Grand Theft Auto IV
Apr 8, 2008We experienced
GTA4's making a concerted effort to integrate all of your console's online functions into multiplayer. According to Rockstar reps, the Rockstar North team's goal is to create an experience that keeps you fully immersed without having to hit your Xbox or PlayStation button to look at menus. Just like many elements of the new Liberty City, multiplayer can be pulled up with Niko's cell phone. Regardless of platform, your buddy lists will pop up in your cell phone's menu, although PS3 apparently won't allow you to accept new friend requests or check PSN messages in-game. Outside of GTA4, the only game that we've seen try to keep players immersed on this level is Burnout Paradise. It's an interesting step forward, to say the least.
When you pull up your phone to set up multiplayer, you can create your online avatar. It's pretty straightforward. You'll be able to pick from a variety of faces, hairstyles and clothing. GTA4 supports up to 16 players for adversarial multiplayer and four for co-op. When the game host sets up a match, his/her options can adjust for weapon types, weather, time of day, permission to auto-aim, cops and pedestrians, or most importantly, decide how much of Liberty City to utilize. If you host, you can allow for anything from a block of a borough to the entire expanse of the game's terrain. Your multiplayer rank will go from 1 to 10. Rank is rooted in money. The more dough you collect, the faster you'll rank up. Certain modes, like Team Deathmatch, offer more opportunities for big cash grabs.
Speaking of those modes, we tried out four of them during the studio visit: Team Deathmatch, Cops & Crooks, GTA Race, and a co-op mission, Hangman's NOOSE (capitalized for emphasis). All four are diverse in gameplay style and rules, and quite frankly, we're impressed with the way that the single-player game's engine integrates so effectively into multiplayer. After years of experiencing a solitary open-world on PS2, it's jarring to see that, yes, GTA can do multiplayer well on console. We were just as jazzed to find out that some elements of Rockstar's Social Club will integrate with multiplayer.
We kicked off with Team Deathmatch on Happiness Island, Liberty City's Ellis Island. It's a little more... capitalist... than standard TDM rules. You can rack up as many kills as you'd like, but the most important element is corpse looting. Every time you get a kill, your team earns money, but the biggest income increases come from raiding money from your deceased opponents. It's akin to the dead pedestrian money drops in single-player, but in TDM they're worth a lot more. Rockstar North has implemented another big tactic to spice up the mode: your avatar is invisible when crouched. In that sense, the benefit of running around the map comes at the cost of player visibility. It also allows for some big changes to gameplay, if, say, the host picks a big map with only sniper rifles.
It's in this mode that we discovered one of the most important tweaks of multiplayer: the blip system. At first, it doesn't seem as big of a deal as picking whether you want a shootout at the Statue of Happiness or Midtown Algonquin, but it's ultimately a huge factor in multiplayer. If your host picks close blips, you'll get an indication on your radar that enemies are close. If they're set to far away, you'll have to take a stealthier course and try to pick off the other team from afar. We weren't quite as sold on its importance until our host switched from close blips to far blips. It also plays a big role in modes beyond TDM.
Beyond that minutiae, TDM works on a simplistic level because it's immediately gratifying. Any crazy stunt that you've ever done in single-player works in multiplayer. Whether it's gruesome headshots, or our favorite, jumping out of a speeding car and taking out a competing pedestrian, it's a big rush, and honestly, we're impressed to see that unlike many games in which the core gameplay translates into tacked-on deathmatches, GTA4's transitions very smoothly. Also, we discovered during our last session, which took place in a prison yard in Alderney (New Jersey in the real world), that you can use the phone system to set up private chat sessions with select teammates and form pacts with them, all without hitting the Xbox or PlayStation buttons and fumbling around sub-menus. Cool stuff, indeed.
In our few rounds of Cops & Crooks, we discovered a few important elements: no matter how organized and mobilized your team is, all hell will break loose when cops and crooks meet up. The spawn points seem designed to create the biggest bottlenecks possible and prevent criminals from making a nonchalant exit to those extraction points. If you're looking for some action that's less confined than TDM and you've got enough friends online, Cops & Crooks is fun stuff.
Our favorite adversarial mode so far is GTA Race. In a lot of ways, it lets long-time GTA players live out their fantasies and it demonstrates how far GTA4 has come in regard to car handling. Live out your fantasies, you say? Yes. Remember how frustrating it was in the GTA3 Trilogy to lose a race to cheap AI, since you couldn't shoot at them? Now, not only can you shoot at them, you can create a roadblock and snipe away at them from afar. GTA Race puts more of the "auto" in Grand Theft Auto while staying true to the anarchy of the series.
