NEWS - Thursday, January 31, 2008
Rockstar Braces for GTA IV Backlash
The GTA series has seen several often controversial entries, but Rockstar Games VP Dan Houser thinks critics of the games industry still haven’t gotten over the crime-centric premise of the franchise."I expect it because we’ve had so much of it in the past," said Houser following a recent press demo. "I wish people would treat videogames the same as other media. They seem to not want to do that for reasons that I don’t understand. It’s a convenient enemy for people."
Adult-targeted games continue to be the focus of legislators, pundits, pop psychologists and other critics. Most recently, BioWare’s Mass Effect was targeted on Fox News for its PG-13 alien love scene.
GTA IV could draw even more attention than previous iterations of the series (well, maybe not more than GTA: San Andreas and the Hot Coffee fiasco) because Rockstar opted to make the game less cartoony and more realistic.
"If the graphics are slightly cartoony, we make sure the writing is slightly cartoony to match that," said Houser. "Obviously, the graphics have gone closer to realism, so we wanted everything else to be closer to realism as well."
It’s not difficult to imagine that there will be backlash towards the next game in the multi-million-dollar GTA franchise, but the degree of that backlash is still totally up in the air.
Source: http://www.next-gen.biz
