GTA IV: Deserving of its current status as best game ever made?

[Dark Jaguar]

1. Oblivion has nowhere near the amount of NPCs as a game like GTA.
2. Oblivion uses way more procedural generation than GTA.
3. GTA has a hours of vioce-acting and cutscenes, maybe even more than Oblivion.
4. GTA was already the most expensive game ever made.

I really don't care if there's a street full of people if there's no method by which I can interact with them except maybe take out a side walk of them with a fire truck. A partially bustling street full of people I can actually talk to or get a quest from is far more interesting to me. I'm sure there's loads of cut scenes, but for my tastes I'd much rather they focus on interactiveness with the world.

More procedural coding is a plus if you ask me. It certainly works better than the idiot AI of "walking around a block in a circle forever". I wouldn't mind if they took procedural content generation and applied it to gameplay mechanics. I've seen the way that Spore's content generation mechanisms can determine how a creature you make should move and what means it uses to attack. Just imagine if you had an action game like Devil May Cry (let's put Kid Icarus in there) and the procedural programming allowed for on-the-fly gameplay. Instead of WATCHING the awesome combat cutscenes and then playing the not nearly as awesome fighting parts, you'd DO the awesome stuff. Someone hits you in the air, the gameplay determines that, the position of your limbs, the fact that there's a pillar behind you with an arrow you stuck in it before, and suddenly you have the ability to reach over and, say, either grab the arrow and flip off of it into the enemy, or pull it out and fire it at the enemy's sword, knocking it out of his hand and into your own and... and... awesome happens. Random events would need to be "weighted" towards awesome things (the direction a sword knocked out of someone's hand would not follow physics but the weighting).

Did GTA need to be that expensive?

Anyway, take a look at Majora's Mask. That game shows the level of detail I want in an NPC. Oblivion required a lot of work, but it was way worth it. If the next one keeps up that detail and revises the combat system to make it a lot more compelling, it'll be amazing.

Look I'm not saying you are wrong for liking GTA. A lot of people like it and it's a matter of taste and what you want out of a game. For my own tastes, there are certain interactions I need to have in a game, and GTA as a series doesn't really feel "free" to me because there are ways I want to act that aren't allowed in the series. As a result, I may be able to freely run in circles and blow stuff up, but when I don't want to do that, the world feels dead. It's a matter of taste and GTA does not match my own. Give me Oblivion instead.