Wikipedia:Peer review/Grand Theft Auto IV/archive1

Grand Theft Auto IV

I've listed this article for peer review because I think that it has potential to become an FA (based on Grand Theft Auto V & 1080° Snowboarding) and would like some input on how to improve it to that standard.

Thanks, TheSandDoctor ^Talk 21:56, 27 September 2020 (UTC)

NOTE: when you close this peer review, please be sure to remove it from Template:FAC peer review sidebar. If FA regulars have to do all the maintenance, they may stop following that very useful sidebar :) And please add the sidebar to your userpage so you can help out at Peer review! Good luck, SandyGeorgia (Talk) 13:59, 28 October 2020 (UTC)

Comments from CR4ZE

@TheSandDoctor and Rhain: I assume you will be collaborating together on a pending FAC, so comments are addressed to the both of you. I ran through and copy-edited top to bottom. I always opt for economy of words, however you may not like all my changes and that is fine. Please feel free to refine/recast as you see fit. Now, my comments. I'm going to discuss the most crucial point first and then list off others chronologically:

• There is nothing in the body that evaluates the game's impact and legacy in retrospect. The fourth lead paragraph claims the game is considered one of the greatest all time, yet this point is never expounded anywhere else. Why was the game so important and how did it influence the industry? This omission is critical and must be addressed. There are multiple RS that discuss the game's influence on subsequent game design; ten minutes of research brought me a myriad of examples.[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8] More comprehensive digging I'm sure would unearth many more. Naturally, several "greatest games of all time", "games of the generation", "best open world games" etc articles by RS could be used. Avoid mere listicles however and try to use quality pieces that discuss the game for at least a paragraph or two.

Gameplay

• List-defined refs made this a pleasure to copy-edit, so thank you. Wish I'd make more of an effort to incorporate this into my own editing style (although I alternate between different editing gadgets anyway).
• "the world of Grand Theft Auto IV is larger in area ..." the cited source doesn't really make this connection. I remember reading a few articles way back that explained GTA IV was smaller than San Andreas but had less open-ended, dead areas and more playable city space. If you could find something, this would be a more interesting and less OR-y point to make (not necessarily OR but again not a very clear point).
• "There is a first-person perspective option when using vehicles" this feels a bit phoned-in and breaks the flow/rhythm of prose.
• "The game's single-player mode lets players control ..." reads a little awkward here. Could we look at something along the lines of "the single-player mode follows player character Niko Bellic's journey through Liberty City's criminal underworld" or similar? Something that establishes we control him and that the narrative chronicles his experiences in Liberty City. Niko's Eastern Europeanism may be more relevant to Plot than Gameplay so perhaps doesn't need to be mentioned.
• The in-game internet sentence is a little snakey.
• I think overall this paragraph doesn't flow quite the way it should. We jump from taxis in one sentence, to morality choices and then to bowling. Reshuffle info and try to connect statements a little better here.
• The multiplayer paragraph needs massaging. I fixed shifting of tenses but it still lacks rhythm and cohesion in spots. "Players decided which game mode that they wished to play, including deathmatches and street races" (tense corrected in my revision) is an example where the rhythm is really off.

Synopsis

• A few examples of stuffy prose I couldn't recast myself: "the design of the setting focuses on a recreation"; the sentence on bridges/islands is fragmented by four commas; "Grand Theft Auto IV takes place" and then "However, the game takes place" in the very next sentence.
• I read through the Plot section but didn't spend much time editing it. Again, lots of fragmented sentences here that need work. One choppy paragraph needing a merge somewhere.

Development

• Development was split off recently but I'm not so sure it met the requirements for WHENSPLIT. Parent article's readable prose size is 30 KB and child article sits at 22 KB. Merging back and removing SS would leave us with somewhere between 40 and 50 KB of prose. I think this should at least be discussed in talk space before we move ahead.
• I refined the "The team did not look at the previous renditions ..." sentence but it perhaps still needs to be tighter.
• "more realistic and detailed style and tone" what constitutes "detailed" style remains unclear.
• "The team took the game's development ..." the word "style" four times in a single sentence.
• "was the first contemporary game" what does this mean? I know what it means (first game set in modern-day since III) but the reader won't.

