“It’s cutting your cloth to match the body you can put it on, isn’t it?” says Dan Houser of the game’s aesthetic approach. Houser, vice president of creative at Rockstar and brother of company president Sam, is our host today, and is proving as enthusiastic about this particular incarnation of the GTA legend as he is anything that carries the unique brand, over which he has a guardian role. “The challenge,” he explains, “is to make something that works and is optimised for the hardware but at the same time is GTA, with the core things that make it GTA – such as having an open-world environment that you can move around freely, and a good density of population. The firefights are insane, and once we started to get that kind of performance on the DS we knew it was going to be really enjoyable. We wanted it to be feel almost like a GTA version of a classic arcade game – it seems like it’s being very serious but then it’s very fun and undermining itself constantly.”

We wonder how long it took to decide upon the presentational style, given the difficulties we had in envisioning it. It turns out that Rockstar was working from an advantageous position. “This type of viewpoint was something we’d played around with years before, just after GTA2,” Houser reveals. “And we’d never used it in a commercial game, but we always liked that isometric view and kind of had it in the back pocket as a fun thing that could be revisited. This was the perfect hardware for it.”

So the viewpoint suited the host hardware, but there are other considerations at play which have been created with a firm view of the hardware’s diminutive screens. For starters, the graphical style is almost cel-shaded. “The visual style uses quite a strong outline to make everything pop more – we wanted something that looked very vibrant,” explains Houser. But it goes further than that. Significantly, Rockstar Leeds’ artists are playing around with proportion: when you exit a car you can see that, really, you’re a little bit too big for it. In the real world, you’d be looking at standing seven or eight feet tall.

“The characters on foot are exaggerated for the very simple reason of being able to inject them with character when viewed from above,” says Houser. “It just isn’t as fun otherwise – we did various experiments with this kind of thing. This way, you can actually see what your character is doing. And one of the great successes of the game at the moment is that the out-of-car action feels really fun. It was always a challenge to make that seem fun in GTA1 and 2, and as much as we loved them at the time, I think now it’s more explosive and fun than it ever was before. Part of that is simply an issue of clarity, so the explosions are really powerful, and the firefights look great. The bullet traces are obviously super-exaggerated, but that all helps with figuring out what you’re doing.”



This is a scaled-down GTA, then, but also one that is larger than life in a way that GTAIV, in some ways, was not. “Even if it doesn’t have the depth that you could get with, say, Niko in GTAIV, it’s an interesting creative challenge for us,” says Houser. “And not just in terms of it being fun to drive the cars – which it is – or shooting the guns and causing all the explosions, but also just fun to work through the story. And that’s a challenge for us because the platform does not support the kind of things we’ve done in the past – the full 3D cutscenes that flow seamlessly into the rest of the game. So we had to work out new ways to do that kind of thing.”

In order to tell the story in the absence of 3D-driven exposition, Rockstar has settled on a comic-book style that sits perfectly alongside the clearly defined, almost cartoony visuals of the action proper. Offering stills of Rockstar’s customarily charismatic characters as their dialogue is delivered via text, together with the occasional animated feature in the second screen, it is a compact, elegant solution.