The host can pick any vehicle class, from muscle and sports cars to SUVs and boats. There's the choice of either a free race, in which you'll simply hit your lap points, or Cannonball Run, in which you'll have a set course that sends you around an area to get to the end of a lap. There seem to be myriad tracks to choose from, plus you can tweak them. The weapons choices are just as customizable as in other modes, so if you want to allow rocket launchers (and who wouldn't?), you can blow up fellow participants with RPGs. Same goes for car respawns, pedestrian presence, etc. If you've blown up your car and you're near the checkered flags, you can even finish a race on foot.
The beauty of GTA Race lies within its controlled chaos. After trying out a fairly linear race within Algonquin, we moved to another map called "Taxiing," set in Liberty City's equivalent of JFK Airport. "Blood on the Tarmac" would be a better way to describe it. Nearly every one of our races began with an attempt to race and within one minute, half of the participants in our eight-person match had resorted to trying to kill anyone passing them on the race course. Our Rockstar PR rep took to jacking every car in his vicinity to make a massive roadblock in one of the course's bottlenecks. Another person sat on the side trying to shoot out tires. In the meantime, planes were taking off and landing, which adds another dangerous factor into the map. After fifteen minutes of essentially playing "crabs in a bucket," we took it upon ourselves to get back on track and try to hit the finish line. We got third place, but not before we got sidetracked at least twice by a few grudges on the jetway.
After three hours of finding new ways to screw over other players, we took a step in a different direction with Hangman's NOOSE, a co-op mission. Co-op gives you brief, story-based missions to play with your buddies online. In this mission, crime boss Kenny Petrovic has just landed at the airport, but LCPD's SWAT teams are trying to make an interception. It's up to you and your friends to shoot your way through the cops, get Kenny across the tarmac to an escape chopper, then fly him to the extraction point. The catch is that unless a team member loses all of his or her lives, all of you must get there in one piece. Mission difficulty also will determine how big your payout is, and therefore how much it affects your rank.
We played through it twice on both easy and medium difficulty. Either way, it's quite harrowing; the first time, we got stuck in an armored SWAT car as we tried to stave off police officers from shooting down the escape chopper. The chopper made it to the extraction point, but one of our teammates had to fly back and rescue us. Unfortunately, the cops incapacitated the chopper, so we had to drive the van out of the airport. The line-of-sight police radar still applies to this mode, so we ducked, swerved, got caught, then drove off a freeway and destroyed the van before running on foot. Meanwhile, SWAT choppers were in hot pursuit, and cop cars followed us nearly the entire way to the extraction point. If this mode is a snippet of what we can expect in three weeks, we're looking forward to screaming orders at our friends through a headset ASAP.
Now that we've seen the scope of what Grand Theft Auto IV offers, from single-player to multiplayer, we're very excited for the final product. Prior to our demo, details had been vague regarding the game's multiplayer offerings, but now that we've tested out three of the adversarial modes and one of the co-op missions, we're confident that Rockstar's next installment can revolutionize the franchise in huge strides (multiplayer) as well as many of the subtle ones that we've noted in single-player. Get ready for the world's biggest sick day in three weeks, and don't be surprised if the content's slow that day from us, either. Odds are we'll be online with you.
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After two profane rounds of TDM, we jumped into the next mode, Cops & Crooks, which can span all of Liberty City. Substitute "cat" for the former, and "mouse" for the latter, and you've got the fundamental idea behind this section of multiplayer. Criminal teams have a designated VIP, dubbed a crime boss. As long as the boss is alive, the game is on. Even if other teammates are killed, they can continue to respawn near the boss. Ultimately, the criminals are trying to get to an extraction point, which is represented with a blue square on the radar. The catch, however, is that they can't see any police presence on their radars. Cops, on the other hand, can see the crooks, but don't have any sense of where the extraction point is.
That was all good preparation for our finale with GTA Race, a three-lap round on "Stars In Your Eyes," a deadly race around Star Junction, Liberty City's equivalent of Times Square. After lots of shouting and "F Us" on the wide-open airport section, the close quarters of Star Junction felt even deadlier. Since it's a smaller map, there's room for big stunts, plenty of shootouts -- you can pick up new weapons if you slow down and drive into them -- and, most importantly, plenty of Liberty City transit buses to make roadblocks. In both GTA Race and Team Deathmatch, you'll know when a round is coming to an end as the GTA4 theme starts to play. That's your indication that thirty seconds are left. As we heard the music hit on our final round of GTA Race, we started to feel a bit sad that we'd have to wait another few weeks to jump online and test the limits of our friendships. Of the three adversarial modes we played, it's GTA Race that feels most true to the spirit of the franchise.