What sort of touches? Houser talks at length about main character Niko’s cellphone, and how it’s evolved from a way of getting new missions in previous games to become a significant means of interacting with the game. As you encounter other characters in the game, you can add their names and numbers to your phone’s address book. While they’ll still call you for missions and such, the twist here is that you can call them whenever you like, and even arrange to hang out with them. So when not on a mission or just wandering around to take in the scenery, you can call up your friends and hit the bars for drinks, darts, bowling, and more. The more you hang out, the better your relationship with them becomes, and the more they’ll help you out with free cab rides, access to weapons, and more.

Even more interesting is something Houser touches on for just a moment before quickly changing the subject – GTA IV is going to have comedy clubs you can go to, either alone or with friends. While details currently amount to pretty much that sentence, the potential is incredible. What else could be hiding out there?

Between that question and the promised social interaction from the interview (and everything else the game going for it), I’m sold. While there’s still a chance of ending up disappointed, it sounds like Rockstar have finally created a character with as much potential as the city around him. And that’s something worth showing up for.

The trouble is, I just can’t decide how I feel about all of it.

But then, I’ve always had mixed feeling about the GTA series, or at least the installments from III on. Rockstar’s achievements with the games are undeniable, with each new game expanding upon their idea of a living, breathing city, full of people going about their business, cars on the streets, and even weather. Grand Theft Auto III: San Andreas took things even further, giving you most of a fictionalized state of California to play around in with cities and towns divided by large expanses of wilderness that often held its own surprises. And while it’s something I’ve enjoyed dabbling with before (my fondest memory of the series is still playing San Andreas at Will’s house and discovering that not only could I steal a train, I could run it off the tracks), the longer form of the game has never quite clicked with me. Some of the problem is down to the way it’s built – targeting in the series has always been a joke, and San Andreas took the simulation aspect way too far by tasking you with caring for your character’s overall fitness and keeping him fed. These issues and more are said to be addressed in IV, which makes me happy, but still isn’t quite enough to seal the deal. Ultimately, my problem with the games isn’t in how I move through them, but who I am in them.

I touched on this before in talking about my issues with Assassin’s Creed, but in the case of Grand Theft Auto, the originator of open world sandbox games as a genre, its even more true. For all there is to see in the world, my ability to interact with it is almost completely limited to hurting people. This was particularly true of Grand Theft Auto III, and while Vice City and San Andreas expanded on the sort of things you could do in their world, they were almost always rooted in your character being a criminal with no hope of redemption. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing – Grand Theft Auto’s intentions are right there in the name, after all, and I don’t think anybody is foolish enough to go in to one of the games expecting to play a saint. For me personally, though, the problem appears in the contrast between the free-form nature of the game and my severely limited options for playing it. Rockstar have proven themselves capable of creating beautiful worlds for players to explore, cities that live and breathe in a way few other games can match. For them to constantly cast me as a walking cancer cell within them just feels like a complete waste of potential.

I’ve tried each of the GTA games so far, and each one has been sold or given away after a few hours of playing. Partly because of the control issues mentioned above, but largely because I just get tired of hurting people for no real reason. Killing sprees just aren’t all they’re cracked up to be, it turns out, and I inevitably find myself wanting to contribute to the world around me in some way beyond stealing its cars or knocking down its census numbers. That said, GTAIV is an incredible opportunity for the series, with the power of then new hardware it runs on and the time Rockstar have put into it creating the potential for a heretofore unknown level of player freedom. The screenshots and videos of the game so far have been stunning, as have the details on gameplay and the multiplayer aspects. I know several people here in New York who are going to spend their first hour in the game trying to find the Liberty City version of their home or work. If they’ve found room in all that wonder to create a character I don’t mind being, then the game will truly stand apart from its predecessors. I have sixty dollars set aside that could go towards pre-ordering it or picking up something else, and I’m still waiting to find out.