Traveling from eastern Europe, the Serbian War veteran sought a new life in Liberty City, while also trying to find the man responsible for betraying him many years before.
While the familiar iconography, social commentary, and open-world action from previous games were still present-albeit in a more subdued light-GTA IV's plot centers around the immigrant experience of Niko Bellic, establishing a fresh start for the series. This gave the game a drastically different look and feel compared to the previous entries, presenting more detail in geography and aesthetic across the city's various locales across the four boroughs of Liberty City. In addition to featuring the Euphoria physics-engine, it offered far more detail in movement and animations, along with stronger visual fidelity and design. Powered by the Rockstar Advanced Game Engine (RAGE for short), which made its debut with the budget-release Rockstar Games Presents: Table Tennis, Grand Theft Auto IV was the first AAA game to use the publisher's new tech. And now celebrating its tenth anniversary in 2018, we're taking a look back at Rockstar's seminal sequel and how its more realistic take and focus on immersing players into its dense city opened doors for many other open-world games thereafter-setting the stage for Rockstar's biggest success, GTA V.Īs the first GTA game on PS3 and Xbox 360, the developers at Rockstar North opted to switch things up for its return to Liberty City. With a larger cast of characters, along with several new systems to learn while exploring a more dense city, the new setting offered the most dynamic space in a GTA game at the time. When you look at GTA IV in the broader sense, it was more interested in immersing players into the atmosphere of Liberty City. Though GTA IV found remarkable critical and commercial success, many fans found the game's more grounded and subdued tone to be somewhat jarring, especially compared to GTA San Andreas' outlandish, over-the-top campaign. With the open-world framework set by GTA III, where player agency inside a large and expansive setting is given all the focus, Rockstar Games' big return to the criminal underworld of Liberty City had to overcome some high expectations and other competitors that advanced the genre even further. In 2008, Grand Theft Auto IV came at a time when open-world games were a dime a dozen.
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