Grand Theft Auto Complete Pack

Editor's Note: In part 1 of Grand Theft Auto DNA, we explored how vehicles and driving physics evolved over the GTA series. Today, we discuss the role of sandbox environments like Liberty City and San Andreas.

Playing a Grand Theft Auto game is a lot like observing an ant farm. The AI-controlled citizens of Rockstar North's worlds drive around, obey traffic laws or blow red lights, loiter on the sidewalk to panhandle and gab with friends, and throw fisticuffs after getting into a fender bender at the intersection of Columbus and Jade. I've spent hours in each GTA sandbox just driving around, marveling at how alive each world feels.

When I get tired of people watching, I lift the nearest set of wheels and stir the ants into a tizzy. I make things happen. "I'm fairly certain we didn't make ANY progress on the main story line that entire night," Shacker atom519 said, recalling his first time playing 2001's Grand Theft Auto 3 with a group of friends. "Instead [we] just explored the city in awe while laughing our asses off as we punched random pedestrians for looking at us the wrong way. I vividly remember hearing the phrase 'Wait, you can actually do that?' multiple times from people watching us play."

GTA 3 set the bar for open-world games. That skyscraper off in the distance? You can drive there, climb to the roof, and snipe pedestrians until the boys in blue show up. That hooker working her corner? Pick her up, recharge your health using her oh-so-soothing services, then back over her when she gets out and reclaim your cash. If mowing down pedestrians gnaws at your conscience, you can put in an honest day's work shuttling ants around the city in taxi cabs or steal a black and white and chase down perps.

Players can take a break from rampaging across GTA's virtual cities and watch AI inhabitants go about their routines.

Rockstar's open-world juggernaut permitted players to tackle missions in their own way, too. "There's a mission where you have to kill a mob boss, and it was seriously kicking my ass," explained Shacker and former staff writer Jason Bergman. "So I trailed the guy and learned his pattern. He would get picked up by a limo and taken back to his house. I jacked a semitruck and parked it in front of his house, so the limo couldn't get in there. Then when it stopped, I came screaming down the street in another car, running over his bodyguards when they got out, one after the other. Then I just got out and shot the bastard."

Shacker MamiyaOtaru took a different tack to stage the same hit. "I blocked the entrance with a fire truck and lobbed grenades over it until everything blew up. Then I took off on foot down the cliff and along the beach, heart pounding. Awesome stuff."

In 2008, Rockstar North ushered its flagship series into HD with the release of Grand Theft Auto 4. Sporting breathtaking graphics, physics-powered characters and vehicles, and sharper AI, GTA 4's ant farm felt more like a living, breathing, real world than any GTA setting before it. That realism, so strong you could practically taste the hot dogs you buy from carts on the street, came with a downside.

In San Andreas, riding bicycles was more than just a method of transportation.

Antics like pedaling bicycles fast enough to outrace trains and raiding a military facility to lay your hands on a jetpack no longer fit in with Rockstar's focus on crafting a more mature, lifelike world. Instead, you threw darts, took dates to cabaret shows and out to eat, and went bowling. Other riveting activities included strip clubs and channel surfing on the TV. Odd jobs like stealing specific cars, assassinating NPCs, and vehicle missions returned, but most of them were variants on, or imports of, side missions we've been playing for 12 years. GTA 4 has a pretty face, but comparing its shallow pool of jaunts and junkets to Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, the benchmark for sandbox fun in the GTA universe, is like saying you prefer your local park to Disney World.

Every action I performed in San Andreas offered incentive to continue performing that function. Sprinting from the cops increased my ability to run greater distances without having to stop and catch my breath. Operating different vehicle types improved my handling of vehicles of that type. Buying properties, a carryover from 2002's Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, generated a limitless income stream, keeping me flush with cash.

Activities in GTA 4 exist just for the sake of making the sandbox feel full. Winning at bowling or darts offers no reward. Hanging with friends and courting the ladies grants access to perks like guns at discounted rates, car bombs, and helicopter rides, but entertaining NPCs so I can retain access to their perks feels more like a chore than a fun time. Rockstar excised the RPG-like stat upgrades from San Andreas, so there was no way to customize my character other than changing my clothes, a purely aesthetic alteration.

In short, Rockstar North chose to preserve its sophisticated world simulator and storyline at the expense of the player's ability to influence her character and the game world.

The logo in the bowling alley was the highlight of GTA 4's bowling minigame.

