#Gta 5 rockstar series

Travel beyond the city limits and you'll immediately earn a 6-star wanted level and be hunted mercilessly by waves of cops, FBI agents, and soldiers. The game confines you to Los Santos in the first act. The short draw distance, a technical compromise to allow a game of this size to run on PS2-era hardware, also adds to the sense of scale, obscuring the distance and making things feel further away. When you're out in the middle of nowhere, you really do feel disconnected from civilization-more so than even GTA 5, whose deserts and forests never feel truly isolated. But the variety of terrain between the cities-including redwood forests, small country towns, and a sprawling desert-makes it feel much bigger than it actually is. You could fit the entire landmass into Grand Theft Auto 5's map several times over, and driving from one end to the other takes just 8 minutes.

Related: The Magic Of Grand Theft Auto's Radio Stations Just a few years earlier, Liberty City felt like the biggest, most detailed virtual city that could ever exist-and now there were three of them in one game. But above all, it's the world that really sets it apart. The sheer volume of ways to interact with the game was, and still is, remarkable. You can take control of a vast array of land, air, and sea vehicles. You have a ridiculously fine level of control over your character's fitness and appearance, with repeated trips to the gym or Burger Shot having the expected effect. There's a lot in San Andreas that took the open-world genre to new heights in 2004. Los Santos, San Fierro, and Las Venturas are satirical send-ups of Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Las Vegas respectively, encompassing the fictional state of San Andreas in the 1990s-and to this day it's the boldest, most ambitious thing the studio has ever done.

#Gta 5 rockstar series

But no one could have predicted that the next game in the series would feature not one, but three cities, with acres of desert and countryside in between. A year later it was Vice City, a garish '80s analogue of Miami. In 2001 we visited Liberty City, a contemporary spoof of New York City. After the success of GTA: Vice City, people wondered which caricature of an American metropolis Rockstar would take Grand Theft Auto players to next.