Niko walked the streets anonymously, free to listen in on conversations, dip into internet cafes, or visit the city’s tourist traps and take it all in. It felt like life would continue regardless. A living, breathing cityīy contrast, GTA IV’s Liberty City felt like it didn’t care whether the player, as Niko Bellic, was there or not. Everything is at its most dramatic, played up like it’s an 80s cop show, and there’s always the sense that - just like that squad car you just outran - everything ceases to exist when it’s outside of the player’s cone of vision. Everything revolves around the player, with random pedestrians calling out to compliment your car, police zeroing in on witness-free gunshots in the middle of the desert and then disappearing when your back is turned, and every interaction ending in confrontation with either the city’s residents or law enforcement.Ĭivilian motorists jut out into your path to give you something to dodge, then face plant on the steering wheel, killed by a tap to their rear bumper.

The map’s much larger size meant it would never be as dense as GTA IV, but it also feels much more… video gamey. Michael, Franklin, and Trevor’s story encompassed all kinds of carnage, bringing the out-of-control feel of earlier games to the graphics and writing of the HD universe.īut to me, something always feels a bit off driving around that incarnation of Los Santos. With the next - and last, to date - entry in the series, Rockstar set out to give these fans what they wanted. Rockstar back-pedalled slightly with its second expansion, The Ballad of Gay Tony, which provided at least some mayhem against the game’s weightier backdrop.Įnter GTA V in 2013. GTA should be all about the over-the-top explosions and chases, they said.

On release, some fans complained about GTA IV being too grounded and gritty after the jet packs, planes, and tanks of San Andreas. At the time of writing, the tweet is approaching 600,000 likes and fans are speculating over how the next iteration will build on the hyper-successful GTA V.īut while the most recent game is the one that broke all records, selling more than 155 million copies and making more than $6 billion for Take-Two Interactive since its 2013 release, I still think that 2008’s GTA IV is in many ways the pinnacle of the series, and maybe that’s precisely because it didn’t try to do everything bigger and better all of the time. Rockstar practically broke Twitter with its announcement of what will surely be Grand Theft Auto VI on 4th February.

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