When it was announced that Grand Theft Auto 5 would be launching only on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, despite the meatier muscle of the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 arriving only a few months later, some fans raised their eyebrows and wondered why Rockstar would choose to develop its biggest game yet on old hardware.
The simple answer: because Rockstar knows that old hardware inside out and can make it do remarkable things. Every aspect of the game had to be better, richer in gameplay and more fluid and knowing we were launching on the same platforms meant we could focus on extracting the most out of those consoles and making the game as fantastic as possible, Phil Hooker, the game's associate technical director and combat designer, told IGN this week.
In the end we surpassed our own expectations and during development I think everyone working on the game has been astounded by improvements to the graphics, or new mechanics, or AI, or mission scope along the way. Hopefully the gamers will see all of these improvements at once in one go, compared to GTA 4 this definitely feels next generation to us.
So there you go. There doesn't need to be a next gen version of GTA 5 because Rockstar has squeezed enough juice out of the existing consoles to deliver the game they wanted on the hardware everybody already has.
Grand Theft Auto V launches on September 17th which is only a few more sleeps.