Ive nearly finished GTA4 now, clocking about 40 hours, and I already am looking forward to the DLC. This airplane ticket is intriguing, based on previous media with words like 'map pack', 'episodes', this has to be AT LEAST a new island with new mob bosses giving you missions (10 hours worth, so I would say 4-5 more NPCs). The airport in GTA4 doesnt really do much at the moment, so opening this up to take a plane to a new area must be the way to go! Man this is going to be awesome.

Reasonable said: I know MS put up $50 M but I find it hard to believe the DLC would be anywhere near this - plus I thought MS had pretty small size limits on DLC from recent comments from developers struggling with the limitation... what does that implay? Will the DLC need to be small enough or will MS annoy other developers by suiting itself and letting Rockstar have larger DLC limit than others?

The size limits are for xbla games, not dlc. You can already download xbox originals and some of those games are 5+ gigs.

can that fit on 11 gigs are you seriouse.

They got the whole damn gtaiv on the 9gb dvd9 at less than 9gb its like 7.8gb or so.Now think that disc also includes music voice over and if they use textures from disc they could do san andreas at about 4.8gb and i have xbox games downloaded that are about 4gb.

they could do that easy.

There is no way that the DLC is San Andreas
How retarded.

I'm not saying the DLC won't be something of great significance. But give me a break!

ultraslick said: There is no way that the DLC is San Andreas How retarded. I'm not saying the DLC won't be something of great significance. But give me a break!

And that's constructive.

 

Does anyone have a reason why it couldn't be San Andreas, besides time and space issues, which have already been shot down several times with reasonable answers?

I'd also like to add that the game cost $100 million to make. If Microsoft gave them $50 million, that's another half the game right there. Now, take into account that they don't need to spend money buying new music (probably only a little bit), they'll likely add maybe one or two tv channels, a few San Andreas-style web sites, and obviously some new buildings.

They already have the engine done, they probably know exactly what they're going to do by this point (probably started working on it already). With those assets already done, they could EASILY make a new city in a few months that is of a decent size.

It wouldn't seem financially sound for Rockstar to release the equivalent of a whole new game just through DLC. (at this point in time/near future) I would expect the turnaround dev time to be similar to last gen between 3 and Vice City... or between VC and SA, which is longer than 3 months. A lot longer.

Regardless if they have the engine available and the dev teams in place, the amount of dev time needed to create a similarly detailed environment the size of the state of California, or even the size of San Francisco.. is ridiculously long.
Too long for the exclusive DLC to coincide with it. IMO.

And there is a strong contrast in the way that Liberty City in 4 compares to 3 as opposed to the already comparatively detailed environment of SA in 3 as it would compare to 4. ... Follow me?

There was in fact significant strides differentiating GTA3's Liberty City and Vice City/ San Andreas outside of just larger geometry to roam around in. They were separate games which were more than just refined over time. The whole experience was added upon and the evolution from game to game was taking place which lead us to GTAIV.

The same equivalent can not and will not be done for the DLC.

If you think it will... then you are dreaming.

No one said they will add completely revolutionary new stuff--this is an expansion pack, remember, not a full sequel. It would just be a new city with a different design.

NO WAY!

So Rockstar are going to put the biggest game of last generation, a game that sold 21.5M units worldwide, onto a userbase of less than half of that (10M XBLive subscribers?).

thekitchensink said: ultraslick said: There is no way that the DLC is San Andreas How retarded. I'm not saying the DLC won't be something of great significance. But give me a break! And that's constructive.   Does anyone have a reason why it couldn't be San Andreas, besides time and space issues, which have already been shot down several times with reasonable answers?

Because when you have the choice of doing a few million of DLC at 15$ or so each or selling 10 Million+ copies at 60$ each you tend to pick the second :P

 If the DLC was to come to a point where it would have sufficient content to be sold independantly as a new game Rockstar would follow that road as it would be a much better one for them financially ( and GT5P has shown people are ready to pay 40$ for half a game when the franchise is big enough).

PS : And seeing Take Two financial situation you can bet they will do all they can to milk their most successfull franchise..