A Living City

Grand Theft Auto III is one of the few action-oriented games to present players with a game-world that truly feels like it is alive . Unlike so many other games that have claimed to be set in the real-world, GTA3 made that world believable, blending in exactly enough reality to allow players to suspend their disbelief. First and foremost, the landscape of GTA3 allows players to navigate the city in any way they want. 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. 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. In GTA3 , players are confined by a limited number of tall walls and fencing but more by the water that surrounds the island on which the game is set. 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 . Similarly, though the cars are able to sustain much more damage than is realistic, if you treat a car badly enough, it will eventually explode, hopefully without you inside it.

Within the city, the game also presents a very believable traffic simulation, with 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. Similarly, the pedestrian simulation seems just as authentic , with citizens going about their own lives in the city instead of appearing to have been placed there strictly for the players benefit. In sharp contrast to most games, 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 . At the same time, both the traffic and pedestrian simulation will react to the players actions in a believable way. 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. All of this contributes to the feeling of a believable world. Though the game-world is far from real, the world is recognizable and these various systems create a consistent space in which players will enjoy playing. In a way sadly few games do, Grand Theft Auto III fosters the spirit of play in players, encouraging them to try out that crazy jump, see if they can find some way inside that fence to a tantalizing power-up , or daring them to try to outrun an entire SWAT team. David Jones, Creative Director at DMA Design when the first two Grand Theft Auto games were developed, has stated that the first goal of the games was to build a believable city environment in which gamers could have fun just playing around. Turning the game into a crime and car-jacking game came later, after the city simulation was already enjoyable by itself.

Despite Grand Theft Auto III s impressive world simulation, it is equally interesting-what the game-world does not attempt to do. 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. Furthermore, these civilians do not make much of an effort to get out of the way of a car heading straight for them. A more advanced simulation of these pedestrians could probably have fixed these problems, but might have made them more computationally expensive and meant fewer of these NPCs could be walking down the street at any one time. 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. So too with the art: if one looks at the graphics, no one piece of it is particularly breathtaking. But taken together, the graphics become impressive because of the sheer size of the city and the amount of variety contained in it. In order to make the world so large and to allow players to see so far at any one time, the game s art is all fairly low polygon. Indeed, 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. But players forgive the somewhat low-rent appearance of the game because of its incredible depth as a gameplay experience. In Grand Theft Auto III , players are never able to go inside buildings during gameplay, with all interior interaction happening exclusively during cut-scenes. Lots of games have certainly allowed players to go inside interior spaces, and this limitation is one of the most obvious omissions in GTA3 . Part of the problem inherent in developing a game based in a quasi-realistic world is that players will crave more and more realism as they play and may become frustrated when they reach the borders of the simulation. Yet one can understand why GTA3 s designers made that choice: given all the other systems and content they needed to create, being able to also go inside structures would have been a whole new headache and they would almost certainly not have had enough time to implement them at a high quality level. Indeed, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City included interior spaces but failed to implement them particularly well, making the interior sections some of the weakest and most frustrating parts of the games. In GTA3 , deciding not to let the players go inside was a wise choice, and once most players became familiar with this restriction they understood the boundaries of the simulation space and forgot about their desire to go inside.

Despite how much players are allowed to do in the game, it is interesting to note just how few actions players can actually perform. The whole game is based around moving through the environment, either in a car or on foot. Each mode is different, with foot travel accomplished by pressing the left stick in the direction you want your character to go, while driving involves steering the car with the left stick while accelerating, decelerating, or using the hand break with various buttons . Players are able to perform attacks in either mode, on foot using either brawling or guns, in a vehicle through ramming into targets (other vehicles or humans ), or through shooting out the window drive-by style. The interface for attacking is kept fairly simple, particularly when in vehicle mode. When on foot with projectile weapons, auto-targeting is employed, though the interface for this is one of the weakest parts of the game. Beyond world-navigation and attacking, players are also able to pick up simple objects by running over them; on foot these are items like money or weaponry, while in a car one can stop the vehicle next to passengers to let them get in, if they are amenable. Each mode adds a few more custom options: on foot, you can sprint and jump, while in the car you can switch the radio station, honk the horn, or access custom vehicle features, such as playing the game in taxi, ambulance, or fire engine mode.

For a game with such a wide range of player expressive potential, the above mechanics are actually quite limited. Grand Theft Auto III comes across as positively simplistic compared even to standard modern first-person shooters, almost all of which include features such as crouching , strafing and backing up, alternate weapon firing, a complex inventory, and so on. Indeed, in terms of the sheer numbers of buttons players need to use, Grand Theft Auto III is quite a bit more simple than most modern action- adventures . It may not achieve what Brian Moriarty has referred to as the desperately simple interfaces of mass-market breakthroughs like Myst or Tetris , but the game does more to accommodate non-enthusiast users than most of its contemporaries. The game provides its depth through players combining these mechanics and improvising within the game-space.