IGN: How did working on the two projects concurrently help in the creation of L&D? Leslie Benzies: We didn't work on them concurrently we started full scale production of The Lost and Damned after GTA IV shipped, but we had good plans in place long before that point so we knew what were doing in terms of story flows and mission design.
Plus, as presumably, the player will know the city when the game starts, so does Johnny-so you start right in the middle of someone's life, in the place they live, rather than turning up new with Niko. The changes range from huge shifts in storyline and gameplay to more subtle things like physics, graphics and animation tweaks, to all of the background media that make GTA what it is, and some really cool new multiplayer modes. YES NO You have the entirety of Liberty City open to you from the very beginning, full of new vehicles, new missions and a whole new story and point of view. It's huge, it's subtly intertwined with the main game without feeling tacked on, and it changes every aspect of your experience inside Liberty City. We think the Lost and Damned does a very good job of that at least, as no one has ever offered a fully self-contained downloadable episode like this before, or treated a game world in quite this way. As with all our projects, we're constantly trying to push ourselves, competing internally to offer something genuinely new and exciting. As we were developing GTA IV, we loved Niko and his story, but wanted to figure out a way to fit other stories in Liberty City, and that as something downloaded would be the perfect format for that. What was the approach going into the creation of L&D? Leslie Benzies: We don't really pay too much attention to what other people do, but we have always felt that, having built a massive, complex living game world, to only have one story flow through it felt kind of limiting. IGN: The Lost & Damned seems far more robust than the typical DLC. We spoke with Leslie Benzies, President of Rockstar North to get a more in-depth look at what gamers can expect when L&D releases February 17. Rather than tack on some extra missions for Niko, gamers get to experience GTA from a new perspective, experiencing an all-new storyline, new weapons, vehicles, and new multiplayer modes. The Lost & Damned, the first of two promised Xbox-exclusive episodes, returns gamers to Liberty City, but puts them in control of a new character. Next week, Rockstar takes the concept of downloadable content to the next level.