I’m writing to you from Alderney, the final area to unlock in Grand Theft Auto IV. It just opened up after I completed a particularly lengthy and lucrative mission working for… well, I guess I should leave the specifics out, just in case you haven’t cruised past me yet. I’m 18 hours in now, with a game progress of 37.19%.
Over the course of the day, the game, and the big differences between this and previous games in the GTA line are really starting to sink in. On a mechanical level, GTA IV doesn’t seem like a revolution–you’re still stealing cars, tailing people, and doing many of the same tasks you’d expect to see in a game of this type. It’s a slower burn that happens on a deeper, more emotional level. Grand Theft Auto has always been about morals, but this time, the game shifts a bit of that moral weight onto you. You aren’t just along for the ride, doing whatever the game tells you to do. In a few cases, you’re making specific choices about who lives and who dies. It’s something that pops up early on and doesn’t seem like that big of a deal, but as you keep playing and get deeper in the story, and as you become attached to various characters, you’re forced to make some tough calls.
Again, I’ll try to talk around it a bit, for those of you who haven’t gotten here yet, but when faced with a tough choice, I actually had to pause the game and think about it. I got up and took a walk around the block, went upstairs and sat on the couch for a bit. My mind was mostly made up, but was it the right move? What was more important to my version of Niko–money or loyalty?
I chose loyalty. Or, at least, that’s how I interpreted the decision.
Choices like this are the real reason why the game has autosave, I think. Sure, you could go force a manual save and split the path, try it both ways, and come back to it. But there’s something about the finality of your actions that I really appreciate. Along with its more-contemplative tone, that gives the game a weight that the previous games lacked.