GTA IV

[leowyatt]

hehehe

Seems the places all signed a agreements not to post anything before Monday.

[Haly]

Come Tuesday, you are all gits

[leowyatt]

Yeah but less than 7 days later you'll be revelling in the GTA goodness

[Davey_Pitch]

Originally Posted by leowyatt

Yeah but less than 7 days later you'll be revelling in the GTA goodness

Indeed, I fully intend to destroy the game inside a week, especially at the weekend when I've intentionally made sure I have nothing to do. Lynnie has already been warned

[leowyatt]

US, April 21, 2008 - Grand Theft Auto IV is just a week away. To prep you for one of the most anticipated games of all time, IGN is bringing you a week's worth of features. Liberty City is perhaps the most important element of GTA IV. Without the level of detail and the atmosphere of Liberty City, the rest of the game might not have been as great a success. So we begin our week of GTA coverage with a discussion with Rockstar North Art Director Aaron Garbut about the creation of Liberty City.


The setting of every GTA game has been crucial in dictating the tone and the mood of the game experience -- why did you decide to base the game in Liberty City for GTA IV?

Aaron Garbut: Liberty City was our first attempt at a fully realized 3D city many years ago, at the time simply making an open world that can be interacted with in so many ways was a challenge. We had a lot to learn and we were making it all up as we went. I think [the original] Liberty City was a great world to play about in and it was a great experience for us to make, but it wasn't New York. While loosely based on New York it had elements of many other cities and was as much a generic American city with a Manhattan-esque skyline in the middle.


The city's bridges are closed down due to terrorist threats at the start of GTA IV.

Rockstar is based in New York and over the years many of us have been over from Edinburgh numerous times. We all knew what an amazing, diverse, vibrant, cinematic city it is. And the guys in the New York office lived that every day. I think because we really felt that we had never properly based one of our GTA cities on New York it seemed like now would be a good time to do that. And since we were hoping to push the detail, variety and life, for lack of a better word, to such a degree it seemed that basing the game in a city so synonymous with these things was a great fit.

In GTA IV, Liberty City is much closer to New York than it was in GTA III. What prompted the decision to go for a more faithful representation?

Garbut: We've moved slowly in that direction through each Grand Theft Auto. In GTA III, Liberty City was very much its own place. It obviously had elements of New York along with other cities but there were no landmarks and nothing deliberately recognizable. In Vice City, and then more so in San Andreas, we started to take real landmarks and mix them in to our versions of the city. I think this is just us continuing down that path we had already started on. It's one of the reasons we felt comfortable redoing Liberty City. We spend years of our lives making these worlds we don't want to retread old ground and "up-res" something we had already done, that would be soul destroying. By going back to basics, throwing away the original Liberty City and building an entirely new city based on New York we were able to keep it fresh for ourselves and by extension for the people that will play it.

Apart from the name, was anything retained from the old version of Liberty City or did you start fresh?

Garbut: There's nothing that links them other than name and general feel. We started from scratch. Looking to New York itself as a basis and reference point, not to our old work. There might be a few references to GTAIII our artists have slipped in there but that's all they are, it's a completely reinvented, fresh take on Liberty City as New York, rather than Liberty City as an American metropolis. It's important to stress though that we never limited ourselves in keeping faithful to the real city. We treated Liberty as a separate place just as we had in the past. It's a distilled, exaggerated New York, a caricature of a city and not a brick for brick recreation. We exaggerated the best and worst bits, twisted the real city to suit our needs and left out whatever we felt wasn't necessary.


How large is this Liberty City compared to the version in GTA III?

Garbut: In terms of pure landmass its roughly three times as big. But it's far more dense, varied and detailed. I didn't actually realize how much more dense and detailed until I reminded myself just now by overlaying the two maps. There is so much more of everything in GTAIV.

The architecture in the game is stunning, particularly the skyscrapers of Algonquin and the level of detail in building design is mind-boggling. Do you have any architects working on your team?

Garbut: We have a broad cross-section of backgrounds on the art team, architects among them. But every artist has a great eye for both detail and the bigger picture. The same artists model the buildings, lay out the city and place the props. Everyone on the team has dedicated a large part of their lives over the past three years to create as detailed a city as possible, and every one of them has taken a great deal of pride in making their own part of the game as unique, crafted and beautiful as they could.

