Rockstar has a lot to prove, but today's Take 2 conference delivered something of a delightful surprise for attendees: 3 minutes or so of actual GTA IV gameplay, running on 360 hardware and looking every bit as cool as the initial trailers have suggested.
Despite the presenter's insistence that IV offers "progressive
changes to the series", what we saw offered only a glimpse of the most basic gameplay - driving mechanics and walking around - and it all looked very familiar. The demo started off with a black menu screen, which is likely a temporary version, as is much of the user interface. The menu listed, from left to right, 'map', 'game', 'brief', 'stats', 'controls', 'audio' and 'display'.
In an announcement that is sure to drive fans wild, the presenter confirmed that GTA IV's scope and scale is on par with San Andreas - but much more focussed and packed with detail. As the game kicked off legitimately, Niko Bellic (lead character) is in the middle of the mock-New York streets, in Times Square. The traffic and most other AI characters are turned off, so it's hauntingly empty. However, the lighting and atmosphere is undeniably hot - it's night time and the hours start to pass, drawing out the sun and showing off the HDR lighting, which is very realistic.
According to the presenter, the official period of the game is present day - stylistically, it's an evolution of the style in GTA III that tells an "American dream, rags-to-better-rags" story.
Niko smoothly enters a black Lincoln Continental-lookalike and suddenly GTA IV comes together. There is the familiar circular map in the bottom left of the screen, the similarly familiar numerical score listing in the top right of the screen and that's it. There are no other UI elements on-screen yet.
Niko begins to cruise down the streets - rows and rows of wonderfully detailed buildings, storefronts and high-risers - and the initial look is identical to previous games. The camera is fixed 15 feet behind the bar and a little above. Some 50s era jazz is playing softly in the background, over the car's radio.
About a minute and a half into the demo, the sun is starting to peek over the building tops, revealing the details at street level - trash cans, incidental objects and all manner of bottles, newspapers and more. The lack of traffic and people is a little disappointing - we're keen to see how the game deals with foot traffic and the new AI routines.
Niko rounds a corner and ends up at the docks, similar to the waterside locales in the trailers. The water effects are just stunning, and the HDR plays off of the surface very impressively. Niko stands around not doing much, just performing little passive animations like turning his head and looking around, moving his arms and things like that. When he moves, his animations are impressively smooth and transition well.
Niko initiates a mission with his cell-phone, though it's not clear what you press to bring out the phone. A little Sony-Ericsson knock-off pops up on the lower right of the screen and some dialogue text appeared at the base of the screen, as voice acting hasn't been implemented yet. We don't get to see how the conversation ends or what happens when you accept the mission. The demo is cut short and leaves us hungry and scandalised by the questions raised.
And that's that. The demo ends. That's kind of a mundane preview, we know, but that's exactly what they want us to think. Even something as simple and bland as driving is very, very cool.
Lastly, as the demo ended and the screen was paused, we got the shortest glimpse of the map for a split second and indeed it's a big game. It looked like two enormous islands linked at the middle, but the glimpse was so short that we could be wrong there. However, in line with the presenter's comments, we're expecting San Andreas scale here.
There are still a truckload of bugs to be worked out - the framerate is a little worrying, as is the pop-up. With just a few months of development time left, we're hoping what we were shown was just an early build; otherwise, Rockstar still has a lot of work to do in order to make the October release date.
