Grand Theft Auto IV, developed by Rockstar North and published by Rockstar Games

In Round 1 of our Vs. Mode exchange with MTV News reporter Stephen Totilo (also featured on Totilo's blog Multiplayer), he expressed concern over the direction in which Grand Theft IV has taken the franchise, which narrower and more restrained than its wilder, freer predecessors. We accused him of damning developers for running in place (The Legend of Zelda series) and damning them for walking a new path (GTA IV). In today's Round 2, Totilo reveals his favorite GTA title and explains why he believes that Rockstar North should have preserved player "liberation" as the spine of its gameplay, while we advocate forcefully for "emotion" as the broader focus which explains why the developer has taken a left turn. Please be sure to note that spoilers can and do abound, and enjoy.

*** 

Date: June 17, 2008
To: N'Gai Croal
Fr: Stephen Totilo
Re: Why I Like San Andreas Better

N'Gai,

Clearly, you need to play more Grand Theft Auto.

-Stephen

P.S. Am I really the enemy of progress? The contradicter of my own theories? A guy who calls for Zelda innovation but wants GTA to retreat to its old ways?

Nah.

I've finished San Andreas. I've finished IV. I know what I'm talking about.

Grand Theft Auto IV is simultaneously the best-made GTA and the least-GTA of the six GTA games I've played. I'm all for progress as a game series evolves, but I'm not for a game franchise losing its spirit. And that's why I say I see Grand Theft Auto IV as the game that puts its series at a crossroads. It's why I think it calls for commentators like us to offer some feedback about where it might go next.

You asked me why IV isn't my favorite GTA. It's because, of the things that make a GTA game a GTA game, I most value the gameplay, moreso than the characters or narrative. I've never played GTA III, but the sensation I got when I first played Vice City was liberation. I felt interactive freedom the likes of which make other games feel like prison and GTA feel like an escape. Finally I could play a game that would let me have fun while I ignored The Next Thing The Game Wants Me To Do. I could get lost creating action and mayhem of my own. I could at least pretend that I was acting up beyond the bounds of what I was supposed to do in Vice City. That sense of wicked liberation was enhanced by the real-world setting of the game, a landscape that tempts you to do things in those places that you better not do in reality.

With San Andreas I felt even more that GTA, at its best, represents a sprawl of possibility. The work the developers did that I most appreciated wasn't the enjoyable cutscenes but the expansion of gameplay opportunity. You've read those San Andreas lists of gameplay options: you can race cars, bounce low-riders, get fat on burgers, be a pimp, consume Hot Coffee, drive big rigs, play fireman, raid a military base, use a jet pack, fly to Liberty City, ride a bike, play basketball, etc., etc.

Years ago I heard Will Wright observe that so many more things can happen on a real city block than can happen on any city block ever created in a video game. He's right. But I've long felt and long cheered that Rockstar was the studio working hardest to prove Wright wrong. And they were doing it in such a wild way, expanding the possible actions on a city block to include the implausible and the illicit.

That's the trajectory I thought the GTA series was on, one with gameplay as the spine of its evolution.

Yeah, I also appreciated Rockstar's non-gameplay achievements. I've enjoyed watching Rockstar develop their chops as possibly the top parodists and working in the gaming medium. I liked their efforts to craft distinct and idiosyncratic characters that, unlike most video game characters, would sometimes do and say things you didn't expect. But a great game critic once told me--actually, he's said this dozens of times--that games are first and foremost things you "see with your hands." So I've been championing what GTA games have shown my hands, and that's freedom. And gameplay freedom, many gaming fans know, has long been the enemy of plot and character. What you do in a game so often doesn't fit who, technically, the character is supposed to be (Mario's really that violent? Snake is really that clumsy a sneaking soldier?) The way I see it, one thing that Rockstar excels in appears to work at cross purposes with other things the studio is good at. And not all aspects can necessarily be improved equally.

GTA: San Andreas remains to me the high point of Rockstar's GTA gameplay approach; GTA IV curtails it seemingly to reach a higher point with those other approaches: story and character. The reason I questioned the endeavor and asked you what they should do at this crossroads is because there is real evidence that the attempts to create a richer and more consistent sense of character and plot are being undermined even by the more curtailed, somewhat less freedom-loving brand of GTA gameplay in GTA IV. Everyone I've spoken to who has played GTA IV can tell me a moment when their manipulation of Niko through gameplay made Niko seem like a different character than the one portrayed in the cut-scenes. Friends cite moments when the cut-scene Niko--cautious about causing wanton violence--didn't seem like the guy they had gunning down everyone in sight at the behest of either the player or, more oddly, in order to fulfill a mission scripted by the developers. What do you make of that? I see the game developers writing Niko one way in cutscenes and requiring him to conform to a very different script in some missions. You see Rockstar maturing. I see Rockstar creating a game that sometimes works against itself.

