Scott Phillips, Design Director
I've played every GTA (on the consoles) since GTA3. They do some amazing things and I can't wait for GTA 5. My favorite, for reference, is still Vice City. However, Saints Row and Saints Row IV specifically are very different games than GTA and serve a very different need/niche for gamers. I don't think we need to live in a world where only one open world game exists and I think if you saw anything from E3 this year it was that open world games are the future.
I personally think you'd have to be crazy to make open world games and claim you haven't played GTA... I'm of the opinion that if you are going to do something and do it right, you'd better learn how everyone else who came before you did it and then try to do it better and improve on things.
I'm always fond of examples like: Apple didn't come up with the first smartphone, mobile mp3 device, nor tablet. Microsoft didn't come up with the first operating system. But both of them did do those things better than anyone else had done them before.
I think this philosophy holds true in games as well.
