BCO523: Game Design 30.05.2013

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The title features a game-world in which emergent behaviors and a wide breadth of player choices combine to create an amazing gameplay experience where players feel truly empowered to play however they want.

If sales can be extrapolated to popularity, then Grand Theft Auto III and its sequel Grand Theft Auto: Vice City have each captivated more players than any other game of the PlayStation 2 console generation.

Overview

Reason: the games brilliantly combine uniquely fun core mechanics with giving players enough freedom in the environment that the game becomes an entertaining experience players will enjoy much longer than almost any other action game.

Radical changes in games mechanics compared to its predecessors. Such as top-down camera has been changed to a car game chase cam.

Overview

The title features a game-world in which emergent behaviors and a wide breadth of player choices combine to create an amazing gameplay experience where players feel truly empowered to play however they want.

If sales can be extrapolated to popularity, then Grand Theft Auto III and its sequel Grand Theft Auto: Vice City have each captivated more players than any other game of the PlayStation 2 console generation.

Overview

Overview

GTA II: Driving

GTA III: Driving

From the very beginning of the series, the Grand Theft Auto games’ biggest hook has been their realistic setting with which anyone who has driven a car in a city can immediately connect.

Everyone has fantasized about avoiding a traffic jam by popping the car up on to the sidewalk like in an action movie. Anyone who has seen a fancy vehicle pull up next to them at a stoplight understands the desire to just ditch your own car and take this better one.

Belieavable Game World

These are all taboo activities that many people fantasize about on a daily basis. Surely, they would never do them in real life, but in the safe context of a game-world where the worst consequence is having to start your game over, who wouldn’t want to try it out?

Belieavable Game World

Many of the design concepts found in the third game are also present in the first, whether it’s the ringing telephones giving players their missions, the feel of a living city with other cars and pedestrians all going about their lives in a believable way, the “rampage” mini-games, or the satirical nature of the game-fiction including the highly amusing car radio.

Belieavable Game World

Grand Theft Auto III is one of the few action-oriented games to present players with a game-world that truly feels like it is alive.

GTA3 made that world believable, blending in exactly enough reality to allow players to suspend their disbelief.

Players can drive down any street or alley, over any bridge, through any park, up any set of stairs that is wide enough, and even use ramps to make jumps over obstacles.

A Living City

There is very little sense of being artificially constrained as is so often experienced in most games, thus avoiding the sensation of, “The designers did not want me to go there so there’s an invisible wall blocking my way.”

This consistency of world navigation is made possible by a car physics simulation, which includes enough responsiveness to make the driving seem quasi-believable (at least in an action movie sense), yet keeps the driving fun and fairly forgiving.

A Living City

GTA3 creates the sense that this world does not revolve around the player at all; the player character is just one guy in a city full of shady characters.

Cars waiting for traffic lights, staying on the right side of the road, honking at each other, and some cars weaving in and out between others

A Living City

If players run up and punch one of these random civilians, he will fight back while the other citizens flee in terror. Any police who happen be around will run up to try to stop the fight. If players stop their car in the middle of street, traffic will stop and the drivers will honk.

A Living City

The pedestrians and traffic on the street are intelligent enough to support the illusion of reality, but at the same time are not exactly brilliant. For instance, the pedestrians sometimes appear to be walking around the world like zombies and can easily get hung up on a car left parked in the middle of a sidewalk.

A Living City

Clearly the designers came to the conclusion that having enough NPCs to make the world look truly alive was more important than making each one of them super smart.

The developers seem to have embraced a cartoonish art style more compatible with their limited graphical horsepower, probably because they understood their limitations at the start of development and decided to embrace these restrictions instead of fighting them.

A Living City

In Grand Theft Auto III, players are never able to go inside buildings during gameplay, with all interior interaction happening exclusively during cut-scenes.

Once most players became familiar with this restriction they understood the boundaries of the simulation space and forgot about their desire to go inside.

A Living City

A Living City

A Living City

A Living City

The design centers the game on actions and their consequences. For instance, players are given the freedom to drive recklessly in the city and run over whatever pedestrians happen to be in their way. But if there happens to be a police officer, players will suddenly become wanted by the police for their crime (which is represented on the players’ wanted meter) and will need to avoid the pursuing law enforcement until their wanted level decreases.

Actions and Consequences

Similarly, players are able to steal any car they want in the game, but if a police officer witnesses the theft, the players’ wanted level will increase. Stealing a police cruiser is also possible, but the police become especially mad when players do so and will pursue them even more doggedly.

If players shoot a member of a gang, the other members of the gang are liable to come after them with guns blazing.

Actions and Consequences

The police make players think twice about the choices they make. Players may need a car right now to get through a mission, but there’s a police officer watching. Can they outrun the cops? Or do they have time to run around the corner and try to steal a vehicle when out of sight?

Actions and Consequences

Grand Theft Auto III’s level design is another key component of the game that gives players meaningful choices.

The missions are quite well set up to provide players with a good variety of goals to accomplish, all of which exploit the game’s same core mechanics but reuse them in interesting ways.

Actions and Consequences

Players will have missions where they need to assassinate a particular enemy, steal a specific car, pick up a person or a package and drop them/it off at a second location, and so on. The missions are set up to make sure players explore all the different parts of the city, frequently crossing the whole island to accomplish a specific mission.

Actions and Consequences

From a level flow perspective, what’s most interesting is how players can take any route they like through the city to get somewhere. Furthermore, in some missions the target of the job may move around the city space freely and unpredictably.

Grand Theft Auto III is a game that causes players to tell each other tales of the amazing chase sequence they had with the police or all the improvisation they used to pull off a mission.

Actions and Consequences

Amidst all the emergent gameplay and interesting choices, Grand Theft Auto III also manages to tell a compelling story. The bulk of this storytelling happens in cut-scenes, but it is interesting to note how short and to the point they are.

The opening of the game manages to convey a lot of information all in approximately two minutes.

Storytelling

The player character’s involvement in a bank robbery, the girlfriend who betrayed him and leaves him for dead, the trial that sends him to jail, the main character’s subsequent involvement in a prison transport break that leaves him a fugitive from the law.

The game tells its story through more than just the cut-scenes, with the believability of Liberty City perfectly supporting the game-fiction.

Storytelling

Players are sent on missions to various neighborhoods that show the diverse types of life that exist in the city, with the types of cars driving around and the pedestrians walking the sidewalks matching the flavor of the neighborhoods appropriately, all contributing to a remarkably consistent world.

Storytelling

The designers deliberately kept the main character mute so players could feel more immersed in the game, avoiding the distancing effect of having a main character that talks. Since players are already making choices in the game-world that define the personality of their character, keeping him from speaking allowed this personality to be dominant in the players’ minds, instead of something the designers established for them. Interestingly, Vice City added speech for the main character, though this was not particularly praised by users or the press.

Storytelling

There has been lots of complaints about the game and its awards because of the fredoom in game such as running over a pedestrian or going on a killing spree.

Storytelling

The End