Noen interessante quotes fra Dan Houser i et eksklusivt intervju med UK OPM:
Problemer med diskplass:
“One area that I’m really involved in is creating the audio assets – I think we’ll have well over 400 speaking parts, which is insanity. The amount of studio time we’re having to get through and the amount of writing that’s involved, we’re more worried about getting it on the disc. That’s our initial challenge. We’re having to go to dual layer DVD because we’ve already filled up a full DVD. We’ve done some clever stuff with compressing it, but we were virtually full on the disc with Vice City – this time we’re overfilling the disc to the max.”
Om å få spillet konsist og fokusert:
"We are very conscious of that being the potential problem. And so, styling-wise, everything has to feel as though it matches perfectly. The controls have to feel like they’re from the same game, the animations have to feel like they’re from the same game, the art direction has to feel like it’s from the same game. Even the story – which might be outlandish, even though you thought you were in a game about being in a gang running drugs or whatever – needs to make sense at that point. We do want to stretch stuff, because we do want to give people a broad experience. Here it always feels like you’re in the same game. Now I’m having my hair cut, now I’m running around in a car… It all feels like the same world. Plus, of course, you have the freedom to do it or not to do it. We do some sections where you go first-person, but they make sense as well of where you are in a mission".
Grafikk og gameplay:
“We’ve done a lot of work on the graphics from a technical standpoint. We’ve completely rewritten the render pipeline. The detail and the scope you now see, we couldn’t get before. There were bits in the Vice City map that we felt were a little under populated. And even in the countryside, it feels like there’s more possibility for action. We’ve got real-time reflections in mirrors, we’ve done a huge amount of work on the lighting system. There are shadows, which give us a gameplay thing we never had previously, because you can hide in them. Now you can sneak in a GTA game for the first time. You can have a mission where you can play it balls out with a machine gun, running and trying to blast everyone, or you could sneak around and pick them off one by one. It gives a lot of choice.”
Gjenger:
“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.”
Karakter- og storyutvikling:
“If we’d both been playing for a while, your game would begin to feel very different from my game. We might be at the same point in the mission structure, but your character might look great, you know, have all these great attributes, have a lot of money coming in, but if I’m just focussed on the missions I might look like a piece of shit. It’s about giving people that freedom of choice. It’s still very much an action game, but there’s a whole world out there to explore if you want to. At points in the GTA existence we’ve gone very, very non-linear, like GTA2 was very, very non-linear. And we’ve tried to get the best of that which comes down to giving people the freedom of choice at any moment. You also get the advantage of a story which relies on emotion and characters. So the story opens up, it feels very non-linear, then it closes for a bit, then it opens up again: it works quite well, I think.”