How to Make ‘Grand Theft Auto IV’ Not Suck
I have talked almost nonstop about my distaste for Grand Theft Auto IV. You can watch the marked progression from “good but problematic” to “ass factory.” So with a couple weeks’ distance between finishing the game, I’m just going to come right out and say it: it’s an awful, awful game.
If you ignore the rampant bugs, the hilariously inept implementation of a cover system, and the legendary pop-in glitches and poor frame rate (all of which — including, if you want to get technical, the poor implementation of new features — are hallmarks of Rockstar game design), it’s impressive from a technical standpoint. But not that impressive — not so impressive that I can ignore the myriad flaws in gameplay, story, and just…well, I always hear about how this amazing Euphoria technology. You know, the thing that takes cold and sterile Lieutenant Commander Data and fills him with vibrance and emotion unlike anything seen in a machine.
Euphoria is supposed to randomize things like reactions from passersby, even reactions from Niko and other characters. Which is fine, except for how unamazing it is. You’re in a game where the prime reaction to Niko running — something he has to do at all times because walking is totally fucking useless — is a horrified gasp, arms raised in the air, an O of shock on the pedestrian’s face. Niko doesn’t have a gun out, isn’t charging into people, isn’t starting fights — he’s just running. You might find it hard to believe, but I have run around in large cities. Like, Niko-style running. This is not “put on the jogging shorts and the silly headband and go jogging.” This is “I have a 10-minute break and need a fucking cup of coffee, stat!“-style running — just a normal guy in street clothes, running a couple of blocks to a coffee shop, then running back.
Here’s approximately what happens: maybe one or two people will give you a second glance, but otherwise nobody gives a shit. Nobody’s shocked or horrified. Nobody’s diving to the ground for fear that you’ll hit them. Nobody’s shouting a limited range of prescripted responses. I swear to God, if I hear somebody yell what sounds like “cheesy vagina!” one more time…well, fuck, it’s a moot point since I’m done with story mode and have listed it to sell on Amazon. I’m done with this piece of shit.
So is that clear? The game is not amazing from a technical standpoint. It has some nice-looking graphics in a lot of spots, but have you ever gone exploring? Certain areas are loaded with rich detail; others are bland and detail-free. They created a large city, but they did not create a living, breathing city, which is why I wish they’d concentrate less resources on “realism” they will never achieve with current technology and had instead put their eggs back in the “fun, engaging gameplay” basket.
I didn’t really care about the technology, though. Sometimes I’ll play a game to marvel at the technology; mostly, I just want to play the fucking thing. Like special effects in movies, the technology in a game — graphics, control, sound, gameplay mechanics — all exist to serve the gaming experience. Making a game that isn’t fun to play but boasts some impressive visuals won’t win any awards in my book. I’m more concerned with the overall gameplay than with how it looks.
I didn’t really want too much from GTAIV. In fact, I only had one hope, which the game fell spectacularly short of fulfilling: I wanted it to be better than San Andreas. When I heard this would be a more serious, dramatic game, I thought it could work. San Andreas had a few moments of legitimate drama within the goofy/fun story, and like I said, while playing Saints Row I thought about the idea of how interesting, engaging, and landscape-changing a game that brings the depth and complexity of The Wire to a console would be. It didn’t do that. At all.
So I came up with my three biggest problems, and solutions to all three that could have made this a vastly superior game.
- Niko doesn’t need money by the time you hit “Three Leaf Clover.”
Don’t try to convince me I’m wrong on this one, because it’s the absolute truth. I haven’t tallied it all up, but I’m pretty sure buying every article of clothing in the entire game would cost less than $20,000. I finished the game with around $750,000, and I had bought most of the clothes, done none of the very few side missions, and spent too much time fucking around with these asshole characters because I thought keeping them happy would actually be worth the effort in the long run (spoiler alert: it’s not).
