Before GTA 4 there was Rockstar Games Presents Table Tennis, the first game to use the Rockstar Advanced Game Engine (RAGE). Table tennis might seem like a strange fit for a group of studios best known for sweeping cowboy epics and open-world crime sagas, but there’s a method to Rockstar’s madness.
Think about what table tennis is – a game of physics. The ball must account for the angle of the racket, the speed of the hit, and the bounce when it hits the table. In multiplayer, both players must experience the same thing.
Rockstar Games Presents Table Tennis laid the groundwork for the Euphoria tech-powered physics of GTA 4, which allowed NPCs to hang from car doors, dive away from approaching vehicles, and topple down when pushed. It’s a procedural animation blending technique that calculates forces and applies them realistically to characters, and it’s what makes messing with NPCs so fun in modern GTA games.
After the launch of GTA 4 came the release of Midnight Club Los Angeles, the fourth installment in the racing series. As well as allowing Rockstar to have a go at creating an open-world LA before the launch of GTA 5, it experimented with adjusting traffic density depending on the time of day, it had a dynamic weather system, and it gave Rockstar the chance to improve its driving model for the main event. Go back and play GTA 4 now and you’ll find the vehicles are much stiffer, more lifelike than they are in GTA 5, a game that strikes the perfect balance between realism and arcade handling.
Shortly after that game landed, GTA 4 got a couple of expansions in the form of Episodes from Liberty City, introducing two new characters and showing the events of GTA 4 from a different perspective. This was one of the touchstones for GTA 5’s character switching mechanic.
Then came Red Dead Redemption and Max Payne 3, which improved the gunplay. The former also introduced wildlife while the latter added slow-motion bullet-time, which is also used as a special ability when controlling Michael in GTA 5.
Everything Rockstar makes informs what’s coming. Even LA Noire was seemingly a failed experiment in the groundbreaking (at the time, though soon outdated) facial animation tech. With that in mind, I thought it would be fun to look back at the most recent games and see what they could mean for GTA 6. Obviously, there have been fewer games between GTA 5 and GTA 6 than there were between GTA 4 and 5, but there’s a lot we can learn from Red Dead Redemption 2, GTA Online, and the GTA 5 relaunch.
