Grand Theft Auto III

A systems-driven game with one amazing core system and a whole bunch of shitty ones in its orbit. DMA Design salvages a lot of elements in here by threading everything through the game’s driving mechanics, which perfectly straddle the line between fiddly accuracy and easy-going simplicity. The taxis clogging the streets give you that front wheel drive that’ll keep you from ending up nose-first in the bay, but if you comb through old parking lots and alleys you’ll find much sportier cars to outspeed police cruisers and pull ahead in races. In the early game, where your guns do jack squat, running someone over repeatedly becomes the standard mode of operation for each mission, turning your car into your most powerful weapon. Once it takes a certain amount of abuse, it’ll ignite, ending its life as a giant explosive that will nuke everything in the vicinity and let you get away scot-free – assuming you’re not stuck in motion or getting dragged out of the car, in which case you’ll go up in smoke as well. Every mission element that touches the driving in some way, shape, or form automatically benefits from its depth of handling and potential for carnage.

That’s about where the positives end. Gunplay improves dramatically once you get access to anything other than the handgun, but it’s divided between guns that can delete someone directly in front of you (shotgun, Uzi, AK) and guns with proper aim that can delete someone anywhere on the map (M16, sniper rifle). Since enemies primarily have the former, it creates an awkward dynamic of you having total control over enemies in the vast majority of space until you’re right in front of them, at which point they can nearly instantly kill you. Your other main adversaries, the police, operate off of a wanted gauge that increases as they witness you performing consecutive crimes, escalating their response to match. On paper this creates a dynamic adversary naturally provoked by your mission tasks, but the methods for clearing it aren’t quite as nuanced: grab a police bribe pickup at fixed positions on the map to clear one level of the gauge, or drop by a Pay ’n’ Spray and wipe the whole thing away for pennies.¹ The small sizes of the first two maps (where the majority of missions take place) make these shops close and accessible, removing the threat that the designers intend when they script in specific wanted levels during missions.

In the mission Waka-Gashira Wipeout, Claude must hijack a cartel car and use it to kill yakuza leader Kenji Kasen on this random parking deck, stoking the flames of the gang war between the two crime syndicates. Procuring the car is trivial, since the deck is about a block away from a construction site run by the cartel that has plenty of unguarded cars within it, making the preparation more of a chore than an exploratory process. Once you get to the roof, you can’t exit the car lest the yakuza see who you are, so you’re limited in approach to either running Kenji over or shooting him with an Uzi in a drive-by. A necessary restriction to keep you from sniping him from afar, but also one that makes the execution your best attempt at sloppily crashing into him without blowing up your ride prematurely. [src]

Both of these feed into a frustrating “collectathon” focus with regards to pickups such as bribes and weapons. Liberty City manages to be both expansive and easy to memorize, partially because the space’s layout has coherent urban zoning and differentiates itself significantly between the islands. However, for how pleasant and varied it is as a space to drive through, its actual contents are split between collectable-laden areas for you to slowly traverse on foot and purely practical structures geared towards specific missions. Finding hidden packages strewn throughout the nooks and crannies of the world ends up not being a resource but rather a way to permanently increase the arms store at your hideout, letting you bypass future preparation. Alternatively, you can scour the map for natural weapon spawns; the locations for these feel obscure until a subsequent mission where they’re useful inevitably occurs there, making it clear that the spawn is an inelegant aid for one mission yet exposed globally. When finding a secret creates a gameplay moment of its own, such as stumbling upon a rampage or getting inside a particular car in Staunton Island’s park, you’re thrown into a simple side mission that often stresses the organic outcomes of the combat, pushing you to level city blocks with minutes on the clock or wrestle with the game’s strict physics in an all-terrain ring race. However, the excitement of throwing yourself into the danger trumps finding the side mission in the first place, so the insistence on swapping the locations of rampages upon failure begs the question of what they thought the focal point of their system was.

This extends to the main missions as well; players of the modern Rockstar open-world games, which have jettisoned any of the improvisational action contained in this one in favor of choreographed, manicured setpieces, have likely already keyed into the fact that the team never seemed to consider the gameplay more than a means to an end. For what the loose mission design allows earlier in the game, the tendrils of the designers start worming their way inside by the mid-game. In some cases this is well-intentioned: in Plaster Blaster, a mission where you silence a severely injured witness by assaulting his ambulance, destroying the ambulance from afar will kick in a special condition wherein the game informs you that said ambulance was supposedly a decoy, and the real ambulance has been spawned somewhere else on the map. This tries to keep the player from completely trivializing their design, but again, with easy access to sniper rifles and Pay ’n’ Sprays as mentioned earlier, the designers seem to apply this rule unevenly. In other cases, interventions on the part of the designers limit your contributions: in Bait, a mission where you lure three cartel cars back to a yakuza-owned lot to ensnare them in a deadly trap, engaging at all in the firefights that occur in the lot can trigger a failure condition under which you did not properly let the yakuza subdue their prey, making walking outside the lot and waiting for them to die off-screen seemingly the “canonical” way to handle the mission. Perhaps cohesive from a narrative front, but in a game with a story this careless, I’m not quick to ascribe an essential quality to that kind of design.