RAM>256mb
VC>32mb
HDD>500mb
Grand Theft Auto III
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Grand Theft Auto III | |
|---|---|
North American cover art design for Grand Theft Auto III, which features a style that became the standard for all regions in future games.
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| Developer(s) | DMA Design[a] |
| Publisher(s) | Rockstar Games |
| Distributor(s) | Take-Two Interactive |
| Producer(s) | Leslie Benzies |
| Programmer(s) | Obbe Vermeij Adam Fowler |
| Artist(s) | Aaron Garbut |
| Writer(s) | James Worrall Paul Kurowski Dan Houser |
| Series | Grand Theft Auto |
| Engine | RenderWare |
| Platform(s) | |
| Release date(s) | |
| Genre(s) | Action-adventure |
| Mode(s) | Single-player |
Grand Theft Auto III is an open world action-adventure video game developed by DMA Design and published by Rockstar Games. It was released on 22 October 2001 for the PlayStation 2, on 20 May 2002 for Microsoft Windows, and on 31 October 2003 for the Xbox, and re-released an anniversary version on moblie platforms in 2011. It is the fifth title in the Grand Theft Auto series, and the first main entry since 1999's Grand Theft Auto 2. Set within the fictional Liberty City, based on New York City, the game follows Claude after he is left for dead and quickly becomes entangled in a world of gangs, crime and corruption.
The game is played from a third-person perspective and its world is navigated on foot or by vehicle. The open world design lets players freely roam Liberty City, consisting of three main islands. Development was shared between DMA Design in Edinburgh and Rockstar in New York. Much of the development work constituted transforming popular series elements into a 3D world. The game was delayed following the September 11 attacks, to allow the team to change references and gameplay deemed inappropriate.
Upon release, the game received critical acclaim, with praise particularly directed at its concept and gameplay. However, the game also generated controversy, with criticism directed at the depiction of violence and sexual content. Grand Theft Auto III became the best-selling video game of 2001, and has sold over 17 million copies. Considered one of the most significant titles of the sixth generation of video games, and by many critics as one of the greatest video games of all time, it won year-end accolades, including Game of the Yearawards from several gaming publications. Since its release, it has received numerous ports to many gaming platforms. Its successor, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, was released in October 2002.
Contents
[hide]Gameplay[edit]
Grand Theft Auto III is an action-adventure game played from a third-person view. Players complete missions—linear scenarios with set objectives—to progress through the story.[4] It is possible to have several active missions running at one time, as some missions require players to wait for further instructions or events.[5] Outside of missions, players can freely roam the game's open world, and have the ability to complete option side missions. Liberty City is composed of three boroughs: Portland, Stauton Island, and Shoreside Vale; the islands are unlocked to players as the story progresses.[6]
Players may run, jump or use vehicles to navigate the game's world.[7] In combat,auto-aim can be used as assistance against enemies.[8] Should players take damage, their health meter can be fully regenerated through the use of health pick-ups. Body armour can be used to absorb gunshots and explosive damage, but is used up in the process.[9] When health is entirely depleted, gameplay stops, and players respawn at the nearest hospital, at the expense of losing all weapons and armour, and an amount of money.[10]
If players commit crimes while playing, the game's law enforcement agencies may respond as indicated by a "wanted" meter in the head-up display (HUD). On the meter, the displayed stars indicate the current wanted level[11] (for example, at the maximum six-star level, efforts by law enforcement to incapacitate players become very aggressive).[12] Law enforcement officers will search for players who leave the wanted vicinity. The wanted meter enters a cooldown mode and eventually recedes when players are hidden from the officers' line of sight.[11]
The game lets players control the mute criminal Claude.[13] During the story, Claude meets various new characters from gangs. As players completes missions for different gangs, fellow gang members will often defend players, while rival gang members will recognise players and subsequently shoot on sight.[14] While free roaming the game world, players may engage in activities such as a vigilante minigame, a fire fighting activity, and a taxi cab service.[11][15] Completion of these activities grants players with context-specific rewards; for example, completing the vigilante mission allows players to bribepolice after committing a crime.[16]
