Buzzfeed (of all places) has an extensive interview with Aaron Garbut, the long time Art Director of the Grand Theft Auto series and it does a great job of delving into the improvements Rockstar has made to engine underpinning the GTA V.
It’s a familiar story: with each new game Rockstar tends to try and push the high standards it set for itself in the previous game. Rockstar’s last open world game was Red Dead Redemption, probably my favourite of this generation. The idea that the team at Rockstar North is attempting to push its latest game beyond that is a salivating prospect.
“In terms of raw man-hours, this has been way in excess of any project we’ve done at Rockstar before,” explained Garbut. “From the outset, we wanted to ensure that not only was the world big but that it was absolutely packed with character and life. It’s levels of magnitude above Grand Theft Auto IV in terms of what we’ve done on the environment side.
“I want to stress that not only is this world huge but it’s absolutely handcrafted. Every little bit of this world has had a large number of extremely talented artists pore over it. There’s always something to discover, something weird or interesting to see or interact with. It’s absolutely not a massive, empty world. We’ve considered the placement of every tree. We’ve simply not copied buildings around the map or procedurally generated the terrain to pad it out. It’s all handcrafted, all unique, and we’ve gone over it all again and again and again to make sure there’s enough layering of detail that I don’t think many people will ever see everything we’ve put into the world.”
It’s a great interview that covers almost all aspects of Grand Theft Auto V from a visual standpoint: the art, the technology, the world building. I know that most of you probably head to Buzzfeed for its expansive ’25 Pics Of A Cat Doing Something A Bit Weird’ photo features, but this really is a top notch piece. Good stuff.
“Way Beyond Anything We’ve Done Before”: Building The World Of “Grand Theft Auto V” [Buzzfeed]
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17 responses to “Rockstar On GTAV: ‘We’ve Taken A Big Step Forward’”
Rockstar has updated the GTA V website, it’s pretty awesome although still not as awesome as the GTA San Andreas website was.
http://www.rockstargames.com/V
Edit*
Some hobnob from Nvidia stated that “Gamers are preparing their systems for a strong roster of games coming this fall, including blockbuster franchises, such as Call of Duty: Ghosts, Grand Theft Auto V and Assassin’s Creed IV.”
Whether they are privy to information we are not or just an assumed guess that it’s coming to PC’s at the same time.
They get my vote when they say avoid the “this is a brand new engine” cliche and just say they’ve improved their engine. I know it’s a petty gripe, but when a developer says they’ve created a whole new engine for their game I listen very carefully for a laugh track.
To be fair, it’s the first GTA game to use the RAGE engine entirely GTA IV used Rage and Renderware. So they’re not incorrect in saying it. They’re just sort of stretching the truth a little.
Well GTA V is still using the RAGE (Rockstar Advanced Game Engine) Engine which has been around for 7 years now (I can remember when Rockstar Games Presents Table Tennis debuted and they showed it off at E3 because that was the debut of the RAGE Engine). I would say it has been tweaked heavily from Max Payne 3 and NaturalMotion (owners of the Euphoria Physics Engine used in Max Panye 3 and now in GTA V) tweaked their engine a little bit to suit and it looking to be a very good game
Not bad for a 7 year gaming engine which was showed off and debut with a table tennis game
I wonder why Rockstar (and Lucas Arts for a time) are the only ones who use Euphoria – it’s incredible!
1 month (and 3 days) to go!
It’s not like anyone is counting or anything 😉
792 hours!!!!!
47520 minutes!!!!!
See, this is why I wanna live on Venus. On Venus, GTA V is less than a day away.
But the shipping is soooooooo expensive.
Bundle it with stuff and get it free with Amazon?
It’s expensive but I usually use the ‘NASA Priority Wormhole’ option.
Great that they thought of the placement of every single tree, but will we be able to destroy those trees?!
It would take too long for them to grow back……
What is this? GTA-V: Easter Island edition?
All I want to know for sure is that the framerate with be fairly smooth.
GTA IV would slow down pretty regularly (and wasn’t that fast to begin with). Honestly I want to see it running better than that which is a huge ask considering how much bigger in scale it looks.
You always get a handful of games towards the end of a generation that just try to be a bit too much and the experience suffers for it.
Good, because there was absolutely no reason to wander around backstreets in IV.
Driver 2’s nooks and crannies offered more.
And I hope that they have indeed taken a big step forward, Rockstar have promised improved damage on cars, but I’ll believe it when I see it. Also I expect smooth, shiny panels on cars, not a 3D shingled mess and mousse texture in the color of your choice. (most prevalent on the roof).
Also it had better not crash out of the box. No computer can run IV in any patch spec without it crashing at some point.
I still feel like they’re taking a giant poo on PC gamers. Unless they bring it out at the same time.