GTA3 and Vice City now Online Multiplayer

glengineer writes "A deep bow and an "I'm not worthy" to Kent Simon, at the University of Kentucky, Ed Lyons in London, and Chris McArthur in Canada who have made the dream come true for GTA fanatics like me - GTA3 and Vice City online multiplayer! Now I can streetrace and play Liberty City Survivor with real people, not just use the "crazy pedestrians" cheat. Rockstar would be nuts not to hire these guys. So, anyone up for a deathmatch? Meet me at the Malibu Club in Vice, or the construction site on Staunton Island."

Comments

Any chance of litigation?

[-kertrats-]

I can't imagine that what they've done doesnt break some copyright law somewhere-what are the odds Rockstar sues?

Re:Any chance of litigation?

[PoPRawkZ]

Like the article says, these guys should be paid, not sued. Hopefully they aren't worth anything to sue over. If there is no lawsuit over this I'm going to go and buy the game myself for the multiplayer.

Re:Any chance of litigation?

[Lussarn]

what are the odds Rockstar sues?

Just because some companies always sue doesn't mean it's correct. They mostly do it because they know the people they sue has no chance of defending themselves. Well, SCO may have picked the wrong target.

Re:Any chance of litigation?

[k98sven]

Unless Rockstar planned to release this feature as an expansion to the existing PC games.

Not very likely. No games are developed today without seriously considering multiplayer. Rockstar obviously took the design decision not to include it.

Had they decided to make a multiplayer add-on they would have done so already. GTA3 has been out for 3 years now. It's been very successful, obviously they have the resources. Not to mention they already know the internals of the game engine.

If they wanted to do something like this, they'd have done it already.

I still dont understand

[xtracto]

i still dont understand why Rockstar didnt implement some kind of multiplayer mode in Vice City. The multiplayer in GTA and GTA London was by far some of the most fun (and ridiculous) LAN gaming experience I have ever had. Theres only so much fun you can have fragging - but once you start playing silly mini games like (kill as many pedestrians as possible in 2 mins) and (hunt each other down with only the rocket launcher) it showed the actual completely silly fun you could have with the game. I do enjoy Vice City, it is a good (however a little overrated) game. But it would have benefited tenfold from a proper built-in multiplayer mode.

Re:I still dont understand

[Anonymous Coward]

They did, but they never could quite get the multiplayer bit to work properly (it still doesnt, really)

Rather than release a game with broken multiplayer, they released it with NO multiplayer.

Otherwise they wouldve been torn to shreds in all the gamer forums.

I wonder if it works on wine

[FidelCatsro]

Ive been following MTA(multi theft auto ) for a couple of years now (im sure its been that long) and played the various versions along the way .
I have to say that this is one of the best mod projects going ,IT adds a feature that was sorely missing fromt he origional game , Many many hours have been spent with my mates having a few Buds(Budiwar chezch beer ,not budweiser) playing turn about ,The moment i lernt about MTA i was enthralled , i even installed windows on one of my machines to test it out , Honestly its a great deal of fun .
I have yet to look too deeply into it , but i would like to test it out on linux X86 and see how the network code fares with wine or cedega .
MY point being has anyone tried to get this running under linux in some form , if so how (Was it just install and play).

ps the site seems to be suffering : http://osdir.com.nyud.org:8090/Article4775.phtml I have yet to make the correl cach link as i can not really access the site

Pedestrian problem

[cablepokerface]

Wasn't multiplyer impossible because you couldn't share all the pedestrian information across players? How did they solve that?

Wondering

[speed1001]

Wondering if the Multiplayer version allows for teaming up or clan type scenarios. A roving gang of street thugs has a whole new meaning when there are actual players controlling them.

South Beach and Vice City

[hankaholic]

This is a bit off-topic, but as the story is a dupe of a dupe of a dupe I don't feel too bad about mentioning it.

I visited Miami's South Beach over the weekend and was amazed by how well Vice City represented it. Like the stretch of beach all along the right island, South Beath stretches far along a strip of colorful restaurants and hotels. It was eerie at times -- I really felt like I'd been there before, especially when I showed up two nights in a row and saw some of the same exotic cars parked in the same spots.

For the interested, this included a Rolls Royce and a classic Corvette. I'm pretty sure the Corvette was owned by the establishment in front of which it was parked. Nonetheless it was amusing that much like in the game, coming back the next day revealed some of the same cars parked in the same places. My girlfriend and I joked about grabbing the Corvette and coming back the next day to see if it had respawned.

The eeriest thing about it was that the bridge between the mainland and South Beach was closed and barracaded due to a motor accident which had occurred slightly earlier -- in GTA:VC the bridges are closed until you accomplish certain missions, so it didn't quite surprise me that we couldn't take a cab across the bridge.

South Beach is a neat place to be, and any Vice City fans that find themselves in the area would do well to take a cab on over and enjoy the place that inspired the game setting.

Re:GTA online

[MikeFM]

So? Why shouldn't it be easy to die? Just make the results of dying minor so it can happen frequently. Offer some good body armor. Jeez I'd love to have that Rhino tank and take it roaring down the street blowing up other players until they finally capped my ass.

I've been wanting a MMORPG version of GTA for a long time now and have written the authors requesting it several times. It'd be cool to form gangs that have to compete with each other, the peds, and the cops. Killing, drug deals, pimp'n out girls, hook'n, bad drivin.. it should all be part of the game.

A good Player versus Player MMORPG like GTA would kick ass. I'm so sick of these weenie little MMORPG's where all you can fight is NPCs and it's all so formulatic that you may as well put your player on auto-pilot. Unleash some mayhem. It's be the inverse game to City of Heroes. By encouraging players to form criminal gangs they can introduce some actual strategy. (Gangs would be more like guilds and less like parties in standard MMO jargon.)

Re:MMORPG?

[British]

I wrote up my 2 cents on the possibilities of a GTA-based MMORPHG here. Instead of classes, you would get occupations(cop, thug, fireman, etc). Put in the skill sets from San Andreas, and the game writes itself.

If Rockstar offered a monthly fee to host servers of a GTA "America", yes, i would happily pay for the priveledge.

Re:Yay! Now they all must die!

[gameboyhippo]

That's an interesting theory, but in all seriousness, I just don't like games that emulates such evil behavior. We as humans, whether on the right or the left, instinctivly know that murdering is wrong. We pay taxes to protect our cities with cops, why make a game that involves murdering them?

But GTA goes a step beyond that. Prostitution is a desperate profession. It's something people do when they are poor and have no idea how to make money otherwise. To have a game that shows them being murderd and thus despite their desperation, they are killed in cold blood is cruel.

I suppose it would be cool in "the right" not to like GTA, but I've never worried about being cool. :) Believe it or not, there are people who just aren't entertained that way. I personally like games such as Mario or Sonic. The most violent game I'd play is something like Final Fantasy or Kingdom Hearts.

Re:Hire?

[eAi2]

As a MultiTheftAuto developer, our main limitation to what we can do with MTA is time, if we were employed by R*(N), we'd clearly have more time. Plus, the added bonus of access to the source code ;)