Cult GTA: San Andreas appeared after the meeting, which still pursues developers in terrible nightmares
Former Rockstar North Technical Director of Obbe Vermeij continues to talk about various difficulties in developing the Grand Theft Auto series games. His last publication is devoted to the features of creating the famous Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. On the blog, the developer talked about how certain game decisions were made, which subsequently helped the project to win a cult status.
GTA: San Andreas was released in 2004 and forever changed the idea of players about the open world and opportunities. This result was achieved after a difficult meeting of the developers, which still pursues Vermeus and his colleagues in the most terrible nightmares. The team for a long time discussed the game map and the scene of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. They wanted to implement three cities in Rockstar, but the main question was how to realize this idea and add Los Santos, San Fierro and Las Vicuro.
We had a meeting at which three people wanted cities to be on different maps. This would save memory, since it would not be necessary to simultaneously keep in memory the models of horizontal lines of cities. GTA 1 had 3 cities on different maps. The player moved between them on airplanes/buses/trains. I wanted the cities to be on the same map, since it is very important to be able to move between cities. Even if it meant that we would have to look for memory in another place.
– shared NABB VERMEY, former technical director of Rockstar North.
The developer team could not come to a single decision for a long time. Vermeus’s proposal was accepted only the next morning, when several key programmers of the studio passed to his side. The next serious problem was RPG elements.
If the player ate too much, then CJ became too thick, which prevented him from climbing the walls and quickly running. Such mechanics were interesting, but made some missions technically impossible for passing. The developers had to correct such tasks already in the course of testing the game.
To help develop the game, Rockstar hired new developers and attracted a team from Manhunt after completing work on this game. By the time of the GTA San Andreas exit, about 80 developers worked on the game, which significantly facilitated the entire development process.