BuzzFeed managed to score themselves an interview with Aaron Garbut, art director at Rockstar North. In it, Garbut primarily discusses the gaming world in Grand Theft Auto 5 and the pains Rockstar has gone through to make it look and feel as realistic as possible (in a GTA sort of way). They also scored some new screenshots (even newer than the ones released earlier today!).
You can read the whole thing here, but here's couple of the more interesting pieces...
The entire world was handcrafted and unique:
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. That in itself, though, means that most people will have different experiences. We used to call Liberty City a living, breathing world, but this is way beyond anything we’ve done before.
The draw distance is "unlimited":
The main thing we wanted to achieve was to pull off this sense of scale. The way we don’t limit the draw distance and draw the lights so far back really emphasizes this. Every single light we place in the world is stored, streamed, and laid into the map, even into the distance. The entire world draws all the time: You can fly high in the air at one corner of the map, look over the miles of city and skyscrapers, over the hills and desert to the furthest ridges of the most distant mountains. It’s all there and visible.
