GTAV

[Guest rumbo]

I want to make a game where you are stuck in apartment building, and that's the entire game. You wake up in a room not knowing how you got there, and the door is locked. Everything in the building is modelled to the most minute detail. Electrical wiring etc, and is able to be interacted with and these real world puzzles allow you to advance through the building to find out new things. The building seems strangely vacant at first, but then various "paranormal" events begin to occur, very subtle at first and increasingly hostile. Basically amnesia in a modern apartment building but with a lot of detail.

 

I'm starting to lose interest in the massive expansive city sandbox games, and would like to see games with a more narrow environmental scope, but with rich and detailed interactions within it.

[Guest iep]

I want to make a game where you are stuck in apartment building, and that's the entire game. You wake up in a room not knowing how you got there, and the door is locked. Everything in the building is modelled to the most minute detail. Electrical wiring etc, and is able to be interacted with and these real world puzzles allow you to advance through the building to find out new things. The building seems strangely vacant at first, but then various "paranormal" events begin to occur, very subtle at first and increasingly hostile. Basically amnesia in a modern apartment building but with a lot of detail.

 

I'm starting to lose interest in the massive expansive city sandbox games, and would like to see games with a more narrow environmental scope, but with rich and detailed interactions within it.

 

have you played Silent Hill 4: The Room?

 

tho different, Hotel Dusk: Room 215 had a similar concept and was pretty involving as well.

[Guest rumbo]

nah havnt tried those. I'll have a look. Cheers.

[Guest iep]

nah havnt tried those. I'll have a look. Cheers.

 

SH4 has the exact same premise that you describe. enjoy, it is one of my fav games ever.

[Braintree]

Since GTA IV and with Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar's games are like huge boring po-faced overwhelming epics with disappointing mission after disappointing mission.

 

Red Dead Redemption was fucking amazing. It was like playing a character in Once Upon a Time in the West. The game mechanics, graphics, generative missions, and side quests were all outstanding. And I played way too much hold'em in that game.

 

I've not played much of it, only the beginning, and I watched my brother play through some of the later missions, and listened to what he said, and read other people's opinions on the game. And what they said matched what I thought; that, like GTA IV, Rockstar put more time and effort into just creating the world, story and cutscenes, that it meant the missions suffered. They're not as surprising, exciting, varied, creative as they could be. That they're largely samey and ordinary. I might play the game now I've finally got a hdtv. Gamers are a little bit sensitive to criticism of modern games and can't understand why anyone would be so negative and angry about just a videogame. Because it makes sense to want to enjoy a game. But what was so bad about GTA IV was that it never intends to hit any highs to excite and amaze you, it merely intends for you to play the game for as long as you possibly can, and that feels like a cheat. So they take away instant save, make you visit one of your few safe houses, run up the stairs, through the door, save by the bed, when if the game was truly freeform they'd allow you to save using your mobile phone, or maybe that's not immersive enough, they could allow you to save by falling alseep on a bench. But finding a bench might not be easy. They also take away mid-mission checkpoints purely to artificially lengthen the game just a little bit more, but the affect it has on your enjoyment is huge. If you play the game knowing it intends to have no highs, like the kind in San Andreas where you get to fly a fighter jet, then it's just a procession of things to do, which is what work is. Except work has a point to it, and an end result that needs to be done; you're not being cheated by doing it. Plus sometimes you get paid and the whole experience feels good and rewarding.

 

There has been a definite shift in tone in Rockstar's games. GTA 3 was never silly, and it never felt like work. They made the idea of finding different types of cars and driving them to a garage actually fun, whereas GTA IV struggled to make chasing cars around the streets fun because they strangle all the spontaneity out of it. Like the overlong shootouts, it's just a procession of things to do, to move on to the next mission, which is the same thing, but in a bigger warehouse with more baddies. Developers can't dedicate so much time and resources and effort into creating huge worlds without it affecting the actual creative part of the game, which is the missions. That's why I play GTA. The missions take the enjoyment you can have just messing about in the city and amplifies it. I play the game in anticipation of what cool missions will be next.

