14 DAY TRIAL // The Grand Theft Auto video game franchise has always pushed the envelope in terms of gameplay and controversy, but if you had to blame its massive popularity on one single thing, it would be the intricate stories that unfold in the game, which places the player as the main character.
While some critics believe the story of the latest iteration in the series, Grand Theft Auto IV, to be Oscar-worthy, now the first of two DLC (Downloadable Content) episodes, The Lost And Damned, has been praised by none other than the creators of the series, Rockstar. Talking about the story of these new adventures, which replaces immigrant Niko Bellic with biker Johnny Klebitz, Rockstar's vice president Jeronimo Barrera revealed that it was actually better than the things found in the mainstream media.
“Stuff just ends up being so generic these days,” complained Barrera. “We want to have something that stands up to all mediums. If you put The Lost and Damned as a movie script, man, it would be crazy, and we want gamers to realize that. There's a lot of super people working on this, and the quality and caliber of their work I think exceeds what's out there in all other mainstream media.”
This newly found value of video game writing isn't something that has gone unnoticed, as Rockstar's co-founder Dan Houser also declared a few weeks ago that because there weren't a lot of things imposed on the people responsible with the game's story, we had such deep, intricate but also immature ones these days.
Hopefully the high quality of the writing will be seen in future Rockstar titles, including the already highly speculated second DLC episode, and we can all enjoy the same great experience that we had in previous titles.