San Andreas set the expectation that every GTA would go bigger and sillier – GTA 4 is set in one big city, rather than an entire state. This wasn’t what everyone wanted from Rockstar in 2008, and some of that criticism was fair. To a younger generation playing GTA Online now with its numerous expansions, heists and suite of expensive vehicles, this would probably seem like pretty basic stuff, but clearly it taught Rockstar so much for the future.
Mostly, I just thought it was amazing you could encounter other human players in a Rockstar open world using the 'free mode' option. I played a fair few hours of GTA's debut online component at the time, and I recall it being something of a prototype for what GTA Online is now: a chaotic playground where everyone's trying to kill other players for laughs. In my mind, the only comparable leap in recent gaming history is GTA 3's own transition from 2D to 3D. That the developer went from the simple character models and cardboard-looking buildings of Los Santos to this rich HD vision of GTA in just over three years is remarkable. Rockstar’s version of New York has golden sunsets, numerous landmarks and no wasted space – it’s a compressed and gorgeous encapsulation of the real thing, a deliberate move away from the simpler-styled (but gorgeous) sprawl that San Andreas was. Much as I like Niko Bellic, though, Liberty City is the part of GTA 4 I still think about the most. It dares to take its protagonist seriously (but not too seriously), and asks the player to do the same. I feel like it's easy to be sniffy about stories in big, triple-A games, comparing them unfavourably to movies or TV, but I really like the writing and voice acting in GTA 4. Importantly, they let you determine Niko's morality, based on your assumptions about who he used to be and who he should become in his new life in Liberty City.
I recalled thinking these were gimmicky but memorable when I first played GTA 4, but you still don't see them done that frequently or this well in most modern big games.
Gta 4 niko series#
Rockstar brought narrative choices to the series for the first time, including a situation where you decide which of your friends live or die. The story is more daft than serious on a moment-to-moment basis than I remembered, with a vibrant cast of friends for Niko and a few well-developed villains. These signs of age don’t stop GTA 4 from being enjoyable now, though. The driving, meanwhile, is a little too stiff and punishing for car chases – GTA 5 got it just right, but some purists might consider 4's steering more realistic. The melee fights, where characters ludicrously dance around each other like they’re two posh English gentlemen having a boxing match in the 18th century, aren’t exactly Arkham Knight. It was a decent solution for the time, but the gunplay feels outdated now – it’s not very slick to control, and it was never a match for the refined combat in Gears. This was the first GTA to introduce cover shooting, since combat was the main weakness of the original Xbox games.
Playing GTA 4 now shows how much Rockstar learned in the 5.5 years leading up to 5’s release.
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