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

[Great Rumbler]

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.

It's just not feasible with the size of the city in GTA. You either have to go the route of having a collection of smaller cities with a sparse smattering of NPCs, many of whom are copies of other NPCs elsewhere, or you spend thousands of hours and millions of dollars trying to give thousands of NPCs personalities and routines.

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".

GTA would benefit from procedural generation in that regard, but I was more referring to the way that the world is designed. Everything in Liberty City is hand-crafted and hand-placed. However, in Cyrodiil, most of the landscape was generated by procedure, a fact made more obvious by some of the landscape mods out there.

Every location in GTA is unique, that takes a lot of time to do and its something that procedural generation just can't do.

Did GTA need to be that expensive?

High-quality cutscenes, talented voice-actors, huge world full of unique enviroments, over a hundred licensed songs, and HD graphics. What do you want to cut out?

Anyway, take a look at Majora's Mask. That game shows the level of detail I want in an NPC.

Majora's Mask shows how that concept can be applied to a small scale. The problem is that the amount of time and effort required increases exponentially when you try to apply to a larger scale.

Shenmue scaled up and it cost Sega tens of millions of dollars.
Oblivion cut back on that in a larger enviroment and it still took years to make.
GTAIV cut back farther in an even larger enviroment and it still took years to make.

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.

The problem is that you want GTA to be a free-roaming RPG and it just isn't. It's a free-roaming action game.