The first decade of Grand Theft Auto's 3D reinvention, from 2001 to 2011, brought four full-length releases (not counting handheld instalments or DLC expansions) across two console generations: games that reshaped the videogame landscape in their open-world image. In 2023, as GTA 5 enters its tenth year, it remains the series' only release of the period. A single game following in those footsteps couldn't, surely, hope to have the same seismic effect. And yet.
When Sony revealed the PS5 lineup in a 2020 event promising the 'Future Of Gaming', the very first title it showed was GTA 5 – a game that had first released on PS3. This enhanced edition would bring the game to its third generation of consoles, across the span of which it has sold over 170 million copies. Few games have ever remained in the conversation for so long. But for those who haven't held onto their citizenship over that time, what's it like to revisit Los Santos after a few years away?
Visually, GTA 5 has grown old with remarkable grace. In close-ups the game occasionally shows its age, but in the sweep of transit, it still convinces. Of course, it's had rather a lot of work done over the years – what else would you expect from a game set, more or less, in LA? The cosmetic enhancements include cleaner textures and sharper resolutions, naturally, while on PS5 these changes also extend to the hands, the DualSense haptics improving the sense of the city beneath our tyres and pulsing in time with the thick bass of a nightclub.
Most startling, though, are the changes to the quality of light itself. From the searing neons of Vice City to the haze of San Andreas, light has always been a tool Rockstar leverages to establish a sense of place, but here the combination of HDR and ray tracing pushes it further than ever before. Brittle morning sunshine at one end of the day; at the other, Pacific sunsets that bleed out into pink; after darkness falls, the twinkle of lights catching in newly reflective skyscrapers and chrome paint jobs. On a gloomy British day, it's truly transportive.
Along with the odd newly introduced detail – including stray cats that scurry into alleyways as you drive past – and a first-person mode to appreciate them better, everything works together to evoke the feel of a real city, in a way that's still unmatched after all these years. Spider-Man's New York may have the edge in fidelity, but it never feels alive in quite the same way Los Santos does. In part, perhaps, because where the former game posits a city that (for all its supervillain inhabitants) fundamentally works, Rockstar's game is more honest.
The enormous wealth disparity of the region makes for a virtual world that can be navigated by a sense of altitude and affluence alone. For all that cutscenes might try to sell the cultural chasm between protagonists Franklin and Michael, it's never realised better than in the climb required to pick up quests from your new mentor, up from South Central's tightly bunched bungalows and scruffy unused lots into the rarefied air of Rockford Hills, with its playgrounds of the rich and famous. And then, eventually, over the spine of the mountains, the sparsely populated back-country that Trevor calls home, every bit as wild as its inhabitant.
The result is a place as beautiful as it is ugly, where rolling vistas are pocked with billboards crude in graphic design and innuendo, where as much effort has been put into rendering the litter as the architecture. This, at least, helps to explain why – for a world that remains so brilliantly inviting to the player – every character you meet seems to hate living in it so much. This aspect of GTA 5 has aged significantly less well: if its caustic nihilism could be a little wearing at the time, it can feel exhausting now, a relic of '00s attitudes that prized saying the unsayable and disdained anyone stupid enough to care about anything.
هەفتانە هەرسکردنەکان، چیرۆکەکانی ئەو کۆمەڵگایانەی کە خۆشت دەوێن و زۆر شتی تر
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.gamesradar.com/games/grand-theft-auto/ten-years-in-and-on-its-third-console-generation-how-does-gta-5-hold-up-for-a-return-visit/
