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Design Lesson 101: Grand Theft Auto III
by Manveer Heir
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April 29, 2008
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['Design Lesson 101' is a regular column by Raven game designer Manveer Heir. The challenge is to play a game from start to completion - and learn something about game design in the process. This week, with the release of Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto IV imminent, we look back at its predecessor, Grand Theft Auto III.]
Design Lesson: The ability for landmarks to sufficiently guide the player around the game world dramatically decreases as the size of the world increases.
Grand Theft Auto III is considered by most to be a landmark in video gaming history. It was one of the first, and certainly the most successful, 3D open-world action game at the time of its release in 2001. By moving away from the 2D world of the previous games and moving to full 3D, Grand Theft Auto III ushered in sets of new interactions that could not have occurred in a 2D setting. It also ushered in a complexity in navigation, which would not exist in a 2D setting.
The game world of Liberty City spans three large islands, with each island having multiple districts, such as Chinatown and the Red Light District. Each district has a number of distinct visual landmarks to help navigate you. Seeing a familiar, distinct landmark in-game (such as a casino or airport) is a fantastic way to orient the player to their surroundings and help navigate them, all the while sensually immersing them in the game. In fact, landmarks are a large part of how we navigate in real life (at least for those of us without fancy GPS navigation systems in our cars).
When you consider that the three main islands of Liberty City connect to each other at one point each, it becomes even more important to know one's location when trying to get to a new area in the game. Getting lost can be frustrating and take up valuable time. So the landmarks should fix the problem, right? They should help orient the player and get their bearings straight when they are lost, no?
Not quite, unfortunately. The landmarks help to an extent, especially the ones near high traffic areas such as your safehouse and main mission givers, but the world is just far too large to navigate just from landmarks. Think about driving around a new city. It's usually not hard to figure out the major highways and how to get to and from your house. Everything else, however, takes a while to learn. In games, we don't have time for the player to take a while to learn. If we frustrate players early, they may never come back and play the game.
There are many reasons for it being easy to get lost, but the one as it applies to Grand Theft Auto III is information overload. The game slowly introduces you to all of its areas, which is an ideal way to teach the player of new areas. However, it's far too much information to process at once. It's easy to forget about landmarks or confuse exactly where a landmark means you are spatially.
I would forget exactly what street the gun store was on repeatedly, thereby ensuring I would spend five to ten minutes trying to locate the store that was a block away from my starting point. I would remind myself to remember where the gun store was for next time, take a mental note of where I am, and then the next time I was to return I would remember. Except, I usually ended up forgetting. Damn my stupid brain!
The game offers solutions. One is a mini-map, which tells you where your current objective is. This helps for navigating general direction and help pointing you to new areas of the game. The problem is, if the objective is far away, it only appears at the edge of the mini-map. Also, the objective is only for the current mission. If you are looking for a certain area in game that isn't specifically your goal for the current mission, too bad.
Another problem with the mini-map is that it doesn't tell you where things are relative to one another. I know that the baseball stadium is by the shoreline, but where is the gun store in relation to the baseball stadium? That is far more difficult to grasp spatially, and by the time you figure it out, you're probably close to being done playing the game.
Enter the second solution: the names of districts appears on the screen as you pass into them. This, in theory, should teach the player what districts connect to each other. While it succeeds at that, to an extent, it's still not enough. While I may know that Chinatown connects to Red Light District right away, it took far longer to understand that it connected by traveling north.
So, up comes a third solution: a map of the entire city, top-down, with all of the key locations identified. If you can at least look at an entire map at any time, then it should be a lot faster to learn the layout of the city. This should solve all the problems.
Except, the full map comes as an insert in the game manual and on the back of a poster inside the case of the game; it does not exist in the game. Relying on out-of-game materials to play a game effectively is a poor choice. You can't be sure the player knows about them or hasn't lost them. By using an out-of-game map, I cannot know exactly where I am in the game world at any time. Instead I must look at the mini-map and extrapolate enough data to pin-point my position.
There is no reason that the game could not have at least had a full map of Liberty City in one of its menus. This would allow the player to see their current position, figure out where they are trying to go, and make a mental map. It would relate things spatially that are distant, making macro navigation far easier. The best part is, it's simple to implement.
Liberty City is full of identifiable landmarks that help guide the player, but the city is just too large to navigate without some support. Had the game been the size of one island, this wouldn't be an issue. Within five hours of gameplay, you would know where everything was and not have any trouble navigating at all.