From a story standpoint, it’s very difficult to reconcile the “fractured American dream”/”Niko as reluctant assassin”/”he’s doing it all for his family” ideas with the fact that your bank account is packed to the gills with useless cash. More than anything, they needed to integrate the property-purchasing/business-running components of previous games. It’s a fun aspect in general, but it’s the only time in the entire game that having that feature would have made story sense. If Niko has to blow his wad on buildings, houses, and/or businesses before he can start making the money his family desperately needs, it’d go a long way to forcing him into a corner in which he has no choice but to fall back into the life he came to America to escape.
But let’s take it a step further. What about the utterly pointless, barely exploited time component they added to the game? We have days of the week now that only had any kind of effect for, like, three missions. What would happen if they put a clock on Niko’s earnings? What if he has to earn, say, $5000 each week that gets sent right back to Eastern Europe? What if something catastrophic will happen if he doesn’t get that money?
“But wait,” you might protest, “weren’t you the one who bitched endlessly about how the heavy scripting in this supposedly ‘sandbox’ game? Wouldn’t this just script it even more by forcing you to do missions instead of fucking around?” Well, yes and no. The whole key to this new component is a combination of time management and money management. First of all, there’s no rigid law saying, “Niko has to do standard story missions to make the dough.” If he wants to spend the entire week punching the shit out of pedestrians until he gets the $5000, that’s his prerogative. Or if you want to fuck around, just do enough missions back to back, then spend the rest of the game week relaxing. Taking it even further: if you don’t give a shit about the consistency of the story or the character, just let the fucking family die. I’m not suggesting that you’d “lose” if you don’t get the money, just that something bad would happen to them. Maybe there’s a three-strikes-and-you’re-out thing. Who cares? Just something to add a little suspense, add a reason to Niko’s actions, add a way to spend vast sums of money so he’s not running around with $600,000 saying, “I’m desperate for money.”
- Shameful lack of mission variety.
When I’ve talked to people or read nerdy forum posts where people bash the game, 90% of them cite three different missions from each of the three PS2 games, each of which illustrate the general lack of variety in mission structures and the specific lack of variety within the mission. Very few missions give you those delightfully sandboxy “50 different ways to beat it” tasks. In GTAIII, people point out the one where you have to kill Tanner, because you can do it any fucking way you want. In Vice City, it’s the country club mission. In San Andreas, it’s the one where you burn the fields of weed. Granted, in that one you can’t necessarily solve it a bunch of different ways — it’s more an example of the kinds of missions that are unlike anything else in the game, illustrating the wild variety in tasks and mission types.
Where the fuck did that go? For every mission where you set up a date with a gay guy then shoot him like a dog in the street, there are 10 missions that feature endless amounts of driving around the city, with or without a car chase, to some dingy warehouse or apartment where there’s a cover-heavy shootout. Ooh, the excitement.
I mentioned to a friend of mine that one of the major things GTAIV lacks is a nice little suburban area. I figured that’d be Alderney, but Alderney seems to mimic nothing but the grimy industrial cesspool of Jersey City without getting into the sprawling, ritzy suburban areas at all. A nice Long Island surrogate would have helped. For the sake of both visual variety and mission variety — people still laugh (no, really) about the hilarity of driving around the soccer-mom crack dealer in her minivan in Saints Row.
This might sound dumb, but a few days ago I watched the movie Boiler Room, an underrated and mostly forgotten 2000 thriller about an underachiever running a casino out of his apartment who ends up working as a power-broken for a shady investment firm. In addition to containing a performance by Giovanni Ribisi that makes me wonder why his star never got brighter, it also contains the only known good performances from Vin Diesel and Jamie Kennedy.
It’s a terrific movie, but I don’t want to ruin it. I’m just going to give you the overall story arc of the first two acts: Ribisi’s approached by an old friend and a new acquaintance to join this firm; he thinks it’ll be a great thing for him — getting him out of his life of pseudo-crime with a legitimate job. Rather than working on Wall Street, he’s at some office park way at the end of Long Island (that’s where my brain started cooking, when I decided GTAIV needs some suburban environs), and slowly but surely Ribisi starts to realize he’s working for a bunch of crooks. He’s not sure what they’re doing or how, but he keeps getting more pieces of the puzzle; when he finally puts it together, he decides to pull one over on them.