San Andreas didn't have these problems, I think, because it resounded with the tones of cartoon criminality and non-seriousness that the gameplay of a GTA almost demands of its story-writers. Jetpack-riding and rhyme-book-stealing were zany examples of the sprawl of possibility. Anything could happen and anyone could be around in the game to be part of it. The aspects of GTA IV that came closest to those tones felt the best to me. I'm thinking of things like the widely praised eccentricity of the character Brucie, who encourages brazen car thefts and considers a good time with Niko to be a helicopter flight through skyscrapers with two girlfriends sharing the seats. A shootout amidst dinosaur bones in what passes for Liberty City's Metropolitan Museum of Art also achieves those twin tones. So does a motorcycle chase in the subway tunnels and a murder during an otherwise buttoned-down job interview. (I should also add that Rockstar's Bully, with its obnoxious high school cliques, neurotic teachers and consistently mischievous gameplay embodied a slightly milder but equally suitable version of those tones for its open world.)

All that said...

If GTA and Rockstar are on a path toward maturity via more restrained gameplay, mission and world design, there are some things in IV that I consider extremely promising in that regard:

• I greatly enjoyed the mid-game chunk of missions that Niko becomes a mission partner for several brothers from the same Irish-American family. One brother's a bank robber, another a crooked cop, another an addict, and so forth. The paths of their lives are traceable to one home. The branches of their family tree are the avenues and boulevards of Liberty City's boroughs. I like the idea of a GTA being used to trace the divergent paths of a family, to offer some sense of how the character of a family and the members in it is affected and shaped by geography. Getting to know this family by visiting the neighborhoods they've wound up in is a success. And the experience reveals the potency of a matured, controlled bottlenecking mission structure. The pay-off leaves you watching two of the brothers sitting together on a park bench, both of them men you've journeyed with in different places, and knowing that it's your call which one will now die. Only careful planning and controlled design can lead to a moment like that.
• GTA IV benefited from the decision to set certain missions at specific times of day or days of the week. The lead-up to a wedding date produced several phone calls regarding preparations.This was a great way to weave anticipation for a key game event into the backdrop of whatever insanity Niko was committing in the days before the wedding. Another bit of controlled planning that I liked was a night mission that culminated in an airborne view of the Algonquin skyline and the fireworks spectacle of an explosion in front of a dark sky. The mission highlighted a nocturnal beauty unique to big cities. GTA missions have always been located in specific places. Locating them in specific times is a confident aspect of more restrictive design I'd like to see more of.

See? I'm not against progress.

Can you now tell me what your favorite part of GTA IV is? And while you're at it, what was your least favorite?

P.P.S. I never played the multiplayer modes after day one of the game's release. But you know me. Even though I run a blog called Multiplayer, I rarely game with others.

***

Date: June 18, 2008
To: Stephen Totilo
Fr: N'Gai Croal
Re: Perhaps Emotion Is the Intended Spine of GTA IV

Stephen,

I'm not sure how much more Grand Theft Auto I need to play to identify what each of us values most about the series' potential going forward. You slyly quoted one of the medium's most dashing observers when you wrote "that games are first and foremost things you "see with your hands.' " Very true. But you're interested in gameplay for play's sake. I'm intrigued by something else.

Yes, you've dressed up your preference in poetic descriptions like "interactive freedom," a "sense of wicked liberation" and a "sprawl of possibility." But while you're busy making like Mel Gibson in "Braveheart," shouting "FREEDOM!" at the top of your lungs as you prepare to storm Rockstar's East Village offices, you're missing out on the developers' fitful achievement in GTA IV: the way they've married emotion to gameplay.

I'll give you an example; it's my third favorite moment in GTA IV thus far. Relatively early in the game, Little Jacob and Badman sent me to take out a rival drug dealer. I got in my car and drove to my destination, using the GPS/mini-map to navigate my way there. Once I arrived there, I assumed that I'd kill him pretty quickly. But that's not what happened. I was informed that I had to trail him to his stash without alerting him to my presence. So for several blocks, I just followed him. Across streets. Through alleyways. In and out of a house. Over a fence. A call came from my cousin Roman--c'mon, man; can't you tell that I'm in the middle of a hit?--but I just ignored it and kept going, hopping a stone wall, entering a tenement building and walking up several flights of stairs until finally, I was standing outside the drug dealer's front door.

On the radar, I could see that the drug dealer and two other people were inside. Now, whether it was the tension that had built up over the lengthy, deliberate pursuit of my target or a strange aversion to failing and restarting a mission, I can't be sure. But I nevertheless stood outside the door for what seemed like an eternity, Micro-SMG in hand, steeling myself for the firefight to come. Then I burst into the room and kept squeezing both triggers until I absolutely, positively killed every motherf---er in the room. It was over in what seemed like the blink of an eye, and immediately afterwards, as I came down from the adrenaline rush, all I could remember was the echoing gunfire and motion blurred visuals that accompanied my frantic switching from target to target to make sure that I got them before they got me.

The pacing of that mission; its rising and falling tension; the juxtaposition of the tempo and duration of its constituent parts; its blend of driving, walking and shooting--all of that was memorable for putting me in a stunned, shaken, disquieted and finally relieved state of mind.

