GTA San Andreas Goes Swimming, Gangbanging, Smuggling

Thanks to Eurogamer for its article revealing a number of new details on Rockstar's forthcoming Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, as printed in the UK's Official PlayStation 2 magazine. Topics discussed include the 'invention' of swimming ("We just got pissed off with people saying, 'We can't do swimming'... so if you drive off a bridge you're not going to drown"), the advent of gangs ("You can now recruit a gang and take over territories with them, and then lose territories if you don't look after them. So you've got the idea that bits of the map become personalised to you as much as your own character becomes personalised to you"), and the widening out of the game world ("We love, from a technical point of view, the driving in the open spaces on Smuggler's Run. It's awesome. Now you'll be able to do that in GTA, with all of the GTA gameplay.")

Bitch at What Makes You Rich

[illuminata]

On characters and satire: "We've developed our characters a bit more and to that extent it's more serious. But it's still very much trying to be funny at all points. The satire... I suppose it's levelled at the broader weirdness of America and American consumerism and American action movies as well."

Oh no, consumerism didn't do an ounce of good for this game. Nor did this game try not to exploit consumerism with it's giant advertising campaigns.

I've noticed this since GTA3, but it still find it funny how they crack jokes at the very culture that makes their games sell in the millions.

Re:Bitch at What Makes You Rich

[Anonymous Coward]

Very true...

But explain why this is a bad thing?

Re:Oh, the possibilities...

[(trb001)]

They designed it so you wouldn't HAVE to load your save game when you died. One of fundamental principles in making a video game is that you want to suck your audience in and not let them go. If you die and you have to reload, that's a perfect time for the player to decide "Well, I just died, time for me to go [do something useful]". That's not what they want. In GTA:III, you came back at the hospital/police station. In GTA:VC you had a taxi waiting to take you to the last mission you were on. It's all very well designed ploys by Rockstar to make sure you never say "This is too time consuming, I'm going to go [do something useful]".

--trb

Re:Oh, the possibilities...

[Mechanik]

They designed it so you wouldn't HAVE to load your save game when you died.

I dunno about the rest of you but regardless of how well done and user friendly the "you just died" functionality was, if I failed a mission, I bloody well loaded up my last save point to maintain my previous stats and inventory. I'm willing to bet just about everyone else did this too.

Hell, I'm the kind of guy that used to hit the reset button back on my 486 DX33 while playing X-Wing because I didn't want my pilot to get captured or killed, and if I hit reboot before it saved the stats to the hard drive, I could just restart the mission.

Face it, these kinds of schemes are just way too easy to circumvent. As long as there are stats or an inventory that count for something, people will "cheat death" in the game.

Mechanik

Re:conspicuously absent

[NanoGator]

"from the article is the multiplayer option... no dice?"

I don't think the PS2 would be the best system to launch a multiplayer option. That's what PCs are for.