Release and promotion

• Unfortunately, File:Grand Theft Auto IV murals, Hotel Figueroa, Los Angeles, CA 2.jpg is violating US Freedom of panorama law. If you want to keep the image, it will need to be reduced and reuploaded with an NFCC.
• Refs 56-59 could be bundled.

Reception

• We're quite clunky in spots here. There are a lot of sentences that are structured roughly like this: "Journalist A said [x], writing that [y]", "Journalist B considered [x], and felt that [y]", "Journalist C liked [x], and wrote that [y]" etc. We lose cadence and rhythm as a result, so more work in recasting sentences to give colour and be more succinct needs to be done here. A few more examples where prose flow feels clunky and "off": "was impressed by the city, attributing this to the game's AI", "stating that they prefer him", "attributing this to the game's script" etc.
• Here's an example that I haven't fixed but will give a suggestion for and leave up to you to refine accordingly: "IGN's Goldstein praised the fluidity of the cover system, and felt that the auto aim mechanic is a "great help in larger battles" → IGN's Goldstein praised the combat's fluid cover system and effective auto-aim mechanic".
• You could go through in similar fashion to give the prose a more active voice.

Sales

• We could avoid the choppy Windows paragraph by merging elsewhere.

Other considerations

• Try to reduce instances where we refer back to "the game" or "Grand Theft Auto IV" as much as possible. You'll surely find ways to make statements much clearer as a result.
• Oxford commas can sometimes prove distracting. This may fall into the category of personal preference, however there would be at least a few examples to note where fragmentation could be avoided by removing them.
• Check and recheck for DUPLINKS: for example, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 are relinked in the Sales section.
• Per {{cite web}} guidelines, |accessdate= parameters are only required on sources that lack a publication date (although standard editor practice is to include them anyway). However, they are made redundant if sources have been archived. Friendly suggestion (not required and may not be brought up at FAC at all): you could safely remove the parameters on archived sources just to save page size and clean up the reflist.

That's it from me for now. I'll keep my eyes peeled for a pending FAC, but please feel free to drop a line on my talk page or ping me. I hope this was helpful and I look forward to seeing the article continue to grow in the near future. Thank you in advance for taking the time to consider my remarks. — CR4ZE (T • C) 04:23, 18 October 2020 (UTC)

I never intended to nominate for FAC anytime soon, nor do I have the time to dedicate to it at present, but I'll try to help TheSandDoctor in any way I can. Also a quick note that the multiplayer paragraph was rewritten after it was discontinued on Windows, but it should never have been changed as it's still active on console; I did a quick rewrite but clearly missed some errors, hence the awkward phrasing. – Rhain ☔ 14:29, 18 October 2020 (UTC)

@Rhain: Do you have a time-frame for when you may be able to look at this? With some elbow grease, there really is potential for a strong FA here. I'm sure TheSandDoctor is committed but it would be wonderful to see the merit of a collaboration (especially given you are a major contributor). X201 might like to lend a hand as well. There's a wealth of info to unpack just from the sources I listed alone, with potentially even more out there, some of which would suit the Development section well. Some retrospective criticism is there to balance appraisal so that could also be incorporated. There's no rush to get to the finish line but I'd love to see what you could do together in the near future. — CR4ZE (T • C) 00:36, 19 October 2020 (UTC)

Not really; I hadn't planned to do any more work on this article (my recent copy-edit was in response to this peer review, and didn't require too much work as I'd had an offline draft in progress for a while), nor do I really have the interest or mental capacity for FAC for the foreseeable future (and if I do, it'll likely be for a different article). I'll help where I can but don't expect anything of significance from me for a while. – Rhain ☔ 03:31, 19 October 2020 (UTC)