The Making of Grand Theft Auto

Edge Online has another fantastic feature, discussing the creation process behind GTA. From the article: "One of the defining moments of the series happened in early 1996, not long after Baird joined the team. 'At that time, we were still a series of small missions,' he says. "We had a long, long brainstorming session where we picked up on an idea for one long level containing multiple missions proposed by one of the level designers, Paul Farley. We took this and expanded it into the open-ended structure that the game shipped with. This meant a big expansion of the scripting and improvements to game systems — they had to handle the game running over multiple missions instead of the short structure.'"

Comments

Top Down Driving/Walking

[Jonah Hex]

Driving from the top-down perspective drove me crazy with the first GTA, and trying to walk around using the keyboard made me want to ignore the game and just kill all those virtual people. I can't imagine how many times I was killed while walking for a mission, for me it totally overshadowed the "living city" aspect they go on about in the article. Hell I don't even remember that I noticed it was "living" at all, since like most GTA games then and since you merely have to move out of the zone you're in and back into it to find everything "reset"; no crashed cars, dead bodies, etc. Where the hell are all the tow trucks, EMT's, and coroner's that mysteriously clean up behind me? Why can't I kill them too so the wreckage stays? Do I just need to install a "decal limit" hack? ;)
Jonah HEX

Open ended better than single story line

[Pearson]

I like all the games in the series, but with the move from GTA2 to GTA3 they lost one of my favorite features. In 2 there were three gangs in each level. They each had a gang they hated and a gang they were indifferent about. So to do missions for one gang, you had to be hated (to a certain degree) by their rival gang. The fun part was that when you finished all the missions for one gang you could go on a rampage in their turf and get jobs from their enemies. It felt like you got 3x the gameplay for each level.

Also the humor was lost in the transition to 3D. For example the wandering line of Elvis impersonators who were especially skittish, but if you managed to run over all of them at once you got a bonus and the words "Elvis has left the building!" Or the announcer's voice when you got an insane stunt bonus.

The score multiplier, which would get zeroed by an arrest, along with charging in-game money to save the game, added real tension to the game. You didn't want to save very often because it was expensive (the way to get out of the level was to get a certain amount of money), and you loved the multiplier which gained +1 each time you completed a mission without getting busted or killed. So, by the time you had a 6x multiplier you were on edge for any sign of the cops since you would lose so much. Naturally, the missions were designed to get the cops all riled up which was very thrilling.

In the 3D ones, you save whenever and don't care (which limits the risk to repeating once single mission), there is little humor, and the levels are pretty linear, as far as the missions go. That said, I like the 3D versions, and absolutely love Vice City (80s music + the PCJ = ftw!)