxy...."
I.E., a perfect setting!
"A group of words expressing something other than their literal intention. Now that... is... irony!" - Bender
instead of having a generic ambulance mode, we'll have it transformed into a mode where you chase after gang fights and save the hatians lives after being injured by the evil cubans.
then in grand theft auto: los vegas, you'll deliver hatian hookers to cubans and vice versa to promote love between them and settle the gripes of the previous game by the cuban community.
No screenshots? Aw man...
GTA is fabulous in that in manages to blur the distinction between genres, something that many have tried but few have succeeded.
It's interesting, because I've always loved RPGs, but never been a fan of shooters or racing games. I would never call GTA an RPG, but I would call it a shooter/racing game - but I love it!
The weirdest thing for me is that it's actually making me appreciate consoles. I've been a PC game snob, and my first GTA was Vice City on the PC. I was convinced that superior graphics + smaller load time was better, but having just bought a PS2 with GTA 3 + Vice City, I'm starting to understand that some games are just *made* to be played on consoles.
My religion forbids the use of sigs.
I think we'd be lucky if it was the GTA engine with minimal improvements in a new locale :) we'd be guaranteed a great game.
1. Umm, swimming, a little bit, please?
2. More indoor environments.
3. More flying (helicopters were hands down the best improvement to the vehicles in GTA: VC).
4. The property buying in GTA:VC was a good first step, but it can be expanded so much further.
5. NPC drivers, accomplices, bodyguards for hire, etc, etc.
And while I know everybody is clamoring for better graphics, am I the only one that thinks the current engine from GTA:VC got the job done? I'll take gameplay over graphics any day.
ce n'est pas un Sig.
Sony has the rights to the franchise, so they grant themselves a period of time where it is only available on their platform (the PS2). After that, if they choose to, they allow other platforms to pick it up. That's why it took so long for PC & Xbox versions of GTA3 to come out, etc.
Windows
Windows 2.0
Windows 3.0
Windows 3.1
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
developer #1: i have an idea
developer #2: what?
developer #1: you know how no one had ever really heard of GTA 1 and 2, but 3 was a great success right?
developer #2: of course
developer #1: well, lets take the already written game engine and capitalize off it's success by making the same game over and over with different cities!
developer #2: brilliant!
developer #1: brilliant!
- tristan
I was going to moderate this, but I couldn't find -1 bitter.
Don't moderate flamebait as Troll. Know the difference or you will be Meta-moderated.
Seriously it would be awesome to have an earthquake in a game, I don't think any other GTA-style game has done something like that (i.e. disaster scenarios).
One of the objectives in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3's LA level is "start the earthquake". Later on the same level you have to deal with a car teetering over the top of the broken freeway.
The PS2 title Disaster Report places you in an earthquake ravaged city.
Quake, on the other hand, doesn't seem to be earthquake related.
My guess is that it's the later, from what I remember GTA 4 was supposed to be an all-together new game.
Yes, rumors are that the real sequel to GTA3 (e.g. not just an "expansion pack" like vice city/san andreas) will be developed for next-gen consoles (xbox2, ps3). Always remember to take your grain of salt.
Weren't GTA3 and VC big sellers on the PC? Until the consoles get some equilavent of "mouselook", I have zero interest in playing games like GTA on a console.
"The same GTA engine [...] with a new locale" isn't necessarily a bad thing. Both the games based on the GTA 3 engine have been very playable.
If they have got a game engine that does what they need, there is no need to re-write it for every version. Not many film reviews say "same old camera, different plot".
I was going to suggest that maybe game engines have evolved to the point where most of the effort of making a game can go into the content rather than the technology. Then I thought about all the LucasArts games based on similar SCUMM engines.
Perhaps the rule of thumb is that games need to have a certain amount of "newness" but it doesn't really matter if it comes from the technology or the content.
GTA San Andreas gives new meaning to the term "shake down"
e
Build Your Own PVR/HTPC news, reviews, &
Resident Evil: Codename Veronica was a dreamcast excluive... Code Veronica X came out for PS2 later, the X makes it a whollllle new game.. Now resident evil is a gamecube "exclusive"..
GTA3 & Vice City were PS2 "exclusives", until the PC versions, and later XBox versions came out.
The Final Fantasy series is PS2 "exclusive", nevermind that Crystal Chronicles thing.
It may be exclusive on PS2 for awhile, but I have no doubt a PC version, at least, will surface some time next year.
The only real exclusives are from the console makers themselves, Nintendo's franchise players, etc..
It just doesnt make sense for third party developers to lock themselves into one platform in such a fragmented market.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
It makes sense
GTA = Liberty City , Vice City , San-Andreas
GTA3 = Liberty City , Vice City , San-Andreas
GTA4 = GTA London Maps , GTA 2 Maps ???
Maybe ?
Solosoft.org - Your Online Resource to Nothing
Being able to set off some explosives etc along the fault-line and CAUSE an earthquake. Not sure if it would fly in the anti-terrorist US, but it would somewhat fit in with the GTA theme of mayhem and mass-destruction.
Many of you will remember the brouhaha over GTA3: Vice City and the phrase "Kill all the Hatians."
