Niko Bellic, the law abiding citizen.

GTA games were always really designed to be about one thing, causing complete mayhem. From the original on PC/PS1, people were encouraged to drive around the 3 cities, doing relatively simple missions (which in theory, have not changed much) and often being as destructive as possible.


I remember playing it years ago, and driving into the park, seeing a load of boy scouts, and trying to drive over them all in a line. I don't quite know why I did that, but hell, the blood splatters were pretty.

Now I need to make clear that its not turned me into some kind of psycho, who actively attempts to run kids over in a stolen Fiat Punto, but its weird to see how the games have developed. Minus the obvious graphical style change from GTA II and III, the first game had a fart button for crying out loud. This shows how far the series has actually come.

Now when I played the GTA games on the PS2 console, after getting around the story, and building up into the top dog in either Liberty City, Vice City or San Andreas, I attempted to be a bit more, pedestrian. Quite a few of my friends laugh when I attempt not to kill pedestrians as my car flies off the road during a chase. I suppose its the guilt from running all those pixels over that time ago, but whenever I accidentally hit one, after being brutally shunted by the police, simply for nudging their car slightly, I lose all feelings for these pedestrians and end up cutting through them the same way a chainsaw cuts through players on Gears.


GTA IV, with the massively improved graphics, physics and realism, has taken my pedestrian loving to a whole new level. I don't mean I'm often slinking off to a dark alley for a bit of action with some particular ladies, but I've taken to cruising round the city in the close in camera mode, which rests on the bonnet, to make sure i don't run into either people or their cars. I don't drink drive, i don't simply point a gun at Mr Average walking down the street and its only in emergencies I nab a car.


Maybe because of how the world is different in this modern age, the developers intended Niko to have a bit more of conscience. An article on Gamesradar attempted to try and perform as few crimes as possible through out the first couple of missions of the game. Obviously, the way Rockstar has crafted the story makes this difficult to be law abiding, but honestly, who wants to not be a kick ass anti hero in the storyline. The rest of the GTA games, the parts where you just wander about finding cool things to do, that's the part you play how you like, whether nice or nasty. This works really well with the multiplayer aspect of the game, as allows you to play the game with other people, exactly how you want.

For San Andreas on PC, a mod to allow online games has led to role playing servers being set up. These feature people who want to play specific types of characters, for example, Admins of the servers are usually the police, good navigators end up as taxi drivers, and people can operate in their own little world. This stops the temptation of people going insane and just murdering each other, as you can go to jail, and logging in and out of the server wont free you. But this leads to no game being the same, as the person may attempt to resist arrest, or run to the wilderness and become a renown criminal.

Overall then, its clear that the player makes GTA, not the developers. Playing it any way is cool, hence it being a awesome sandbox game, IV being particularly good in this regard by forcing you to make choices on who lives or dies, choosing between friends and being your own person. Niko Bellic is a fantastic character, and causes the player to think 'Would he actually be doing this, or thinking this way?'. This shows what a great game Rockstar have crafted, and that it truly is a 'Next Gen' Grand Theft Auto.