Grand Theft Auto IV - Interviews with Aaron Garbut

Aaron Garbut, the Art Director at Rockstar North, has recently been interviewed by IGN and EuroGamer. Plus, Twenty brand new Screenshots of Grand Theft Auto IV, including an artwork of Mallorie, has been released by IGN, 1up and EuroGamer.

Click here for the remaining of the Screenshots (and artwork)! Below, you can read a summary of the stuff covered in both interviews from EuroGamer and IGN. Thanks to GTAGaming for the heads up! Also, the Empire movie magazine and the Official Xbox Magazine has given Grand Theft Auto IV a 5/5 and 9.5/10 rating respectively.

IGN:

• In terms of land mass, GTA IV’s Liberty City is three times as large as GTA III’s, but this time around it’s much more dense and varied.
• When asked about how textures and details were done: “We took around a quarter of a million photos and a silly amount of video footage…I have 20 DVDs of traffic flows at random junctions at various times of the day sitting on my desk here as an example, and a few hours of footage of a night in a Russian supper club.”

EuroGamer:
“We never reproduce real world locations. We take interesting or representative elements and create something new from them. It’s about taking inspiration from real places and producing something that captures the essence of it. We’re trying to take our impression of New York and keep it as that, an impression, not a laboured reproduction.”

“I think the level of detail the cut-scene guys have achieved is intense. They have the characters interacting with the world, which is hard enough, but they also have added a lot of feedback onto the world. [...] Things like pillows and mattresses bending or bouncing a little under the weight of characters sitting on it, phone cords dangling and following the phones movements, liquid moving around in glasses. It’s pretty amazing.”

“There are no hard limitations on the number of active dynamic lights around the player. The real-time shadows are working across every object and surface in the game with everything self-shadowing and casting onto everything else, there’s ambient occlusion and emissive lighting on top of that. And then your standard next-gen shenanigans - light shafts, bloom, depth of field and motion blur, and of course it goes without saying everything’s rendered with HDR.”

Here for the interviews: EuroGamer and IGN. There’s only a week left to Grand Theft Auto IV’s release date! Have you pre-ordered your copy? What are you waiting for? Click here to pre-order the Special Edition if you have not! Stay tuned to us for more Grand Theft Auto IV News!

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