Transcript BCO523: Game Design 30.05.2013 Anıl Yıldız

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The title features a game-world in which
emergent behaviors and a wide breadth of
player choices combine to create an amazing
gameplay experience where players feel truly
empowered to play however they want.
If sales can be extrapolated to popularity,
then Grand Theft Auto III and its sequel Grand
Theft Auto: Vice City have each captivated
more players than any other game of the
PlayStation 2 console generation.
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Reason: the games brilliantly combine
uniquely fun core mechanics with giving
players enough freedom in the environment
that the game becomes an entertaining
experience players will enjoy much longer
than almost any other action game.
Radical changes in games mechanics
compared to its predecessors. Such as topdown camera has been changed to a car
game chase cam.
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The title features a game-world in which
emergent behaviors and a wide breadth of
player choices combine to create an amazing
gameplay experience where players feel truly
empowered to play however they want.
If sales can be extrapolated to popularity,
then Grand Theft Auto III and its sequel Grand
Theft Auto: Vice City have each captivated
more players than any other game of the
PlayStation 2 console generation.
GTA III: Driving
GTA II: Driving
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From the very beginning of the series, the
Grand Theft Auto games’ biggest hook has
been their realistic setting with which anyone
who has driven a car in a city can immediately
connect.
Everyone has fantasized about avoiding a
traffic jam by popping the car up on to the
sidewalk like in an action movie. Anyone who
has seen a fancy vehicle pull up next to them
at a stoplight understands the desire to just
ditch your own car and take this better one.
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These are all taboo activities that many
people fantasize about on a daily basis.
Surely, they would never do them in real life,
but in the safe context of a game-world
where the worst consequence is having to
start your game over, who wouldn’t want to
try it out?
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Many of the design concepts found in the
third game are also present in the first,
whether it’s the ringing telephones giving
players their missions, the feel of a living city
with other cars and pedestrians all going
about their lives in a believable way, the
“rampage” mini-games, or the satirical nature
of the game-fiction including the highly
amusing car radio.
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Grand Theft Auto III is one of the few actionoriented games to present players with a
game-world that truly feels like it is alive.
GTA3 made that world believable, blending in
exactly enough reality to allow players to
suspend their disbelief.
Players can drive down any street or alley,
over any bridge, through any park, up any set
of stairs that is wide enough, and even use
ramps to make jumps over obstacles.
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There is very little sense of being artificially
constrained as is so often experienced in
most games, thus avoiding the sensation of,
“The designers did not want me to go there
so there’s an invisible wall blocking my way.”
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This consistency of world navigation is made
possible by a car physics simulation, which
includes enough responsiveness to make the
driving seem quasi-believable (at least in an
action movie sense), yet keeps the driving fun
and fairly forgiving.
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GTA3 creates the sense that this world does
not revolve around the player at all; the
player character is just one guy in a city full
of shady characters.
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Cars waiting for traffic lights, staying on the
right side of the road, honking at each other,
and some cars weaving in and out between
others
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If players run up and punch one of these
random civilians, he will fight back while the
other citizens flee in terror. Any police who
happen be around will run up to try to stop
the fight. If players stop their car in the
middle of street, traffic will stop and the
drivers will honk.
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The pedestrians and traffic on the street are
intelligent enough to support the illusion of
reality, but at the same time are not exactly
brilliant. For instance, the pedestrians
sometimes appear to be walking around the
world like zombies and can easily get hung
up on a car left parked in the middle of a
sidewalk.
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Clearly the designers came to the conclusion
that having enough NPCs to make the world
look truly alive was more important than
making each one of them super smart.
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The developers seem to have embraced a
cartoonish art style more compatible with
their limited graphical horsepower, probably
because they understood their limitations at
the start of development and decided to
embrace these restrictions instead of fighting
them.
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In Grand Theft Auto III, players are never able
to go inside buildings during gameplay, with
all interior interaction happening exclusively
during cut-scenes.
Once most players became familiar with this
restriction they understood the boundaries of
the simulation space and forgot about their
desire to go inside.
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The design centers the game on actions and
their consequences. For instance, players are
given the freedom to drive recklessly in the
city and run over whatever pedestrians
happen to be in their way. But if there
happens to be a police officer, players will
suddenly become wanted by the police for
their crime (which is represented on the
players’ wanted meter) and will need to avoid
the pursuing law enforcement until their
wanted level decreases.
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Similarly, players are able to steal any car
they want in the game, but if a police officer
witnesses the theft, the players’ wanted level
will increase. Stealing a police cruiser is also
possible, but the police become especially
mad when players do so and will pursue them
even more doggedly.
If players shoot a member of a gang, the
other members of the gang are liable to come
after them with guns blazing.
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The police make players think twice about the
choices they make. Players may need a car
right now to get through a mission, but
there’s a police officer watching. Can they
outrun the cops? Or do they have time to run
around the corner and try to steal a vehicle
when out of sight?
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Grand Theft Auto III’s level design is another
key component of the game that gives
players meaningful choices.
The missions are quite well set up to provide
players with a good variety of goals to
accomplish, all of which exploit the game’s
same core mechanics but reuse them in
interesting ways.
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Players will have missions where they need to
assassinate a particular enemy, steal a
specific car, pick up a person or a package
and drop them/it off at a second location,
and so on. The missions are set up to make
sure players explore all the different parts of
the city, frequently crossing the whole island
to accomplish a specific mission.
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From a level flow perspective, what’s most
interesting is how players can take any route
they like through the city to get somewhere.
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Furthermore, in some missions the target of
the job may move around the city space
freely and unpredictably.
Grand Theft Auto III is a game that causes
players to tell each other tales of the amazing
chase sequence they had with the police or all
the improvisation they used to pull off a
mission.
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Amidst all the emergent gameplay and
interesting choices, Grand Theft Auto III also
manages to tell a compelling story. The bulk
of this storytelling happens in cut-scenes,
but it is interesting to note how short and to
the point they are.
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The opening of the game manages to convey
a lot of information all in approximately two
minutes.
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The player character’s involvement in a bank
robbery, the girlfriend who betrayed him and
leaves him for dead, the trial that sends him
to jail, the main character’s subsequent
involvement in a prison transport break that
leaves him a fugitive from the law.
The game tells its story through more than
just the cut-scenes, with the believability of
Liberty City perfectly supporting the gamefiction.
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Players are sent on missions to various
neighborhoods that show the diverse types of
life that exist in the city, with the types of
cars driving around and the pedestrians
walking the sidewalks matching the flavor of
the neighborhoods appropriately, all
contributing to a remarkably consistent
world.
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The designers deliberately kept the main
character mute so players could feel more
immersed in the game, avoiding the distancing
effect of having a main character that talks. Since
players are already making choices in the gameworld that define the personality of their
character, keeping him from speaking allowed
this personality to be dominant in the players’
minds, instead of something the designers
established for them. Interestingly, Vice City
added speech for the main character, though this
was not particularly praised by users or the
press.
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There has been lots of complaints about the
game and its awards because of the fredoom
in game such as running over a pedestrian or
going on a killing spree.