It was a big stink - bigger than any of the stuff you thought would be worse (you can kill police, or anyone for that matter, in the game) that ended in Rockstar actually changing the game - they now only push a "patched" version to stores AFAIK.
I was wondering why we don't demand an apology from Francis Ford Coppola about the Godfather movies (to which the GTA series is often, for obvious reasons, compared). After all, there's a line in one about black people being animals "who have no souls."
Then again, that was said by a character, not by the screenwriter.
Isn't it interesting that sometimes we're capable of knowing the difference, and other times we're not?
People apparently love these "gotcha" stories. They have no relation to the facts, and are frightening in their ignorance about the basic issues. I mean, distinguishing between something a character is saying and something the game/movie's makers are saying is a pretty basic feat of human intelligence. Of course the context is everything - the context of the line in the game is a gang war (and "the hatains" are one of the gangs in the game). But when it's time to worry about how many people are watching your news program rather than the competitions, a scare story, a little race baiting, even when the facts aren't exactly straight, can slip through.
Especially when it's a video game.
Where are the defenders of all Hatians now? Probably advocating Edward Norton be locked up for being a Nazi (since he played one in American History X).
Apparently we still hold games to a different standard than movies, even when these games are obviously made for adults, and are rated accordingly. If the game were a movie you'd be laughed out of the room for talking about it like that.
And the amazing thing is that Rockstar has caved to this kind of idiocy.
So what's the point of all this?
If Rockstar feels they have to edit everything in their products to fly this far under the stupid-radar, then they will essentially be neutering their product - which succeeds in a large part on the basis of its funny, irreverent, transgressive "creative" (i.e. game design and story, which are, in this as in many cases, inextricable).
I'm wondering how San Andreas will stack up - if they still have their spine after the "Hatian Incident." If they PC'd and PG-13'd the series, I predict an adverse response from the audience, and at the "box office."
Want to Know How to Cheat the GPL? Read On!
My buddy has a 3 year old. During the time his wife was away, my buddy would play GTA: Vice City, and his son would watch. The son thought it was cool when daddy "beat the shit" of of other guys with the bats. Well, Mom came home to see her son, and saw her son going to town on his favourite teddy bear with a kid-sized hockey stick. He said to his mom that it was because daddy did this "on tv". (And yes, the son would say daddy "beat the shit" out of somebody on tv.)
Whether you decide to play these games is up to you, but I believe we do have to be careful with our kids. We need to make them understand the difference between reality and fantasy, and if they can't tell the difference right now, then that's a lesson for later.
I believe it's called parenting.
The game is mostly a huge bunch of data on top of Renderware Platform. The difficulting in creating the game is the huge amount of artwork required. Unlike a racing game or DOOM, you need to fill an entire city where every building needs all four sides and the roof defined, plus needs a multitude of models so it looks good both close up and at a distance.
Does my bum look big in this?
I think they should license the engine from the "Driver" series and incorporate it into the game, or write an updated engine similar to that one. Cars in GTA felt too much like cardboard cutouts. With a better engine, GTA would be utopia.
is over here: http://www.rockstargames.com/sanandreas/
Hack your mind out of its sandbox.
"The same GTA engine [...] with a new locale" isn't necessarily a bad thing. Both the games based on the GTA 3 engine have been very playable.
If they have got a game engine that does what they need, there is no need to re-write it for every version.
Additionally, it's not like the hardware got any better in the time from the start of the work on GTA3 to the present. Incremental additions, even minor, to the existing engine are far more effective on a fixed platform than they ever would be on a variable platform like the PC. At the same time, they have an existing engine that has counterparts on the PC and XBox, all of which probably use a lot of common content (though the artwork on the PC and XBox games is obviously superior to the PS2 version, the PS2 art could be generated from the PC art if they made this game with future ports in mind). They can always add the incremental improvements into the engine's ports and then polish the ports according to the platform's capabilities (ie the PC version could increase quite a bit more than either the PS2 or XBox versions), but all of that is a matter of adding workload to what is essentially supposed to be the same game.
If this were a strictly PC-based series, I'd expect much more improvement between titles, but in the case of a series in which 3 titles are released on the same platform, with absolutely no change in the platform's capabilities in the interim, there's not much point to rewriting the engine. They certainly added to it technically in GTA:VC, giving the game motion blur, better graphics, and interior areas. None of these things are really the items most people mention when they talk about the changes in Vice City, but in reality they were probably the biggest challenges they faced, technically, in building the game (of course, I don't know whether 2-wheeled vehicles were an engine limitation or not, and it's quite possible that was among the most technically challenging portions of the game's development).
-PainKilleR-[CE]
Libery City = New York City (Modern Day)
Vice City = Miami (1986-87 there or about)
San Andreas = (I Imagine that is Los Angeles, but when?)
19th century.
Grand theft horse-carriage, baby! Whoooo!
You can't take the sky from me...
Is that when I was 3 me and my older brother made these little cardboard cut-out replicas with gold and silver marker of all the items in the original Legend of Zelda.
The fighting part was no different ^.^
There's a GTA game in the works for gamecube.
