Grand Theft Auto's DLC Direction

Rockstar Games creative VP Dan Houser talked about the change with Edge Online recently, and he believes that people are largely misremembering the series of GTA III games and their tone.

“We’re still figuring out what we’re going to do next, because of the downloadable content. I don’t think it’s set anything in stone, it’s just what we did with that game. The idea that the tone was identical from GTA III through to Vice City to San Andreas to Liberty City Stories to Vice City Stories is a little bit of revisionist history. It really wasn’t as close or as unified as all that — sometimes even within a game like San Andreas the tone moved a lot, and we desperately tried to make that make sense.”

Reflecting upon that, he does raise a good point about the tone in GTA 4 not being terribly different than GTA III or Vice City. The recent rumor about GTA 4’s downloadable content being a zombie outbreak doesn’t make much sense in this game’s universe, especially when considering Houser said, “As an overall package there are two episodes, and each episode works on its own, and as a whole it works well.”

Don’t expect it to connect directly to the end of GTA 4 or any of the critical decisions you made while playing through the game — Houser wasn’t even sure that the game was capable of tracking those decisions. Maybe he was playing coy in order to throw us off the scent, but the safe bet is that he was telling the truth. It’s a large enough undertaking for Rockstar to enter the world of downloadable content, let alone trying to work out a story that could acquiesce itself to the all of the difference choices gamers made in the original game.

As for plans for the extended future of the Grand Theft Auto series he doesn’t go into much detail, but I’ll tell you one thing, if I worked at Rockstar I would be pushing for an MMO, a Grand Theft Auto MMO encopasing a couple of city’s the scale of Liberty, Vice and San andreas combined! That right there is your World of Warcraft killer in a nutshell.*

*Ed: That sounds just like what APB is trying to achieve.

Last Updated: October 31, 2008