Every building looks different, every street corner has its own unique feel, even the textures on the road surfaces look different. How did you collect all the source material that must have been involved?

Garbut: First, we flew the entire team out to spend some time in New York at the start of the project, we do this at the start of each GTA. The guys in the New York office did an amazing job of organizing this so we could see all the best and worst parts of the city. Again we do this for every GTA, we take the research very seriously and I think we all have numerous stories of the weird or scary things that we end up seeing and experiencing or the bizarre places we end up. For those who hadn't been it is also a chance to get a feel for the place.

We took around a quarter of a million photos and a silly amount of video footage. We spent another year or so working up the city based on this research then about a year or so ago we flew a smaller group across for more research. We also had a full time research team based in New York to handle our numerous little requests for particular details – anything from ethnic breakdowns of particular areas to photos of certain interior types or videos of traffic patterns. I have 20 DVDs of traffic flows at random junctions at various times of the day sitting on my desk here as an example, and a few hours of footage of a night in a Russian supper club. They also sent across various reports, census data, even information on drainage, sewage, electrical and other infrastructure. Some of this is obviously superfluous in some respects, but it's important to start everyone thinking about how something works so they can build with that in mind.


What we wouldn't give for an upskirt shot of the Statue of Happiness.

I keep seeing game worlds of sprawling futuristic metropolis or whatever and the first thing that occurs to me is where the hell do people buy milk, where do they get a cup of coffee? It's too easy to get lost in the aesthetics of something and forget to think in those terms. How does it work? How do these people live their lives? Where do they eat? Where do they work? How do they get home? Where do they park their cars? When you start thinking along those lines it gets easier to work on something of this scale. It's emulating life so you have to imagine living in the world you are making.

How do you fit so much detail for such a large city onto a single disc?

Garbut:We have some very sophisticated compression algorithms that are working some black magic on the data. We're used to squeezing a lot onto a disk.

Every street in the game has a name. What prompted the decision to go into that much detail?

Garbut: Detail was a bit of a mantra across every aspect of the project. Our goal was to distill GTA down into its core elements and add an intense amount of detail and finesse. Whether graphical or otherwise.

The billboard scattered throughout the city really add to the sense of realism, particularly as they tie in with radio ads and the Internet. At what stage do the billboards get designed and who comes up with the ideas?

Garbut: The billboards themselves come fairly late in the day, maybe six months ago. But the design department has been working intensely for years creating hundreds of brands and products. The ideas come from all over the place from the designers themselves, from Dan and Lazlow in New York, from environment artists. From email threads. Anywhere, really. But they integrate completely with the rest of the artwork even to the point where you'll probably not notice, but it's there and it adds to the subtlety and the feel of Liberty City as a real place.

The character artists would use clothing and sports branding on the characters, shop windows contain branding at a minute detail for items they are selling in a corner shop window or on a larger scale the shop fitting, logos and coloring. You'll see branding for oil companies on barrels, gas stations and gas attendants clothing and then when you visit some of the more industrial areas of the map you'll see the same branding on industrial facilities. We even created history in the branding with older variations on old painted ads fading on the side of old buildings. You'll see virtual artists advertised outside galleries, see some of their work through the window and then see other examples in some of the homes you'll get inside. Tiny businesses, dry cleaners for example will have a store on a certain street, and you will see their van driving around the area.


There's great variety in the pedestrians you pass in the streets.

There are stickers, graffiti, posters, signage, billboards, adds on the internet, phone numbers to call, company cars and vans, products, tv shows, films, radio shows, theatres, fashion, jewelry, food, drink, sweets, cigarettes, pharmaceuticals, businesses, perfume, institutions, law firms, banks, credit cards, garages, warehouses, car dealers, city services, shops, airlines, travel agents, sports teams and brands, the list goes on and on. And they are referenced and cross-referenced in as many ways as we can over as many types of media and situations as we can think of.

There's a real sense of diverse neighborhoods in the game, which is very close to the real New York. How did you go about capturing that feeling of diversity?

