Rockstar co-founder and creative VP Dan Houser has said that he hopes players will get the same feeling with GTA IV as they did when they played Grand Theft Auto III for the first time.
"What we wanted was the feeling when you saw GTA III after GTA II", he said in an interview with Variety. "The feeling when [you] see IV compared to III, hopefully it's not difficult to see differences."
Houser also touched upon the need to protect the Grand Theft Auto license from exploitation, debunking any remaining rumours for a movie adaptation.
"The intellectual property is the main asset in the company. That's why 'GTA' is still relevant ten years later. We haven't put one out every year. We haven't fleeced it. And we haven't put it on 50 different formats.
"We're not per se against moving properties between different media but for GTA it just seems so perfect as a game. You lose a lot of what makes it what it is if you move it into being, say, a movie. It just never seemed interesting creatively."
Coincidently enough, it was Variety who reported last year that an Eminem-starring Grand Theft Auto movie was almost a done deal. Guess that wasn't so 'done' as they originally thought, then.