The PC gaming community has made modifications that turn San Andreas and Vice City into multiplayer games, and Crackdown had great online co-op, so we know a multiplayer GTA on Xbox 360 is technically feasible. And we can’t think of anything more satisfying than pushing through GTA IV’s missions and fleeing from the cops with a friend in tow. Think of the potential! One player drives, another shoots. One goes into the bank to rob it while another heads off to get the getaway ready. Or maybe one parachute from the top of the building while another drives a truck for them to land on.

One of the coolest-sounding things about GTA IV is your phone. Which you’ll be able to use to keep track of events and get in contact with people, so it’d be great to see this fleshed out a bit more. How about letting players take photos with the camera or play games on it to kill the time? It worked wonders for Project Gotham with Geometry Wars. Or you could give players a GPS unit – you could have a geocaching sub-game where one person hides a package, then someone on their Xbox Live Friends list could get the co-ordinates and have to hunt it down.

It looks like Rockstar is pulling out all the stops to give GTA IV an engaging plot, but we’ d bet dollars to doughnuts that the player’s interaction with the world’s is still heavily limited to driving, killing, and killing while driving. And while that’s kind of the point of GTA, it gets harder to care about the story when the only thing we can do outside the cutscenes and phonecalls of the narrative are these borderline psychotic crime spress.
[via IGN]