14 DAY TRIAL // Rockstar Games has talked a bit more about Grand Theft Auto 5 and how its open world will feature plenty of varied pedestrians and non-playable characters, which are going to populate it in realistic ways, based on Rockstar's research.
GTA V is eagerly awaited by millions of fans largely because Rockstar already impressed them with previous entries like Grand Theft Auto 3 or San Andreas, but also with the very popular Grand Theft Auto IV.
As with any open world game, developers face a big challenge when it comes to creating pedestrians and non-playable characters that populate its streets.
According to Rockstar Art Director Aaron Garbut, who talked with BuzzFeed, GTA 5's world is based on Los Angeles in many different ways.
"The environments in V are incredibly diverse and so the people we needed to populate it had to be too. Like pretty much everything else about the game, the scope of what we did with the characters is huge. We have a world that incorporates all of Los Angeles and its entire socioeconomic mix," he said.
"We have countless specifics for workers of various types. We have to make every area feel properly populated and sit right with the world and layer another level of realism onto the world. Then we have the towns, farms, campsites, trailer parks, settlements, and various large installations outside the city."
Besides taking into account the actual location, the pedestrians also have plenty of other different aspects, from their personalities to their clothes and much more, according to Garbut.
"Then over that we layer the specifics: the crazies, the one-offs, the random characters, etc. As soon as we had decided on the scale and scope of the world, the obsession was to make sure that it was teeming with life."
"The character team has done an amazing job; there’s so much variation in our characters, enough to populate this world, and over that they have built a massive library of clothing for each of the player characters to wear. Even our secondary characters have multiple outfits to cover every situation."
Grand Theft Auto 5's world will be on full display when the game launches on PS3 and Xbox 360 on September 17.