Players use melee attacks, firearms and explosives to fight enemies. The firearms include weapons such as the Micro Uzi, an M16 rifle and a flamethrower.[6] The game's three-dimension environment allows a first-person view while aiming with thesniper rifle and rocket launcher. In addition, the game's combat was reworked to allow players to commit drive-by shootings by facing sideways in a vehicle.[4] The game gives players a wide variety of weapon options—they can be purchased from local firearms dealers, found on the ground, retrieved from dead enemies, or found around the city.[9]
Plot[edit]
While robbing a bank in Liberty City, ambitious criminal Claude is shot and betrayed by his girlfriend and accomplice Catalina (Cynthia Farrell).[17] Although he survives the wound, Claude is arrested and sentenced to ten years in prison. While being transported in a prison van, Claude and fellow prisoner 8-Ball (Guru) are inadvertently freed after an attack on the police convoy, and escape to a safehouse.[18] 8-Ball later introduces Claude to the Leone Mafia crime family; Sex Club 7 owner Luigi Goterelli (Joe Pantoliano), Don Salvatore Leone (Frank Vincent), his Capo Toni Cipriani (Michael Madsen), and the Don's son Joey Leone (Michael Rapaport).[17] During work for the family, Claude finds himself fighting the Colombians,[19] who are being led by Catalina in proliferating a new drug.[20] Meanwhile, Salvatore's trophy wife Maria (Debi Mazar) begins to take a liking to Claude. Salvatore grows suspicious and betrays Claude into luring him to a death trap, but Maria saves him just in time and they both flee.[21]
Claude then begins working for the city's Yakuza and its leader Asuka Kasen (Lianna Pai), Maria's close friend, who has Claude assassinate Salvatore and get his revenge. This cuts off all of Claude's ties with the Leone family, who are now against him.[22] Claude's work leads him to allying himself with other criminal sources, such as corrupt police detective Ray Machowski (Robert Loggia), an enemy of the Cartel.[23] Claude later saves him from Internal Affairs and the CIA by helping him flee to Vice City.[24] Claude also meets charismatic media mogul Donald Love (Kyle MacLachlan), who maintains a huge media front.[25] In an effort to start a war between the Yakuza and Cartel, Claude and Love organise the death of Asuka's brother Kenji Kasen (Les Mau) and blame the Cartel.[26] Later, Love asks Claude to rescue a man who was kidnapped by the Cartel in the prison truck that Claude was in.[27] While on an errand, Claude finally confronts Catalina, who narrowly escapes. Asuka abducts Catalina's partner Miguel (Al Espinosa), believing him to have knowledge of her brother's death.[28]
With the war with the Cartel intensifying, Asuka and Maria learn of Claude's history with Catalina and order him to attack many Cartel operations.[29][30][31] Eventually, his exploits attract the attention of Catalina. As a result, the Cartel abduct Maria, murder Asuka and Miguel, and demand Claude to pay $500,000 in exchange for Maria's release.[32] When Claude confronts Catalina, she attempts to have him killed, but he escapes. In the resulting firefight, Catalina attempts to flee in a helicopter and makes a final attempt on Claude's life. After killing the remaining Cartel members and rescuing Maria, Claude shoots down the helicopter, effectively killing Catalina.[33] As they are leaving the scene, Maria complains to Claude about the kidnapping, particularly the state of her clothes and nails. During the credits, a gunshot is heard, and Maria's voice is silenced.[b]
Development[edit]
The core development team of Grand Theft Auto III consisted of about 23 people at DMA Design in Edinburgh, who worked closely with publisher Rockstar Games in New York.[6] By early 2001, the team had designed the city, cars, and some weapons.[34] An online multiplayer mode was initially planned for the game, but was ultimately dropped due to time and resource limitations.[35] Producer Leslie Benzies described Grand Theft Auto III as a "crime simulation game".[6] When porting the game to Microsoft Windows, the team delayed it from the PlayStation 2 release in order to ensure quality, citing issues with the simultaneous platform release of previous Grand Theft Auto games.[36]
Open world design[edit]