On September 17, Rockstar North will deliver Grand Theft Auto 5. Last December, Game Informer's cover story revealed that the game world is bigger than San Andreas, GTA 4's Liberty City, and Red Dead Redemption's Wild West combined, with plenty of wiggle room left over. The magazine also divulged details on the rides Rockstar built for its larger-than-ever playground: golf courses, a fully modeled ocean floor for players to explore, new vehicles like ATVs and mountain bikes, bank heists where players can switch perform different roles like sniper and getaway pilot by switching between the three main characters, and hobbies unique to one character or another.

That all sounds great on paper, but it's not enough for side attractions to simply exist. Even though Rockstar will once again prevent players from making changes that would dilute the personalities Rockstar's writers defined for GTA 5's leading men, the developer can still incentivize activities to make them feel worthwhile. Organize golf tournaments with increasingly large pots to encourage us to improve our game on the green, reward us for recovering valuable treasures and spotting exotic creatures under the sea, and escalate bank heists so players go from knocking off local credit unions to bringing down the virtual ant farm's biggest bank, with each job requiring more finesse and offering a larger payday.

GTA 5 promises the largest open world in the series to date.

Jacking cars and raising hell is the bedrock of any GTA game; no one's arguing that. Watching the world burn in GTA 4 was fun despite the dearth of other distractions. I don't mind the emphasis on realism, either. As much as I loved GTA: San Andreas, the game started showing its age a long time ago. The spirit of the game's design, however, is immortal, and remains unchallenged in the GTA series. Call on that spirit. Improve on it. Otherwise, the novelty of running around GTA 5's super-sized ant farm will wear off quicker than I would like.

"I think there is a definite ratio of realism to fun that leaned too hard toward realism in [GTA IV]," said Shacker Rauol Duke. "You kill 50 people on the drive from your place to some girl's apartment, kill 20 more on the way to the bowling alley, and then you have to play a s--t minigame. All the TV shows and radio stuff is great, but I want more stuff [to do] over having a Google Maps-accurate build of some city."

Rockstar has been releasing its entire Grand Theft Auto library slowly but surely on PlayStation Network. But now that the two "Stories" games have hit, it's running low on the modern-era games. What to do? Why, release the classic overhead ones, of course.

A pair of ESRB listings (via NeoGAF) have outed both the original Grand Theft Auto and Grand Theft Auto 2 for the PlayStation 3, Vita, and PSP. Other GTA releases were similarly revealed through ESRB ratings, though occasionally we've seen a long span of time between the rating and a release.

These early GTA games were shown in overhead perspective, rather than the third-person 3D camera that became the series standard after GTA3. It's quite a bit different than the modern games, but it can still serve as a bit of nostalgia while we prepare for Grand Theft Auto V. While you wait, why not check out our retrospective on the series?

Editor's Note: In part 1 of our Grand Theft Auto DNA, we dissect the driving system in GTA 3, Vice City, San Andreas, and GTA 4 to understand how driving evolved over the course of those series, and how it should work in the upcoming GTA 5.

In August 2001, Sony's PlayStation 2 celebrated its first birthday with little fanfare. More a glorified DVD player than a hot-ticket game machine, the PS2 lacked a system seller, industry jargon for a game so popular that gamers plunked down hundreds of dollars on a console just to experience that one game. Two months later in October, Rockstar North filled the void with Grand Theft Auto 3, an open-world romp where players could hijack cars, splatter pedestrians, treat traffic jams like impromptu destruction derbies, and wage crime sprees.

GTA 3 wrapped its freeform gameplay in a story about gangs and betrayal, but Rockstar knew what gamers really craved. From the moment the introductory cut scene ended, GTA 3 handed players the keys to every automobile in sight and got out of the way. "I remember playing the first Driver game and wishing I could just get out and run around," recalled Shacker soggybagel. "GTA 3 literally blew my mind. It totally sold me on the PS2 and I recall spending hours playing with friends. We'd switch off by basically going on crazy crime sprees and then once we died we'd hand the controller to the next person."

Some vehicles in GTA 3, such as the police cruiser, opened up additional missions.

Released in 2002, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City added new types of luxury cars that fit right in with the golden sunsets and coastal routes tracing the open sea of a faux Miami. The most popular addition, however, was the motorcycle. Unavailable in GTA 3, motorcycles came in a mix of types from scooters the players could apprehend from pizza delivery boys to the high-end PCJ 600 that streaked down highways like purring bullets.