Garbut: Attention to detail and research firstly. It came from seeing the places first hand and experiencing them, and from taking enough photos to capture that experience. Some of the diversity comes from each artist having a lot of ownership over their own areas of the world. That's been a conscious thing since GTA III. Generally we create a road network and leave it to each of the artists to do what they want with their bit of the world. Obviously some key features need to be included and sometimes for various reasons a little bit of swapping about occurs but generally each bit of the world belongs to a certain artist. I think that ownership leads to diversity.

The pedestrians help to really bring the city alive. How much research went into capturing the right look for them all?

Garbut: Like everything else, a lot. The character department trawled through some of the countless photos that were taken and created mood boards for each area that collected images of what we felt were representative people from those areas. This was balanced by census data to give us ethnic mixes for each area.

When did you start designing the look for the peds? Did you worry about having to reflect changing fashions as the development process advanced?

Garbut: We started designing the look of the peds at the beginning of the project along with everything else. We were very conscious of fashion throughout this and all the previous GTA games. We've had discussions for years about things that to other companies would seem ridiculously insignificant, and maybe they are, but I think when all these tiny details add up they create something unique. We were never specifically worried about fashion changing on us. I think we managed to keep up with it. We have got a really current look to the characters that I think captures this moment in time very well. The character artists have done a fantastic job with this.

How many different character models are there for the people of Liberty City?

Garbut: Again, a lot! They are created in packs that contain various top and bottom half's along with specific props, hats, swappable faces and clothes, textures, etc. That way the same ped pack can create a huge amount of distinctive people. You can populate a street with a single ped pack and it appears to be filled with unique people and we have a good amount loaded at once. On top of them we have a large number of more unique characters for specific purposes, and on top of them we have a huge amount of story characters or secondary characters that help move the plot along or are used in missions. There is an exponential increase in character variation and detail over previous GTAs. I doubt there are many games that have this level of variety.

I heard peds talking in a wide variety of languages across the city, lots of Chinese in Chinatown, Russian in Hove Beach etc. How many different languages are represented in the game?

Garbut: One of the things I love most about New York is the amazing mix of people. We tried to capture this visually and for this to work as well as it needed to and to set the correct vibe of each area we had to do it audibly too. Its one of the many distinctive things about New York, as you walk down the street you'll see so many nationalities, hear so many languages and accents. So wherever it was appropriate we do that in Liberty.

What was the biggest challenge for you in designing Liberty City and its inhabitants?

Garbut:The scale. The sheer size of the city at the detail and density that we've aimed for is a massive undertaking. Similarly with the detail we've put into our characters and vehicles, the way we've added detail to the interactions with them whether that's through animation, AI, physics, audio or script -- simply creating all this stuff was a huge job. When you start thinking about keeping a consistency across that, whether that is a consistent look, a consistent feel, or even just a consistent level of detail or quality it gets to be an even more difficult job.


Name these famous NYC landmarks.

What single design feature are you most proud of?

Garbut: Not one particular thing -- the opposite, really. I love the cohesiveness of the entire experience. It feels to me like a real place. The "living, breathing city" phrase gets bandied about a lot, but I think this feels more vibrant and alive than anything I've experienced in a game. When you have that feeling, and you are standing on top of a skyscraper with the world sprawled out beneath you and you know you can climb down and visit every inch that you can see and that it will all feel as vibrant, varied and detailed as the area you are in, I think that's pretty special.

[Davey_Pitch]

One week to go, woot!

[leowyatt]

aye by this time next week I should have played some of the game, assuming I can swing a copy from my local Asda

[Haly]

Originally Posted by Davey_Pitch

Indeed, I fully intend to destroy the game inside a week, especially at the weekend when I've intentionally made sure I have nothing to do. Lynnie has already been warned

I'll cross my fingers you do But don't want you rushing it for me

[Joe 90]

Originally Posted by leowyatt

hehehe

Seems the places all signed a agreements not to post anything before Monday.

nnnoooooooooooooooooooooooo

i've got monday off work, but not tuesday

and now my flatmates will no doubt miss the post man...
(hope its royal mail who have the code to our door)

[leowyatt]

Originally Posted by |Show|

nnnoooooooooooooooooooooooo

If anyone is caught selling the game early then they will be barred from selling any future, rockstar, sony, etc games

I think midnight Tuesday is the best bet for all of us.