Grand Theft Auto III is the first 3D game in the series,[37] using Criterion Games'RenderWare game engine.[38] When designing the game, the development team expanded upon concepts introduced in the previous Grand Theft Auto games. Benzies stated that the intention was to recreate the "freedom and diversity" of the previous games in a "living, breathing 3D world", using the power of the PlayStation 2 to do so.[6] The console's ability to use DVDs, an improvement over thePlayStation's limit to CDs, allowed the team to store more data, such as animations, music and environments.[37] Despite this, the team found it difficult to fit the game into 32 megabytes, due to the scale. The game's size also created difficulties for the testers, due to the variety of options.[5] Benzies felt that creating a living city was the "underlying principle" of the game's concept during development.[6] Executive producer Sam Houser felt that the game's 3D element allowed the "chemistry of the team [to come] together perfectly for the first time".[39]
A major difficulty the team encountered was converting all game elements into a 3D world, including the sound and radio stations, as well as designing and voicing the non-player characters, due to the amount that existed within the open world;[40] producer Dan Houser said that there was about 8,000 lines of recorded dialogue in the game,[40] while audio programmer Raymond Usher estimated about 18,000.[41] The basic technical elements of the game began to work together in mid-2000, with a carjacking mechanic prototype and stable streaming model.[42] Streaming was initially intended to be reserved for music and map geometry, but other elements were eventually included when it became apparent to the team as more data was entered.[5]
When designing the game world, the team initially created a "hybrid city", which producer Dan Houser describes as "a post industrial Midwest slash east coast generic" city.[43] Upon developing within this game world, the team realised that basing the design on a real location meant "you have a lot of things you can say about it".[43] As a result, the team redesigned Liberty City, which had been previously featured in Grand Theft Auto (1997), basing it loosely on New York City.[43] The city is broken into three islands: an industrial section representing Brooklyn and Queens, a commercial center resemblingManhattan, and suburbs similar to New Jersey.[37] The islands unlock as the story progresses; the team wanted players to "start out feeling poor and work to being richer".[44] Dan Houser describes Liberty City as a "hybrid of a generic American city", including Chicago, Pittsburgh, Detroit, New York, and Philadelphia.[44] He felt that the parallel realism of the world allowed the team to make more social commentary than previously.[35] Sam Houser cited films and shows like Heat (1995) and The Sopranos (1999–2007) as inspiration for the setting, and wanted to emulate them in the game.[37]
Story and characters[edit]
The team developed the story and design simultaneously. "We use the story to expose the mechanics, and we use the mechanics to tell the story," said Dan Houser.[34] Houser found it difficult to create the narrative, as the game is so strongly focused on player freedom. He wanted the story to be more nuanced and interesting than the generic "rise and fall and rise again of a superhero bad guy".[44] The game's script was also focused on mission objectives, attempting to implement high amounts of interactivity.[42] Houser felt that each mission is "its own short story", and part of an "overarching story".[34]Houser and co-writer James Worrall drew influence from mob films, and the mafiosi featured in films by Martin Scorsese. When writing the story, Houser and Worrall regularly met with the designers, and filled a room with post-it notes to reconstruct the story components to shape the game.[42]
Many of the game characters were animated using motion capture, filmed at a rented studio at the Brooklyn Navy Yard,[37]though this was limited by technical restraints. The character movement was also treated as being cinematic, though limitedpolygons heavily inhibited this.[45] Animating non-player characters entering and driving cars proved to be difficult for the team, due to the variety of vehicle designs. "It involved chaining together dozens of different animations and altering key frames in code," recalled software engineer Alan Campbell.[35] The team used varying camera angles when animated the game's cutscenes, in order to evoke different emotions.[46] For the voice acting, the team wanted "natural, subtle performances", which proved difficult as many of the actors "had in their head the idea that because video games are animated their performances needed to be animated", explained motion capture director Navid Khonsari.[45] The game's playable protagonist is unnamed in the game,[17] and his name is not officially revealed as Claude until his appearance inGrand Theft Auto: San Andreas (2004). He is a silent protagonist, never speaking throughout his appearances. The team decided to make Claude silent primarily because it "did not seem like a major issue", due to the other challenges faced during development, and also partly to allow players to identify with the character.
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