Rockstar crammed over 200 vehicles in 2004's Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, and with good reason. Featuring not one, not two, but three cities connected by fully traversable countryside, San Andreas let players roam the massive sandbox in monster trucks, low-riders, new public service rides like the street sweeper, bicycles that the player could pedal fast enough to outrace trains, golf karts, stunt planes, airliners, and the jetpack, achievable only after raiding a military lab. Rockstar also added mechanic shops where players could pimp their rides with faster engines, sleeker bodies, and nitrous fuel that shot vehicles forward faster than a speeding bullet.

But numbers aren't really important here. What matters is the role vehicles play in a Grand Theft Auto game, and to pull the camera back even further, the role of travel methods in the increasingly large sandboxes crafted by developers like Sucker Punch, Avalanche Studios, and of course, Rockstar Games. Open-world games are getting bigger, and will continue to increase exponentially because real estate is perhaps the biggest, boldest bullet point in the open-world genre. Bigger cities! Wide-open country! Skies to swim! Oceans to cruise! Go anywhere, do anything, take in more virtual sunsets than you've seen in real life! But if traveling across all those virtual miles isn't fun, there is no game. The game is broken.

Vice City and San Andreas added more vehicles including planes and motorcycles.

Would you play inFamous if Cole McGrath couldn't grind on power lines, levitate using lightning, and climb buildings faster than a speeding Spider-Man? Would you bother maxing out your wanted level and seeing how long you could last in a GTA game before the five-oh, feds, and Uncle Sam struck you down? I wouldn't.

Less than five minutes after stepping into GTA 3's sandbox for the first time, I had carjacked a sweet ride, mowed down dozens of pedestrians, and cranked my wanted level up to three out of five stars. That's all I did for months because driving in the PS2-era GTAs was good, not-so-clean fun. I could feel the difference between a fire truck and a convertible, but most vehicles accelerated at a feather touch and turned on a dime. That's what I wanted. Driving in GTA is about having fun, not out-simulating Gran Turismo.

Grand Theft Auto 4 marked a high-definition overhaul for the series and a greater emphasis on realism when it launched for PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and PC in 2008. Harnessing the power of the Euphoria engine, Rockstar reimagined Liberty City and imbued it with realistic physics, animation, and artificial intelligence. Fueled by Euphoria, vehicles in GTA 4 handled quite differently. The glossy and aerodynamic Infernus sports car felt snappy while industrial rides like delivery trucks turned like an ocean liner. Every car required precision and care regardless of size. The days of flying through turns doing well over 90 were gone.

GTA 4 looked more realistic than ever, but many players didn't care for the weighty, more realistic driving physics.

My gut reaction to GTA 4's weightier driving was not a positive one. Frustrated, I found a populated sidewalk and thinned it out, cranking my wanted level up to three stars in no time. And that's when driving clicked. Rocketing down the highway with cops on my tail only to tap the handbrake, pull a 180, and leave police cruisers flailing in my rearview demanded my attention and spot-on timing. Failing to juggle speed and precise control ended with the boys in blue catching up and tossing me in the slammer or smashing into a barricade and shooting through my windshield like a stone from a sling. But the high I felt during each chase trumped any high-speed thrills from the GTA games of the last-gen console era, even if I was the one who ended up as road kill.

Shacker DM7 felt the same way, but noted that Euphoria tempted him to approach the game in a manner likely as foreign to most GTA players as it was to me. "I tried to obey all the traffic laws, stopping at lights, not going fast, really tried to play it straight. Then one mission had me running from the cops and during the chase I jumped the curb and hit a fat biker dude and he flew over my hood and over the car. I felt a little bad that I did that."

Driving in GTA 4 remains a polarizing issue. Either players adapted to it, as I did, or they missed the more accessible handling of the PS2 era of GTA. How, then, should Rockstar handle driving in the upcoming Grand Theft Auto 5? Dan Houser, VP of creative over at Rockstar North admitted to Game Informer that cars felt "big and boatlike in GTA 4." The crack team of developers over in Scotland put GTA 4's physics under the knife, and judging by the recent character trailers, vehicles handle equally well in gang-banging, police-chasing mayhem and mild-mannered traffic.

The days of jetpacks are behind us, but that doesn't mean vehicles in GTA 5 can't balance fun and physics.

Of course, those trailers were heavily scripted. To please new fans and entertain gamers who still cling to their favorite PS2 Grand Theft Autos, Rockstar needs to walk the line between Gran Turismo and Project Gotham Racing. Add just enough weight to make every tap of the brakes and tug of the wheel count, while making driving as easy to pick up as it was in the old days.

In part 2 of Grand Theft Auto DNA tomorrow, we discuss the role sandbox environments play in GTA games, and why the city is as big a player as Tommy Vercetti or Niko Belic.