If you're not yet convinced, how about my second favorite moment? After meeting up with Playboy X by way of Elizabeta to carry out a drug deal that turned out to be an undercover sting operation that erupted into lengthy shootout with and escape from NOOSE--the Liberty City Police Department's equivalent of SWAT--by way of stairwells, rooftops and side streets, Playboy asked me to take him home. Which I proceeded to do, using the GPS, as always, to guide me towards the dot on the mini-map representing his home base rather pause the game to check his destination on the full map.

I crossed one of Liberty City's bridges without paying much attention to it, because again, I was focused more on the GPS/mini-map than the scenery. So it wasn't until I'd been on the other side of the bridge for at least a minute or so when, out of the corner of my eye, I noticed that the buildings seemed different than they used to. Now I was finally paying attention to the city passing by outside my car window--really? Could it be?--when I decided to pause the game and check the full map, which revealed that unbeknownst to me, I had made it into the previously blocked off borough of Algonquin, GTA IV's version of Manhattan.

This may seem like a trivial thing, but since my arrival in Broker (Brooklyn), I'd been periodically looking at Algonquin off in the distance. For instance, after executing Vlad on the waterfront, the game resumes with your character facing Broker. Rather than just head back into the borough, I turned around, walked to the edge of the pier and stared at Algonquin across the water, wondering what and how long it would take me to get there. So to have my arrival in Algonquin take place without fanfare, at the end of a tense shootout and getaway, elicited a feeling of personal and personalized accomplishment, as if I'd uncovered this myself rather than being guided there by Rockstar North.

Still not a believer? Perhaps my favorite moment will convince you. It's the much-talked about choice I--we--had to make when deciding whether rub out Dwayne for Playboy X or kill Playboy X for Dwayne. This moment was interesting, and not just because of the way that it's set up entirely over your mobile phone--first Playboy X asks you to kill his best friend, some time passes, then his best friend Dwayne asks you to kill him. By not jumping into the mission immediately and forcing me to make a choice, Rockstar let me stew helplessly, with this troublesome dilemma hanging over my head like the sword of Damocles, building tension all the while.

I personally wanted to kill Dwayne, because his sad sack, woe-is-me stories about the challenges of li of living in the real world after years on lockdown were wearing on me. Meanwhile, Playboy X's dynamic optimism, though surrounded by bulls--t platitudes about how he planned to improve his community once he'd made enough money, was more engaging to me. But the cutscenes and dialogue exchanges convinced me that Niko preferred Dwayne to Playboy X. And since the emotional engineering of the game's opening hours had convinced me that Niko was a different brand of thug, I spared Dwayne and killed Playboy X instead.

I didn't expect to get Playboy's loft as a gift from Dwyane for killing his friend-turned-nemesis, but I did. But when I returned to the scene of my crime to claim my prize, I found something else unexpected: Playboy X's photos still lined the wall, a number of them containing his logo. For some reason, it made me think of another X--Malcolm. Had I rid Liberty City of a dangerous hothead? Or was I unknowingly guilty of murdering the next great civil-rights leader? Even now I regret the decision, for several reasons, but I treasure GTA IV for making me feel the weight of my choice, for prolonging my internal agony, and for leaving me with a question to ponder.

I suppose it's possible to accomplish all of this while racing cars. Or while bouncing low-riders. Or while getting fat on burgers; being a pimp; consuming Hot Coffee; driving big rigs; playing fireman; raiding a military base; using a jet pack; flying to Liberty City; riding a bike; playing basketball, etc. But while you're pining for the way Rockstar liberated you from the tyranny of scripted progression, I've found that they've done some highly engaging work of layering more complicated emotional possibilities into their gameplay. This is virgin-ish territory for them, and it's worthy of inquiry. I haven't the faintest idea which came first: the chicken (exploding budgets for 360-PS3 development requiring a scaling back on content) or the egg (narrative and gameplay options that are more tightly focused than sprawling), but I approve for all of the reasons I've listed above. By scaling back on our options to diverge from the main story, Rockstar North allows the main story--shorn somewhat of distractions, digressions and diversions--to have more of an impact.

That said, what I didn't like about the game is the gap between the game's enacted narrative (its cutscenes and dialogue) and its emergent narrative (the things that we do as players). This resulted in far too many occasions where Niko--whom Rockstar North had expertly painted in its opening hours as fatigued with killing and death--volunteers to commit murder on behalf of someone he's just met. Part of that could be a problem with how the developers chose to handle narrative compression. But even so, the technique they employed with the Playboy X Or Dwayne Dilemma of building in some time between the offering of a mission and the acceptance of that mission could have been an elegant solution to the budgetary constraints that may have prevented Rockstar North from creating enough cutscenes to plausibly support the variety of ways in which gamers choose to play Niko. I don't know how Rockstar North plans to handle this in the future, but as they create more consistent characters with more subtle and complicated relationships with the violence and outlaw behavior that has typified the series, they may have to content themselves with suggesting how they think you should "act" a character like Niko, but eventually step back and create enough varied chatter and cutscenes to support the performance of your choice.

Cheers,

N'Gai