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Common elementsEdit

GameplayEdit

Each game in this series allows players to take on the role of a criminal in the big city, typically an individual who plans to rise through the ranks of organised crime through the course of the game. The player is given various missions by kingpins and major idols in the city underworld which must be completed to progress through the storyline. Assassinations and other violent crimes are featured regularly. Occasionally taxi driving,firefighting, street racing, bus driving, or learning to fly helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft are also involved in the game.

In later titles, notably those released afterGrand Theft Auto 2, the player is given a more developed storyline in which they are forced to overcome an unfortunate event (e.g., being betrayed and left for dead), which serves as motivation for the character to advance up the criminal ladder and ultimately leads to the triumph of the character by the end of the storyline.

The Grand Theft Auto series belongs to a genre of free-roaming role-playing video games called open world games, and grants a large amount of freedom to the player. Traditional action games are structured as a single track series of levels with linear gameplay, but in Grand Theft Auto the player can determine the missions that they want to undertake, and their relationship with various characters are changed based on these choices. Influenced by the earlier game Turbo Esprit,[34][35] the cities of the games can be roamed freely at any point in the game, and are examples of open world video game environments which offer accessible buildings with minor missions in addition to the main storyline. There are exceptions: missions follow a linear, overarching plot, and some city areas must be unlocked over the course of the game.

Grand Theft Auto III and subsequent games have more voice acting and radio stations, which simulate driving to music with disc jockeys, radio personalities, commercials, talk radio, pop music, and American culture.

The use of vehicles in an explorable urban environment provides a basic simulation of a working city, complete with pedestrians who generally obey traffic signals. Further details are used to flesh out an open-ended atmosphere that has been used in several other games, such as The Simpsons: Hit & Run, which has less emphasis on crime or violence, and Lego City Undercover, which reverses the roles of police officer and criminal, although the player goes undercover in gangs for a portion of the game.

Criminal activities in Grand Theft Auto games do not go unnoticed by the police. As the player engages in these in-game illegal activities, they may gain a “wanted level”, represented by a maximum of five or six stars. A small crime, such as running over a non-player character, may create a one star wanted level situation, while shooting an officer may earn more stars. As the number of stars increase, the amount and strength of the response will increase; a single star might have a few police cars chase after the player, while at 5 or 6 stars, tanks and attack helicopters will chase down the player. Many in-game missions will automatically give the player a wanted level after completing a certain event which they must then get rid of before the mission is complete. Often, trying to keep away from the police while wanted will cause the player to gain even higher wanted levels. The player can remove their character’s wanted level by avoiding detection or spending in-game money at specific locations to elude the police (such as a mod shop to repaint their car). Alternatively, if the player-character dies, they will respawn at a home or hospital and the wanted level will be removed, though the player may lose money, guns, and other benefits they had before being chased. The “wanted level” gameplay concept has become common in other GTA Clones and similar open-world games.

SettingEdit

The Grand Theft Auto series is set in a fictional version of the world, in a number of different time periods. The original Grand Theft Autointroduced three main cities: Liberty City, based upon New York City, Vice City, based upon Miami, and San Andreas, based upon mostly parts of California. In the first Grand Theft Auto game, San Andreas was based on San Francisco and parts of Las Vegas. Expansion packs later set the game in London.

The second entry in the franchise, Grand Theft Auto 2, set the game in the future in a locale named “Anywhere City”.

Subsequent games in the series have re-imagined and expanded upon the original locales. Grand Theft Auto III is set in a different rendition of Liberty City only loosely based on New York City.[36] A revised Vice City and San Andreas are depicted in Vice City and San Andreas, respectively, the latter of which takes the form of an entire state, instead of a single city. The state of San Andreas is based on the states of California and Nevada, and consists of three major cities: Los Santos (Los Angeles), San Fierro (San Francisco), and Las Venturas (Las Vegas). Surrounding towns and areas of desert, water, woodland, and countryside lie between the three cities. The GTA III rendition of Liberty City is also briefly featured during one mission.

Liberty City Stories and Vice City Stories, originally released on the PlayStation Portable handheld console and later reissued for other consoles, are set in the previous depictions of their respective eponymouscities, but in different decades. The maps for the two cities remain the same, with some differences in terms of buildings and geography to reflect the different time periods.

Grand Theft Auto IV and its subsequent expansion packs The Lost and Damned andThe Ballad of Gay Tony are set in a third revision of Liberty City, set in 2008, which is a closer analog to New York City and its boroughs than the GTA III version.[37] Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars is also set in this version of Liberty City, although the Alderney portion of the map is not present.[38]

Grand Theft Auto V, released in 2013, is set in a revised depiction of San Andreas that features Los Santos (Los Angeles) to the south and the rural Blaine County to the north.[39] It includes revised landmarks such as the “Vinewood” sign (instead ofHollywood), Rockford Hills (instead of Beverly Hills), Del Perro Pier (instead of Santa Monica Pier), Los Santos International Airport (LSX) (instead of LAX), Los Santos Golf Club (instead of Los Angeles Country Club.), and Galileo Observatory (instead of Griffith Observatory). The game also features the town of Ludendorff in the fictional state of North Yankton. Los Angeles was extensively researched for Grand Theft Auto V. The team organized field research trips with tour guides and architectural historians and captured around 250,000 photos and hours of video footage during these visits.[40] Since the release of the game, hundreds of in-game buildings have been identified as being based on real-world landmarks.[41] The New Yorker‘s Sam Sweet notes that, with sales of game reaching thirteen million copies, “there will be more people living in the imaginary state of Los Santos than in the real city on which it was modelled.”[42]

In both Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas andGrand Theft Auto V, Los Santos and the state of San Andreas are depicted as being on an island an undetermined distance from the US mainland. In both games it is possible to circumnavigate the state by boat. Similarly, the versions of Liberty City and Alderney inGrand Theft Auto IV and expansion packs are also completely located on islands, as is Vice City. The GTA III rendition of Liberty City however, while mostly island, is connected to mainland on its Northwest corner (a region the player cannot navigate).[citation needed]

Only the expansion packs for the originalGrand Theft Auto, London, 1969 and London, 1961, set in London, have featured a location outside the United States and used a real-life location.