Look, I’m telling you. Watch the movie and tell me it wouldn’t work perfectly well as a GTAIV mission arc. Hell, that’s what all of these arcs should have been — Niko, looking to get out of his life of crime, starts doing jobs he thinks are legitimate, but they inevitably turn out to be criminal enterprises. You have variety in the types of crimes being committed, the types of missions involved — not all of them have to be overtly illegal. People who praise GTAIV keep praising the social system, the idea of “just hanging out.” So what about a half-dozen missions that are all about Niko getting and keeping legitimate, nonviolent jobs? They inevitably turn violent, but the “arc” of Niko getting tricked into committing illegal activities usually lasts through the first mission, at which point he’s resigned to continue working for these people. Give us some build-up, some suspense.
It adds mission variety, and it could even add some fun submissions. One of the only things I’ll praise about this game are the new vigilante missions — they did an excellent job with that. So why not give us some similar missions with Pizza Delivery or Ambulance Driver. Different styles of missions, not just repetitive tasks, with all of them fulfilling that same arc of Niko trying desperately to go straight but somehow getting fucked over. For all the repetitive exposition in the game, the one thing they didn’t highlight enough (or tried to but botched) was Niko’s early attempt to go straight. He should have kept trying throughout the game in different ways.
- With two exceptions, the voice acting is atrocious.
I think, of all the things I say about the game, this will be the one that catches me the most flak. One of the things I see from people who think all other aspects of the game are failures is praise for the voice acting, and praise for Rockstar using unknowns rather than big celebrity voices (as they have in the past).
I’m going to be blunt: Niko has one of the most irritating game voices I’ve ever heard. I’ve played hundreds, if not thousands, of games, and too many of them are plagued with shitty voice acting, but nothing like Michael Hollick as Niko. To be honest, if you’re going to do a game with a bunch of immigrants with heavy accents, why not use real immigrants with heavy accents? The only thing more annoying than the accent itself is the inconsistency of its application. And the voice’s…I don’t know how to describe its quality, but there’s something about it that rivals nails on a chalkboard. When I finally got through story mode, I took to just muting it as I ran around achievement-whoring (that lasted about a day before I got sick of the game altogether) so I wouldn’t have to listen to him anymore. He’s awful.
So the only voices I like in the game are Packie and Brucie. Do not confuse this with me liking the characters. The video game world has never seen a character more irritating and less funny than Brucie. Ever. I actually sort of liked Packie, despite the fact that he’s little more than a rehash of Ziggy on The Wire. But both are well-voiced. They certainly beat the bland, similar-sounding female characters and the awful, awful Alderney characters. I can’t even remember the name of the lame Joe Pesci wannabe, but the only thing in the game worse than that guy was Phil. That guy could not act. Not even a little. He makes Niko sound convincing. The only reason I’m so hard on Niko is because you hear him for so fucking long, but Phil is by far the worst voice in the game.
Other than the suggestion to use people with authentic accents if you’re going to have that be a characteristic of the game, I don’t have much idea on how to improve it. I mean, I can say, “Just don’t have foreign characters in your game.” That’ll solve some problems. Or, “Get a better class of voice actor.” Who knows? All I can say — and I know I’ve said it before — is that people like Ray Liotta and Luis Guzmán added a great deal to Vice City, and the zillions of celebrity cameos involved in San Andreas really enhanced the quality of that game. Come on — James Woods? That was around the time where you’re sorta getting sick of the game because it’s too long. Then James Woods busts in with comedy gold and some of the most bizarre missions in the game — it’s an amazing rejuvenation late in the game. Even so, I have to give credit to Young Maylay as CJ. He’s a relative unknown, but he did great work…
…unlike most of the folks involved in GTAIV. I guess the bottom line is: try a little harder. For all its graphical improvements and new ideas, GTAIV just feels like a thrown-together cash-in, on par with the PSP disasters.
If I think of anything else, I’ll certainly continue to rip this game a new asshole. I really, really hated it.
Posted by Stan on June 1, 2008 5:48 PM | Permalink | Reviews | Digg It
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