Rockstar founder calls GTA MMO "the Holy Grail"

by Chris Chester Mar 7th 2008 at 3:45PM

Filed under: Real life, Business models, Interviews, MMO industry, New titles, All Points Bulletin

In case you haven't seen it, Crispin Boyer of EGM sat down for an interview with Rockstar founder Sam Houser to talk in-depth about all things Grand Theft Auto. In addition to some tasty preview bits, Boyer raked Houser over the coals a little bit, trying to glean from him what the future of the franchise might be. In terms of multiplayer, Houser didn't shy from expressing his enthusiasm for the idea of a GTA MMO. Specifically, he said such a title, "is very, very doable and is a very, very compelling proposition." In a subsequent question he refers to a mainstream subscription-based MMO on a console as "the Holy Grail."

The problem, as Houser sees it, is in combining the GTA gameplay with the idea of a persistent world. Without the right constraints, the game might amount to little more than a city of a couple thousand players all shooting at each other with rocket launchers, instead of an interesting, compelling MMO experience. From the tenor of his comments, it doesn't seem like Houser and Rockstar currently have any specific plans for an MMO just yet, but we imagine they're going to be paying very close attention to Realtime Worlds' All Points Bulletin when it comes out later this year, as its 'cobs and robbers' gameplay is the closest to GTA we've seen yet.

Tags: all-points-bulletin, apb, breaking, cops-and-robbers, crispin boyer, CrispinBoyer, grand-theft-auto, gta, gta-mmo, realtime-studios, rockstar

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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Snailking said on 4:00PM 3-07-2008

It sounds like a good idea, until they add in useless trade skills, rep/faction grinding, level grinding, borked pvp, real money transactions, and all that other stuff that systematically removes any chance of the player having fun.

Just being realistic here, what they'd give us would be very different from the picture we have in our head.

Lemmo said on 5:00PM 3-07-2008

Totally. A lot of traditional MMO mechanics really don't translate into persistent world gaming outside of the heavily defined RPG genre.

I think the only way to make a game like GTA work as an MMO would be to create in-game consequences for actions. As a thug, you start shooting in the street, suddenly all the (player) cops are given a green light to go take you out. In other words, if you could reward thugs for being covert and cops for being aggressive, you'd have an always-tense, slowly boiling city of potential crime and corruption.

But yes, it would require quite a bit of redefining.

Anonymous said on 8:33PM 3-07-2008

I am absolutely positive that they talk about this week after week after week. I can picture 3-5 designers and the art leads sitting down at a table and saying "how can we make this freaking game work?"

Everyone- EVERYONE knows it would be bad ass. I bet they know it more than ANYBODY. But you gotta think, if you are driving down the street, how do you stop some punk from jackin yo wheels?

And for those curious about grinding; This isn't a fantasy MMO. MMO does not mean you have levels or crafting or skills. It's a Sandbox. The point is to sort of make a world simulator (except for the shooting cops thing). Sure there will be kevlar vests and such, but you won't have lvl. 65 black Ironfire breastplates that you get from Kregnar of the Deep Alpha wastes.

note; my favorite part of GTA is driving. GTA 3, Vice city, and San Andreas all rocked mostly because the driving engine was superb.