 

I loved Red Dead Revolver on the PS2 and raced through it because it's hugely linear and straight forward, it gives you the great moments without forcing you to do the time consuming work in between. I saw a mission in Red Dead Redemption where I thought he'd get to do a train robbery, which is the kind of thing that has to be in the game. What he actually did in the mission was shoot some enemies, climb the train, press some switches, shoot more enemies, mission ended. The game told him to climb the train and press the switches. There was barely a reason to do the mission. In GTA IV, one mission I was really looking forward to was the bank robbery, because one of the first screenshots shown of the game was of the lead character inside a vault. I continued playing the game until I reached that mission. I wanted something more comprehensive than the bank robbery mission in Vice City, where you do a few missions that lead up to the robbery and recruit your team. But in GTA IV you don't do missions to recruit your team, I think the missions preceding the bank robbery just involve driving around your mate as he tells you about the big job. You're not really involved, it's such an anticlimax. They could make it as exciting as possible, yet go the route of bringing it down to earth, making it completely dull. Then you get to the bank and a cutscene begins and skips the whole thing, and then you play out the bank escape from Heat in the streets. But even that is poor because you're shuffled along from area to area, told where to go. You do have some shootouts in the subway which are cool, but it's heavy, turning is heavy, moving is heavy, doing anything is heavy, but the mission sets the context of escaping from a bank trying to survive and get to safety so in that sense it's almost fun.

 

Of what I've seen and played of Red Dead Redemption (and GTA IV), the cutscenes are really boring. The writing is good, the voice acting is good, the animation is okay, but they're not succinct, they're not funny. GTA 3's cutscenes were both of those things, but also what was effective is when you have good voice acting and exaggerated hand and body movements that those two things done well mean you don't need to bother with facial animation because you're already convinced. The cutscenes in Vice City were entertining as well, San Andreas was where they got serious and actually tried to write a proper story.

 

Christ, that is a novel you just wrote.

 

I agree about GTA IV, but RDR had differing missions of all types. They had recurring missions, but I thought they were varied enough to hold my interest for a long time. The only thing that annoyed me was having destinations that were incredibly far away. I loved the missions that would generate while you were on the road in the middle of nowhere. Sometimes you would be helping someone, and sometimes it would be someone acting like they need help and try to rob you.

 

The cars in GTA IV had horrible handling. Whereas in GTA III, it was immaculate. I loved taking the Banshee to top speed and power sliding around corners.

[Silent Member]

nah havnt tried those. I'll have a look. Cheers.

 

SH4 has the exact same premise that you describe. enjoy, it is one of my fav games ever.

Yeah, except for the majority of the game where you awkwardly jog around a subway chased by ghosts you can't kill.

[Guest AcrossCanyons]

i thought the car handling in gta iv was amazing. it takes a long time to get used to but once you've nailed it the physics feel just right.

[Guest theSun]

i thought the car handling in gta iv was amazing. it takes a long time to get used to but once you've nailed it the physics feel just right.

 

i thought they did a great job with the realism in 4, just not enough cool shit.

 

the missions were ok, you have to expect a lot of easy missions to get you used to different cars/guns

[Guest AcrossCanyons]

oh yeah, the missions definitely sucked (atleast the majority) but everything else was pretty spot on.

[Guest]

V vs. SA

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftk3f_0WZww

[Guest Gary C]

V vs. SA

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftk3f_0WZww

 

Haha, that's amazing.

[Braintree]

LA sucks.

[Guest Gary C]

i thought the car handling in gta iv was amazing. it takes a long time to get used to but once you've nailed it the physics feel just right.

 

i thought they did a great job with the realism in 4, just not enough cool shit.

 

the missions were ok, you have to expect a lot of easy missions to get you used to different cars/guns

 

Does anyone else swing the camera in the direction you're heading as you take corners? I've never understood complaints about the handling (only in intentionally bad cars), so maybe it's about how you drive.

 

Edit:

 

 

So, the red line is the path of my car as I drift around a corner, but the blue is my line of sight. I find it helps to judge the angles of entry and exit from a corner and provide an earlier chance to see what's coming next. Maybe it's just me.

[spratters]

I want to make a game where you are stuck in apartment building, and that's the entire game. You wake up in a room not knowing how you got there, and the door is locked. Everything in the building is modelled to the most minute detail. Electrical wiring etc, and is able to be interacted with and these real world puzzles allow you to advance through the building to find out new things. The building seems strangely vacant at first, but then various "paranormal" events begin to occur, very subtle at first and increasingly hostile. Basically amnesia in a modern apartment building but with a lot of detail.

