Rockstar on Liberty City: “We’ve always wanted to do New York properly…”

CVG reports that Dan Houser, Vice President of Creative at Rockstar, said in the latest issue of Official Xbox Magazine, that the reason why they decided on having a New York-esque Liberty City for the highly anticipated GTA IV, is because it adds an element of content to the game. He expounds:

We’ve always wanted to do New York properly… With GTA III we were dealing with so many technical issues that we didn’t really think trying to make somewhere like a real place was important at the time and then we discovered later that gave an added element of content to the place.

We’ve got a full time team of researchers and photographers in the office in New York who get emails from the artists in Scotland saying, ‘hey can you find out that this building’s like, or what the traffic flow’s like around here?’ or the designers want to find out how the law systems work. We wouldn’t be as confident doing a next-gen game the way we wanted, somewhere we didn’t have a base.

Now, what really got our attention in this one is his comment about Rockstar researching New York traffic. Accurate traffic? Add accurate traffic to the passage of time in-game, and one can probably safely assume that the Taxi-cab missions (if they’re still there) will be a lot harder now.

That particular issue of Official Xbox Magazine is currently on sale.

Via CVG

CVG reports that Dan Houser, Vice President of Creative at Rockstar, said in the latest issue of Official Xbox Magazine, that the reason why they decided on having a New York-esque Liberty City for the highly anticipated GTA IV, is because it adds an element of content to the game. He expounds:

We’ve always wanted to do New York properly… With GTA III we were dealing with so many technical issues that we didn’t really think trying to make somewhere like a real place was important at the time and then we discovered later that gave an added element of content to the place.

We’ve got a full time team of researchers and photographers in the office in New York who get emails from the artists in Scotland saying, ‘hey can you find out that this building’s like, or what the traffic flow’s like around here?’ or the designers want to find out how the law systems work. We wouldn’t be as confident doing a next-gen game the way we wanted, somewhere we didn’t have a base.

Now, what really got our attention in this one is his comment about Rockstar researching New York traffic. Accurate traffic? Add accurate traffic to the passage of time in-game, and one can probably safely assume that the Taxi-cab missions (if they’re still there) will be a lot harder now.

That particular issue of Official Xbox Magazine is currently on sale.

Via CVG