Grand Theft Auto V Finally Spills A Few Beans

We all know that Grand Theft Auto V is coming this spring. Since it’s my job, I did something I haven’t done since high school. I bought a video game magazine.

Game Informer’s article is eighteen pages long and frankly a lot of it is fluff, but there are some useful tidbits, which I filtered out for you.

• Like in Red Dead Redemption, there will be randomized missions, and lots of them. OK, sold. No, seriously. Sold.
• The total mileage, once you do the math, is that there’s 58 square miles to explore. This includes a military base, the ocean floor, and the wilderness, which is presumably full of haunted cars.
• The game has three protagonists, pictured above. You can switch between them are pretty much any time in the game, but they’re fully autonomous, otherwise; when you’re not controlling them, they’re off living their lives, taking their annoying friends bowling, the usual. This is also true of missions where they work together.
• They also have different personalities and skill sets, so playing as one will actually change how you play the game.
• Sorry, ladies, no time for romancin’. You’ll be able to form friendships though, so there’s another bazillion “LOL NO HOMO” YouTube videos.
• The campaign will be approximately six hours. KIDDING! Actually, they don’t give a firm time but it’s likely in the double digits.

In short, come Spring 2013, this game will eat your life. Personally, I can’t wait. Rockstar has increasingly been pushing game environments as an art form. Liberty City itself was an artistic achievement, and games like L.A. Noire continued that. This seems to be their most ambitious attempt yet to create a living, breathing world.

And we’re probably going to ramp burning cars into restaurants with it.

Let’s not linger too long on the implications of that, deal?