GTA: Good or Bad for the Industry?

4 years, 100 million dollars, and a bunch of questionable “10″ ratings later, Rockstar has etched its newest offering onto a platter for the consumer populace to enjoy. For the consumer, it’s mostly win-win. For your $64, there is a lot of content there for your money. In fact, I’d even go so far to say you’re getting the equivalent of two or three games for your dough.

But what I’m a bit concerned about as a developer is if GTA is good or bad for the industry as a whole. No, I’m not talking about the marketing scandal. That’s just stupid political posturing. What I’m talking about is what Rockstar delivered when it made GTA IV. $100 million dollars is not only a lot of money (more than any other game budget to date), it’s an amount of money that’s nearly impossible for any other studio to compete with save Ubisoft or EA. This sets a bit of a dangerous precedent for the games industry at large: games that cost more than $15 million dollars typically need to sell more than one million units to get to a profitable margin, and that’s not the easiest thing to do, even for an outstanding game.

So what exactly does GTA IV bring to the table? I guarantee you studios all over the planet are playing it for competitive analysis, so let’s take a quick look at the pros and cons of what a nuclear bomb like GTA does to the industry’s standards, due to the consumer expectations it sets.

The Pros:

• Expansive, Huge Sandbox World. Smallish sandboxes are no longer acceptable. GTA IV seems to be about twice as large as Vice City was, even. This world’s size is just epic. Adding to this is the seemingly endless activities you can do, from checking email to watching TV to bowling to going drinking. I have no doubt this is where the “10″ scores are coming from, because it certainly isn’t from the details of the gameplay.
• Mind-Blowing Media Content. The radio, the TV, the internet. Does the stream of content ever end? Even the signs on the taxi-cabs or the naming convention for the stores is amazing. Will anyone ever be able to consume it all?
• Authentic Voice Acting. Screw the huge stars. If you can find excellent voice talent like GTA IV has in it, go for it. The conversations sound natural, the accents authentic. If the swearing doesn’t grate on my nerves, you know you’re doing something right.
• Amazing character/plot writing. There’s little character touches hidden all throughout the main storyline. You’ll be presented with small facts about characters early on that will feel like a frying pan to your face later when you figure out what they mean. Incredible depth. Believeable characters.
• A Likeable Main Character We Can All Identify With. What they’re doing here in IV is pretty interesting. While I can’t identify with an illegal immigrant from Russia, I can find purchase in his fish-out-of-water status in Liberty City. I wonder about the same things he does: where do I go to have a good time? What can I do here to make money? We have the same objectives, and skill sets, for once.
• Incredibly Natural Visual Interface. The taxi-cab, the internet cafe, and especially your phone. They’ve taken natural everyday things and hidden menus in them so that they don’t pull you from your immersion in the game world.

The Cons:

• Pretty Horrible Controls. I don’t know where they fell off the horse here, but GTAIV’s controls feel like a step backwards. I wasn’t a San Andreas player, but I played the bajeebus out of III and Vice City, while dabbling some in San An. I never really feel much in control in IV, either of Niko on foot or behind the wheel. Everything is sluggish, and slow to respond. It doesn’t matter if it’s fisticuffs, gun combat, or driving. It’s kinda all just “meh.”
• Boats on Wheels. Why does every car bounce? Why does every car skid out going around a corner at 20 mph? How many driving games are out there that handle driving infinitely better, and yet we’re subjected to grossly sub-par driving from a game that is named after driving a stolen car and for the most part has defined what driving in a 3D city should feel like?
• Seriously, What’s With the Euphoria?

From the ridiculous lean-walk to the Corman leg-up technique of mounting everything taller than 6 inches when you stop walking, this Euphoria shit is getting old, fast. I get that for Euphoria to work it has to be on 24/7 in your game world, but I’m wondering just how much it was worth it. Yeah, getting hit by a car and hanging onto the hood as you slide off it looks awesome, but if it means I keep putting my foot up on a park bench just because I’m standing near it, uh, I could probably live with just plain ol’ rag doll. And I can’t help but think that stupid crazy lean-walk turn thing he does is only confounding my previous control issue, and the following issue as well.

• Holy Crappy Cameras, Batman. I hope you don’t need to back that thang up, because god help you if you want to see behind you. I get that reversing cameras in a car is a difficult thing to manage. If a player just wants to back up a few feet, whipping the camera around 180 constantly can be nauseating. But the issue with this mentality is that it assumes players want to do some fine tune detail driving, like attempting to parallel park a car, when this simply doesn’t happen, ever, in GTA. Players are more likely slamming it in reverse because the way forward is blocked by gang banging thugs, an 8 car flaming pileup, or a barricade of police cars. If the reverse lights come on and the car begins moving in reverse, PLEASE SHOW ME WHAT THE HELL IS BEHIND MY CAR, NOW. If I get nauseous from slamshifting between D and R for ten minutes, that’s my fault. If I can’t see what’s behind my car because you won’t put it on camera, that’s the developer’s fault.
• Confusing Controller Interface. If X is “yes” and O is “no” when I’m in a car on the phone, then X should always mean “yes” and O should always mean “no.” The fact that I’m on foot or driving a boat should not matter. I don’t want to be on foot and tapping X repeatedly when I’m asked if I want a lap-dance, and then wonder why the hell the game isn’t accepting my input, only to find it wants L1 or some other button because I’m not in a car or not on the phone. This only serves to confuse the player.
• The $100 Million Price Tag. How are other studios going to hope to compete with this? Did Rockstar waste a lot of money in development? Could it have been delivered for less money with a more efficient workflow pipeline? Will all other games have to spend a comparable amount of money to hope for a similar review score? Will the consumer public or reviewer cabals expect this amount of content (which is honestly underpriced at $64) from every title from here on out?

What worries me more than anything about this list is that the “pros” are less likely to be adopted by outside studios anytime soon. It’s actually really tough to sell a powerful character driven narrative, and not many studios know how to set one up properly, especially in a video-game.

Instead, I fear that the “cons” are what are going to be adopted into common practice development. Sure, studios will attempt to hit the massive sized world, but they’ll look at the sloppy driving and the horribly clumsy fighting engine and think “hey, we don’t need to do it any better: GTAIV sold 6 million copies with that crap, and got 10s for their effort” and leave it at that. These are areas that need the most innovation and love, and they seemed to have been ignored (or rushed) the most.

The bottom line here is: Do you think GTA IV is going to push the industry to newer heights? Or are we going to see a bunch of copy-cat attempts to cash in on the massive sandbox world crime game? Will everyone need to deliver GTA IV size content to get the consumer’s money?

If so, this is a bit of a dangerous precedent that Rockstar has foisted upon the industry. I’m curious to see how it pans out.