Just a few more days until the cat's out of the bag and Grand Theft Auto V is out for all of us to enjoy. Despite the game fast approaching, everyone's still eager for as much information as possible to tide them over until the game releases.
One of the few companies to get an early look at GTA was Brady, one of the companies behind the dwindling strategy guide market, all so they could offer players the best way to tackle the game's missions and help them find all the hidden knick knacks. However, it seems as though someone with a retail copy of the strategy guide for the next GTA was a bit overzealous, and posted the guide's print out of the sprawling map of Los Santos.
From there, the pic spread out all over the net: Reddit, social networking sites galore, and countless other news outlets.
We knew how large the game's city would be, but as you can see, the countryside outside of Los Santos' urban sprawl puts the city to shame. I'm sure Bigfoot's in there somewhere...
In plain black and wh..er...green and blue, the map clearly illustrates Rockstar North's Art Director Aaron Garbut's earlier sentiments with Buzzfeed. Described Garbut, "It's absolutely not a massive, empty world. We've considered the placement of every tree. We've simply not copied buildings around the map or procedurally generated the terrain to pad it out. 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."
"It's levels of magnitude above Grand Theft Auto IV in terms of what we've done on the environment side," Garbut described further. "We used to call Liberty City a living, breathing world, but this is way beyond anything we've done before."
Take a look at the map below (or have a closer look here), at least while you can. At last notice, Rockstar was sending out DMCA compliants, prompting many outlets to pull the images. We'll keep ours posted for as long as we can.
GTA V centers around three characters performing a number of heists, each with their own reason for doing so. Players have the ability to switch back and forth between each character on the fly (when not taking part in a mission). First up, you have Michael, who seems to act as a sort of leader of the trio. He's a career criminal whose patience for his family and his wallet are both running dry. Next up, the story is set for repo man Franklin who wants out of the life he's dug himself into. Finally, the resident redneck Trevor, definitely the most colorful of the bunch, but also potentially the most dangerous
Rockstar has confirmed there will be multiple endings, and the story will be about the same length as Red Dead Redemption, at about 25 - 30 hours, and that's before the massive amount of secondary things to do, or release of the obligatory DLC, so this will be a monster of a game.
Grand Theft Auto V hits PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 next week, September 17.
