New Features

There are many new things, however, that have been announced for Grand Theft Auto IV that aren't apparent in the trailers. The first major announcement came when Peter Moore announced that the game would be appearing on the Xbox 360, stating that there would be exclusive episodic DLC via Xbox Live. Although there was some initial speculation as to whether or not it would be a timed-exclusivity deal or not, the questions about it were answered when Rockstar released its quarterly financial results, showing that Microsoft spent a whopping 50 million dollars in order to keep the downloadable content on their side of the fence.

Another new feature coming to GTA IV is multiplayer. Although there was some limited multiplayer in San Andreas and to an even lesser extent, the PSP games, Rockstar hasn't said very much about the multiplayer aspect of the game.

Some of the most interesting updates to the game is the new way the NPCs play. With Liberty City taking on the New York City atmosphere, Rockstar has said that the way that the people on the streets interact with both the player and the environment around them has been completely re-done. In previous installments, the NPCs were merely placeholders; they were people on the street that the character could choose to interact with or not. So outside of the occasional street-walker or gang member, the player could go though a good amount of the game without expressly having to do anything with the people in the game. This is no longer the case, as it seems that people on the street do things that their real-life counterparts do, including talking on cellphones, eating snacks, coughing, smoking and reading newspapers. Although this might sound dull from a gaming standpoint, the fact that every one of these characters will seem more human makes the game seem like it's genuinely modeled after New York.

Bullets shatter windshields.

The part of the game where the series gets its name also gets a fresh overhaul. Now, in order to steal a car, Niko must first walk up to a car, smash open a window and then hot-wire the car. Details on how all of that will work haven't been shown but the complete revamping of this mechanic looks like it could breathe fresh air into the game if executed correctly (eg. NO QUICK TIME EVENTS).

Liberty City's finest have also gotten an upgrade. Police will work in a completely different way than they did in the previous games, relying more on the last known whereabouts of your character. When Niko commits a crime, police will hunt him down by setting a radius around him of where he was last seen. If he can get out of that area undetected, Niko can eventually shake the cops. Yet if he is found out, the cops will then extend the radius based on where they last saw him, making it a much larger area of town that the police will be patrolling for him. Since stores like Ammu-nation and Pay 'n' Spray are no longer in the game, the fastest way for Niko to find his way out of the police's eye is to take a car without them noticing.

The potentially best overhaul addresses one of the most tedious parts of the other games: the gun play. If there was any one thing that hurt the fun of doing all the dirty deeds of Liberty City and Vice City, it's that dispatching your enemies was almost too hard thanks to the wonky targeting system. In light of those problems, Grand Theft Auto IV is said to have adopted a more Gears of War-esque combat engine. Now, Niko can hide behind and take shots from cover, removing the problem of hit and miss cover tactics from the last couple of games which ultimately led to the character losing health from the enemy's shots when the player thought he was behind ample cover.