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When it comes to world-building, few can compete with Rockstar and the results of its phenomenal RAGE engine. For their time, both Grand Theft Auto 4 and Red Dead Redemption offered best-in-class world simulation and the arrival of GTA5 allows us to see the technology at its peak on the current-gen consoles. Time-lapse video accelerates the pace of the game world, offering up a unique view on the both the level of detail in the simulation - and the compromises made.Perhaps not surprisingly, bearing in mind its US West Coast locale, GTA5 offers up an interesting mixture of both of Rockstar's prior sandbox games - the urban sprawl of GTA4 combined with the vast open spaces and spectacular vistas of Red Dead Redemption. Much has been improved - the overall level of detail in the world is breathtaking, pushing the streaming systems on the current-gen consoles to breaking point, while the lighting reaches another level. Appropriately for a simulation of California, the rendering of sunlight is often spectacular, particularly when looking out west over the ocean during sunset.
And yet, as beautiful as it is, we are not seeing a complete, linear progression of technology here. While the scale and scope of Rockstar's vision has expanded, the capabilities - and of course, the storage and memory - of the current-gen consoles have not, so there are some compromises. The NPC behaviours of GTA4 don't appear to be quite so detailed this time around, which hampered our efforts in getting decent city shots. Similarly, some of the cool "furniture" we found in GTA4 has no equivalents in the sequel. Time-lapse friendly props like fully working clocks, for example, were found in Liberty City, but appear to have been replaced with flat textures in GTA5.
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