 

I'm starting to lose interest in the massive expansive city sandbox games, and would like to see games with a more narrow environmental scope, but with rich and detailed interactions within it.

[Ego]

I constantly adjust the camera as well (the default position is too low anyway.) I love the car physics in GTA IV.

[Guest Iain C]

 

Normality - I loved this game when I was a kid. Revisited it earlier in the year after it was rereleased on GOG.com, and it was interesting to have some of that nostalgia well and truly shattered. Most of the humour falls completely flat, and the voice acting was mostly terrible.

 

Had its moments, though. Puzzle design was a strong point, most solutions are well-hinted, and there's even multiple solutions for one or two of them.

 

Overall, a generous 6/10.

[Guest theSun]

V vs. SA

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftk3f_0WZww

 

Haha, that's amazing.

 

funny, i don't think V looks slightly better, i think it looks quite a bit better. rockstar has never been about the graphics though.

 

if i want real looking cgi i'll watch avatar, i play gta to blow shit up and kill needlessly.

[Guest iep]

 

Normality - I loved this game when I was a kid. Revisited it earlier in the year after it was rereleased on GOG.com, and it was interesting to have some of that nostalgia well and truly shattered. Most of the humour falls completely flat, and the voice acting was mostly terrible.

 

Had its moments, though. Puzzle design was a strong point, most solutions are well-hinted, and there's even multiple solutions for one or two of them.

 

Overall, a generous 6/10.

 

instant wave of memories upon seeing that screenshot there. i'd totally forgotten about this one. but i aint got time to go back generous 6/10s :/

[Guest Gary C]

Suspiciously quiet on GTAV news. Some developer put an October release on his LinkedIn profile, but it'll more likely be early 2013.

 

Something's brewing though. I feel it.

[Squee]

Suspiciously quiet on GTAV news. Some developer put an October release on his LinkedIn profile, but it'll more likely be early 2013.

 

Something's brewing though. I feel it.

 

I believe/hope they'll put it out in October but if everything goes wrong we'll probably just have to wait till May 2013. Every now and then they do put out two big games a year (2008: GTAIV, Bully: Scholarship Edition, Midnight Club: Los Angeles), and I don't think Max Payne 3 will push that many copies whereas if they release GTAV in October they'll have a guaranteed Christmas seller.

[chim]

I want to make a game where you are stuck in apartment building, and that's the entire game. You wake up in a room not knowing how you got there, and the door is locked. Everything in the building is modelled to the most minute detail. Electrical wiring etc, and is able to be interacted with and these real world puzzles allow you to advance through the building to find out new things. The building seems strangely vacant at first, but then various "paranormal" events begin to occur, very subtle at first and increasingly hostile. Basically amnesia in a modern apartment building but with a lot of detail.

 

I'm starting to lose interest in the massive expansive city sandbox games, and would like to see games with a more narrow environmental scope, but with rich and detailed interactions within it.

 

This is an uncannily appropriate response. The game's Normality by the way.

[Npoess]

It's been nearly 6 months since the announcement of Grand Theft Auto V, and while we were treated to a trailer shortly after, Rockstar have remained tight-lipped on the all-important details such as release date and protagonist.

 

Fans have never been busier, however, and the GTANet Community in particular is rife with analysis and speculation.

 

One of the most detailed topics over at GTAForums is Mapping Los Santos. Eagle-eyed members have taken to analysing the buildings and locations shown within the GTA V trailer, matching them to real-life points in Los Angeles. To get a feel of how vast the map could be, forum member SonofUgly pinned all the locations discovered to a Google Map. Downtown LA, Hollywood, Santa Monica and as far south as San Pedro all feature, making Rockstar's Los Santos look to be the most advanced and perfectly recreated city yet.

 

http://www.gtav.net/...ping-los-santos

 

 

Not sure how I feel about Hollywood (probably) being such a big part of the game.

[Guest Gary C]

[YO303]

The game looks beautiful. I wish there was a cheat code or something to unlocked all the maps, i can't be bother doing all the missions, i just enjoy driving around being insane.

[Guest theSun]

playing through the other gtas now. beat 3 in a few days, taking my time with vice city. hopefully i'll beat SA again before V comes out. love these games.

 

going back and playing 3, i think that's probably my favorite game ever. everything is just great, from the missions to the ambiance of LC to the radio banter, it's all fucking great.