They haven't got the big wheel, tricycle and razor scooter models just right.
The water pistol effects are fabulous, though!
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
It's not that 'Vice City' wasn't a good game, in fact it's a great game. But even though it was a great game it was a re-hash, it was basically exactly like GTA 3 with some bells and whistles. It was fun but nothing as mind blowing as GTA 3 was.
Your right even with minimal improvements it would still would be a great game, but to be perfectly honest it wouldn't really feel like a new game.
Mike
I think Vice City was, in Rockstar taxonomy, a continuation of the "GTA3 line." I believe the idea was that GTA4 would be "revolutionary" instead of "evolutionary," and probably not available until the next generation of consoles arrives.
New lead designer Harvey Smith, of Deus Ex: Invisible War fame, has announced some changes to the GTA format.
/still bitter about DX:IW
-To better accomidate the casual player market, there will only be one car model. It will come in 196 colors, but they will all have the same handling and radio station.
-The "New and Improved" physics engine will allow players to jump their car over a mile. Crashing into a fence, however, will still ruin your ride.
-There will approximately 600 blocks to explore, each one requiring a 30 second loading delay.
-To avoid the "What do I do next?" question, the mission system will be replaced with a multiple choice plotline which will feature the same exact missions but one path will always lead through a vent.
Parenting Group officially releases "Lawsuit 2: We're back"
Developed by world-class lawyers and parents that want to blame everyone else for their children problems, will be exclusively targeted at GTA: San Andreas. The lawsuit is expected to be released in North America on October 20, 2004.
Josh
If you replace GTA 3 with [insert EA Sports Title here] you can see that recycling the same engine, gameplay, art, etc is not an uncommon procedure.
My patience is infinite, my time is not.
Who cares! GTA VC was not much better than GTA3. Engine still basically the same. Textures changed, different cars and ability to fly helicopters, ride bikes etc. But therein lies the beauty. It's about the storyline, the different feel. Yes, it was a major bonus to have a bit more freedom and that's what I think they will probably improve in GTA: SanAn but I still enjoy playing GTA3 every now and then even though I clocked both.Small differences and a different timeline and improvement in the AI will make this one even better although probably not much different visually from the others. I've been a GTA fan from the first one and the only one that dissapointed me was GTA2. I for one cannot wait to get my hands on this one!
"I used to have that really cool,funny sig
An official site is up (but no content yet):
http://www.rockstargames.com/sanandreas/
One thing worthy of note: the script in the logo for the words "San Andreas" is in that faux-English "newspaper-title" font that is popular among Latinos who put it on the back of their pickup trucks (often along with a decal of the virgin Mary - I don't get it either) and what not. Dunno if that means anything...
RadicalBender.com
To those complaining that Rockstar lacks production polish, citing games that came out 3 years ago like 'Oni' (see Bungie for that one)Let's just have a little history lesson, shall we?
Manhunt - Excellent twist on the stealth genre, great game play, killer sounds. Hollywood stars rounding out the voice casts. "..the most important game in the last 5 years..." -The Chicago Tribune
Max Payne 2 - Love it or hate it, this game on Xbox/PC is gorgeous. The textures and level designs are top notch. Story is on par with most movies being churned out by any major hollywood studio. Artistic storyboards, full mo-capped character models, and again, excellent voice acting round out this game. Several PC GOTY and Action GOTY nods.
GTA:VC - Dozens of authentic tracks from the time perioud. Amazing radio stations and voice acting. Full hollywood cast. Beautiful cut scenes. Immersive, large locale. Game of the year almost everwhere, including an Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences award.
Midnight Club 2 - 9.1 out of 10 IGN. 91 out of 100 Gamerankings. Killer music, awesome graphics and killer gameplay including online component. Set a new standard for environment freedom in a racing game.
What makes Rockstar great is not just their awesome games, but their attention to production and detail which blur the lines between games and other traditional forms of entertainment, such as movies. I have a feeling GTA:San Andreas will be no different.
I just want some goddamn multiplayer already. I don't even care if it's online, I just want to be able to sit in the back of the damn pickup truck with the rocket launcher while somebody drives me around.
well it's kind of a hack but check out Multi-Theft Auto @ http://www.mtavc.com/
not the greatest thing but it does work and is pretty fun to boot!
"Personal ownership is a hallmark of conservative capitalism. And I don't believe I am entitled to anything that I did n
Except that every few years, EA performs such major surgery on the engine (at least that's what they do for Madden) that it is, for all intents and purposes a new engine.
I heard it was going to be GTA: Spira. You'd play as Paine after she goes insane from snorting tainted megalixer crystals. They said you'd be able to jack chocobos, do jobs for the LeBlanc syndicate and pick up lesbian hooker nuns in Bevelle.
And Spider Jerusalem from Transmetropolitan was going to be a playable character with a +7 bowel disruptor.
Or maybe I just dreamed it all.
Oh well.
--- Ban humanity.
San Andreas is ok, but it does have its faults.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
Is it too early to sue them yet for warping my impressionable, young child's mind, or do I need to wait until the game is actually released?