However, the game itself would suffer from a smaller city, so the decision was made to have a large, expansive city. The game needs to support that expansive city with the tools to the player to be able to explore that city without major problems. It's okay to include mini-maps and full maps in your game if it will empower the player to be more successful at the game and alleviate some of the frustrations. As game worlds grow, this navigation complexity will grow and become more and more important to solve.
Bonus Lesson: Just because it's the last mission in the game, doesn't mean you have to make it ten times harder than any other mission in the game.
Seriously, Rockstar, you are killing me. I spend all weekend working up to the finish of the main story missions and then you drop that final level on me. I really wish games wouldn't do this.
The end of a game doesn't have to be a push-over, but levels that take hours and hours to complete are just annoying. The end of the game should appropriately scale with the rest of the game. The second hardest level in the game should be close to the hardest (last) level in the game. It didn't feel like this was the case in Grand Theft Auto III. The final mission felt substantially more difficult than any other mission.
[Manveer Heir is currently a game designer at Raven Software. He updates his design blog, Design Rampage, regularly. He is interested in continuing thoughtful critique and commentary on the gaming industry.]
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The crucial point is that the while oftentimes you might not know how to go to a specific place, the neighbourhoods / districts had sufficiently distinct personality and looks that you always had a sense that you know where you are. That to me is 60% of the success in GTA3 roaming being very natural rather than frustrating. I never felt lost, I just didn't know the way.
GTA3 and GTA:VC both worked great in that respect, while GTA:SA and most other open world games fail to various degrees (in my opinion).
Regarding the difficulty curve - this could also be one of two things:
1 maybe Rockstar intended to frustrate players so they go back to earlier missions and have a look again or there was some type of message in this - like "live is unfair" ;)
2 it could be plain bad game design. maybe you guys discovered that many hacks to get arround essential learning that you actually got to the final mission without the proper skills. that would be a shame. :)
I guess some may disagree, but I often go "all out" when I sense the climax and end of a game to complete it. And it can be VERY annoying to know spend all the time getting there, then you know you're right now, but this annoying and often cheap design is holding you back. I remember years ago, me and friend of mine had similar experiences with Sonic Adventure 2. We both reached the final battle, said to ourselves, "lets beat this game!" Yeah we did....3 hours later..
Now this is something I really hope designers will understand. Yes, a push-over task at the end of the game can mean a weak a climax, but a frustratingly difficult and repetition-demanding task can kill the player's excitement during the climax, such as by the time they do accomplish this task, you've witness the flow of the climax enough times that it is no longer exciting, and the climax ultimately feels weakened anyway.
There's only so many times I can stand tall, determined, and full adrenaline ready to conquer whatever task lies before me before I start to feel like I just wanna get it over with because I'm sick of trying.
Designers, please keep that in mind.
For me, some of the most enjoyable and memorable climaxes I have of games are those that maintain an progressive, evidently elevated level challenge that does not break the progressive balance of the game's difficulty, yet challenges you in a way that you feel a risk for failure, but you also know and feel you are well-prepared overcome them. That actively builds and maintains excitement throughout the climax and ultimately leaves you with a better feeling than if you tried and failed over and over and over again before you succeeded.
Image watching a movie where the hero fails in during the climax. Then you hear him/her say, "whoops, dang, let me try that again". Tell me that doesn't just kill the mood/excitement!
I don't think I did any hacks to reach the end of the game, but I didn't do every single mission either... I think it was just poor scaling of difficulty (If it was meant to be a message, I would say it was poorly done... a message shouldn't just pop up at the end of the game. It should be built towards over time).
It does leave the player somewhat disappointed to feel like they've got the hang of the game and its controls and systems, make them grind for a while to the end, and then make the final mission jump out and surprise them - "So you thought you could play this game huh? Well you're wrong MWUHAHAHAHA!!!".
Sometimes the boss might not be too difficult, rather the problem is it takes too much effort to get back to the boss after a failure. Psychonauts is an example of this, the last stage involved a long series of semi difficult battles and platform jumps. Fail anywhere along the way and you restart and have to do everything over again. Each single element wasn't too difficult, but put together it became very frustrating starting over and over and over.
For example, you beat the Emperor and then face the "run the hell out of the Death Star" on the millenium falcon.
I guess only hardcore gamers who fell in love with a game would like being pushed to anoying gameplay issues as getting lost or having to fight an extremely difficult boss over and over again to beat him. Or maybe a proud gamer who feels the need to beat that boss/level.