Interview with Rockstar's Dan Houser
Q. Why aren’t Kinect and PlayStation Move in GTA V?
A. One of the things we're doing now, just to talk about mini-games, is making sure when you go into the mini-games and when you come out of them it feels very seamless. It feels like part of the whole experience. If you were suddenly go, "This bit's Move, that bit's not, this bit's Kinect, that bit's not," it would feel very disjointed to us. That would be detrimental to the overall experience in exchange for a bullet point on the back of the box. That's not very appealing to us.
Q. GTA V is only confirmed for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Why not the PC, Wii U and so on?
A. Everything else is up for consideration. That's all I can give you. The main thing is we are not... we are a third-party publisher. We're not Nintendo, we're not Sony, we're not Microsoft. We love all of them in different ways. But we can do what we want wherever there's the appropriate business opportunity and chance to find a market. If that's on Apple we put something on Apple. Wherever it might be. I think that's the fun in what we do. We see ourselves as a content company that uses technology. We don't make it; we use it to make the most fun stuff.
Q. Why isn't GTA V a next-gen launch title?
A. Some other people talk about the limitations of the [current] hardware. We don't feel there are that many limitations. We feel we can do some very impressive stuff and do it for a large audience. This felt like the way... There'll be a much larger audience on PS3 than there will be on PS4. At a creative level, which is the most important for us, we could say everything we wanted to say and do everything we wanted to do on these machines. We didn't sit there saying, "We'd like to do this in the game, but we can't." There's plenty of power in these machines.
Q. This is the first GTA with a musical score. Why?
A. We saw it in both Red Dead [Redemption] and Max [Payne 3]. When you put scores into missions, it brought them to life. It was doing a lot of work that nothing was doing in GTA. It adds something. We felt that as long as we kept the radios there as well, we wouldn't necessarily lose anything.
Q. On the GTA V Map:
A. This world -- the range of height and between north and south and east and west -- is huge, and it's a real strength. It felt California. Oceans are there and tall hills are there. We wanted those in the game. For us, this kind of world, that was a big properly-realized L.A. and a huge slab of regionally appropriate countryside, felt like the most interesting match to do something new with. Doing other cities just didn't seem appealing. Doing small towns is very appealing. There's a bunch of small towns and villages and whatnot in there to discover and play around in. Doing other cities, though, felt like it was going to create problems we didn't need. It wasn't going to add to the experience. Of course you could do a game with a bunch of cities now that could be pretty interesting, but we didn't think that was going to be this game. This map is going to be spectacular to people when they start exploring and playing around with it.
Sourced from IGN
