Having played GTA 5 on PS3 and finding it quite enjoyable, I must say that I think it was slightly overhyped.
Technically speaking, it was a great achievement on the old-gen consoles - what they managed to squeeze out of a PS3 was impressive.
The game itself was quite entertaining, if not a bit disjointed and lacking focus in terms of storyline and a hodge-podge of gameplay mechanics. I feel they fell short of fully delivering on the heist component of the game, didn't flesh out the game world with enough missions (considering its size), and the multiplayer is a dog's breakfast which I personally can't stand (maybe it's been patched up since launch but I'm past caring).
I was also disappointed with the areas they decided to place their attention to detail - most of the stuff, such as clothes remaining wet or flip-flops actually flip-flopping, well I didn't notice them amidst the mad dash from car to cover and a hail of bullets - I had to read articles pointing this stuff out. What I did notice was that the city came off very lifeless, and aside from the central mission areas, there wasn't much done to give the city character and life (Watch Dogs makes big promises in this regard - let's see if Ubisoft delivers). There weren't enough vehicles roaming the streets, and it's probably a limitation of the console. I was disappointed to discover that pretty much every building was nothing more than a 3D cube with a nice texture slapped on. Why couldn't a little bit of effort be put into allowing me to enter the foyer of skyscrapers and take a lift to the top? Little touches of detail that would have been worth lauding. The city never felt like it was vibrant, alive, lived in. The game felt like an iteration of GTA 4, and not a evolutionary leap forward.
But I digress.
IMO, getting GTA 5 onto PC won't be a simple porting job if they want it to impress. There was a lot of technical trickery going on to make the game look good on consoles - draw distance fog and texture LOD were the most obvious, but when you slow down to scrutinise the details, you notice a lot of very low resolution decals and textures and shadows, and the smoke and mirrors become apparent.
I don't think PC gamers will happily tolerate this sort of thing especially considering the amount of hype the game got. (Off on a tangent, I think this is why Red Dead Redemption never made it to PC - that game already looks like mud on PS3 and running it on higher resolutions will make it look that much worse).
I think getting GTA 5 looking good and running well on PC is going to be a big technical challenge.
Rockstar/2K are also very good at making money, and taking the hype-train momentum through to a "next-gen" console launch first will make the best business sense. A PC launch will probably be last on the cards, since the profit/effort ratio probably isn't that enticing.
Originally Posted by Eugene
