"We wanted to keep the sense of competition that comes from multiplayer but we wanted to bring back a better sense of character, rather than just being a faceless member of an army, and that was one of the inspirations for Gang Wars. "Multiplayer, particularly in competitive first-person shooters, has almost completely forsaken any kind of story or attachment to character," he says. And the same is true of multiplayer, or at least, we think it should be." And when it comes to multiplayer, Houser believes that no one else is really going that extra mile in storytelling. "Even in a single-player game, we're not trying to serve the needs of the story so much as make a story that works to make the action more exciting and compelling. But through modes like Gang Wars, Houser isn't trying to intrude a narrative upon players having fun with friends he's trying to advance what people expect from a multiplayer experience: "Ideally it will evolve into something that's both a place for emergent gameplay and for game makers, including writers, animators and designers, to provide some context and structure for that gameplay to make it even more compelling," he admits.
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So often multiplayer is seen as beyond the reach of the writer – a forum in which players shape their own private narratives. With Max Payne 3, Houser is attempting to weave Rockstar's strong narrative sensibilities beyond the single-player campaign and into the fabric of the game's multiplayer experience. Max Payne is very much a character-drive experience, and always has been." However, from a more creative standpoint, both are about the same thing – making characters interesting and giving as much weight and context as possible to the action.
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It is, in many ways, the difference between, say, a movie and an entire series of a TV show. "A more linear game has to be more precise, less meandering, but also lets you structure a plot in a much more precise way than is possible in an open world game. But how has Rockstar – a studio much-feted for its sprawling sandbox games– negotiated this potentially-restrictive transition?ĭan+Houser "From a structural standpoint, both have advantages and disadvantages – an open world game has to be looser and have less structure, but that gives you the ability to digress, explore subplots and a wider array of characters," says Houser, co-founder of Rockstar and the co-writer of Max Payne 3. But Rockstar's next game, Max Payne 3, unfolds a very different type of story it's a much more controlled, linear affair.
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Set in open-world environments, the single-player campaigns of Grand Theft Auto IV and Red Dead Redemption pushed what the form is capable of: both are grand narratives, wherein players consolidated their own story within the confines of predetermined missions. Dan Houser and Rockstar Games firmly believe in the power of the third-person narrative.