Grand Theft Auto III begins with Claude, a character who never speaks and isn’t even addressed by name in-game, performing a bank heist with his girlfriend only for her to betray him for a bigger cut, Claude surviving the encounter but almost taken away to prison when providence strikes. Luckily, time hasn’t totally made the game seem archaic, and once you acclimate to the rather rough and jagged character models, you can slip into the criminal life of Liberty City and experience what made this game historic with little issue.
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Players were free to abandon inhibitions and play the game how they liked, and hundreds of games that followed would begin to integrate Grand Theft Auto III’s innovations, but that does mean time has shown how the ideas can be done better, especially through the game’s own sequels. This openness to be amoral and violent got the game in hot water, but the controversies over the mature concepts would help to really push away the idea that video games are primarily a medium for children’s entertainment. You can take missions in a structured format in Grand Theft Auto III and complete the story, but if the mood strikes you, you can also steal a car, run over pedestrians, and then get in a lethal shootout with the cops only to come back to life after and potentially do it all over again. Not only that, but the game moved open world gaming into the third dimension with a city you can explore similar to a real one, giving it a feeling of being rooted in reality even with its deliberately absurd satirical takes on real world social issues.
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While the term has waned in popularity, it helped popularize sandbox gaming where player-guided action is emphasized by the variety of systems in place to entertain them even when off the beaten path. While it wasn’t the first game to utilize an open world where the player is free to explore without levels restricting them or objectives that demanded immediate attention, this 2001 PlayStation 2 title made many leaps forward for the concept. The Grand Theft Auto series is certainly one of the most influential game series of all time, and that mostly comes from the innovations found within in its third entry, Grand Theft Auto III.