gmt

I don't think it's square tbh (at least not the footprint of the tower, the entire complex could be square of course). at 0:38sec on the big billboard of the MHC and it looks more like a rectangular building in the architects drawing. the next scene seems to underline this, although the angle of the shot is tricky. what rules out the square footprint (at least for me) is the shot at 1:00 with the military jet flying by the towers, here you can cleary see that, at least for the main tower, the footprint is not square. (also in this shot you can see a slight curvature to the top of the tower, similar to LA Live Tower, although the original has it on both sides and from this perspective, it looks MCH only has it on one side). as for the billboard, it looks like it's mounted to a wing of the building which is considerably lower than the main tower (the concrete pillars inside end at the same floor the wing ends so I guess it's not supposed to be taller in this area), a similar wing-ish structure can be seen at the south-eastern side of LA Live Tower. Comparing the location of MCH to the other LS highrises in the background at this shot, the part of the building with the MCH-billboard also seems to be the south-eastern side. Cartainly hard to be definite on this one as all we see is a construction site, but from what the trailer shows I doubt it's not based on / supposed to be LA Live Tower. Unless, of course, they don't come up with an entirely fictional building

did somebody already mention the similarities between the under-construction-highrise (Mile High Club) and the LA Live Hotel and Condo next to Staples Center? the overall shape, blue-ish window texture, size, location relative to other downtown buildings, even the date of construction matches the approximate timeframe the game is set.

now since R* tends to make big noise concerning the cover artwork of gta (just remember the artwork trailer for gta4) I doubt it will be download only. for the question itself, I think I won't download, for the pure lack of hdd space as my ps3 is a first gen ps3 with just a handfull of gb (and I'm too lazy to swap for a bigger hdd). also I'm no fan of buying online, unless I can pay via transaction or cod, so my answer would be no. But since EFLC eventually ended up in a physical form, I guess the game will do the same, either right from the start or some time later.

the uncle @ R* thingy? oh nevermind, just go ahead n flame me for this evergreen of rumor creation

Well my uncle works for R*. Got the job pretty much right after he got fired from Nintendo for leaking too much. j/k No, of course I don't work for R*, nor am I a time traveller (I guess). That psychic thing tho holds a certain appeal, maybe I dig deeper here... But yeah contrary to many others that seem to think "Los Santos and the surrounding countryside" = San Andreas, I take this statement plus the lack of official hints to anything else (all we know so far is limited to LS) as it stands. Until veryfied or falsified. I mean I love GTASA for it's setting and wouldn't mind if it would be more than just one big city, either another of GTASA's cities or a whole new one (like a San Diego-ish town) but I'm not going all fanboy over it and interpret every damn pixel as to how it hints to more cities than just LS... this particular speculation on GTA5 is all too often totally through the roof, repetitive like the licenseplate thingy and sometimes freak me out (here you go, the psychic). And to be honest I would rather see R* stick to the statement LS + countryside and putting a hell of a lot of blood and sweat into the detailing of 1 big city and it's backdrop to make it an outstanding experience in terms of (authentic) atmosphere than giving us a San Andreas 2.0 with a couple wannabe-big cities and a hell of a lot of landscape. But after all, we're doomed to wait for more info anyway to be more certain and therefore can speculate on anything from the color of the grass to the size of the raindrops, but IF they give us info on anything, I'd rather stick to this. Hope not. It was annoying how you couldn't enter certain areas without getting shot. whatever they do here, I hope they balance it out better. They assault you, it's ok. You fight back, cops all on your ass. even worse than permanently being fired at in certain areas.

oh yeah the easteregging truthtelling license plates. Now it's clear that we get the whole state of San Andreas back. 1:1 replica of GTASA, only better graphics. peeew lucky me. now... we can see a lot in the trailer. we can see what's supposed to be the pacific. probably we can swim all the way to hawaii. there's construction sites, maybe we can help building the houses minecraft style. seriously... the license plate thing has been pointed out like 3 billion times already. US plates ALWAYS have the STATE written on it, therefore it says San Andreas, nothing else to it, no proof of San Fierro, Las Venturas, an arbitrary recreation of San Diego deep underneath the infinite desert with a hidden entrance through the bigfoot cave on mt chiliad, no nothing. period. San Andreas is a fictional state depicting the US southwest. Why they (R*) got it wrong in GTA SA where the plates listed the city instead of the state is beyond my knowledge, but this was rectified in GTAIV already and I recon it won't change in 5. They even went a little further and recreated different styles of California license plates (as in different years of issue) plus re-introduced actual registrations. And once again, San Andreas is not Los Santos... jeees is it that hard?? Of course we get a hell of a lot of same stuff we've seen in Los Santos in GTASA, most probably because there's the chance that both Los Santos are based on the same real life city of Los Angeles. But Las Venturas is not Los Santos and San fucking Fierro isn't Los Santos either.

will people ever get that V aint a copy of San Andreas and "It's Los Santos and the surrounding countryside - and a very big map." means Los Santos and not San Andreas, so no Chiliad, no LV, no SF... I guess the geographic features of the LA area will be more accurately represented than they were in SA and since they're talking about countryside, there will be a couple smaller towns in the backdrop, like a spinoff of Palm Springs or something like that, would be a waste of space and no need to go there otherwise. But I doubt there'll be anything of considerable size, think of something like the island of Los Santos in San Andreas, only bigger and better etcpp As for blocking access, that's a little hard to tell. I doubt R* artificially cuts through the city to create different islands. This was easy in Liberty as NYC offers this, hard for an LA recreation. maybe you can't cross LA river for the bridges are closed (earthquake, heavy downpour in the mountains, damage, bad maintenance, there's enough ideas to justify that). A little easier to block access to the countryside (landslide comes to mind in respect of all the mountaineous area around LA/LS) Of course you can always go for roadwork and police blockade to limit access, that's how they created the limits in LA Noire, but they are harder to enforce in a GTA game as it offers more movement options than LA Noire does, so it might feel too artificial I'm a little curious how they will keep up the classic access limitation in V

depending on the car... a lambo gallardo does about 15mpg driving normal, a smart-car does the same pedal to the metal style. but I guess we're drifting a little too far off topic here. I get many ppl don't see a point in it, but the fuel-system works pretty well in mafia 2 (where you could also just jack a new car once you ran empty), I don't see no reason why it wouldn't work in GTA aswell. either you use it or not, just like with every other sidekick available in games. Let's see what R* thinks about which gimmicks the game must have

but that doesnt account for full throttle driving like you would when evading cops, these figures are given for normal/economic driving. think about it

R* put a gazillion of "useless" (guess that's a matter of personal likes rather than a matter of fact) things in every GTA. Why not functional gas stations? Adds some more realism to the game, just like the car wash did and the friends-system did and the minigames did an so on... and once you get 4 stars a tank of gas is no way near good for 300 miles, I doubt you run from the cops at 35mph

No one's threatened anyone. hm ok then...

no fred? u serious?

and i thought this was a link to a fun threat in relation to the omg theres dogs in gta5 thing...

lost me at the liquor ace analysis...

That's why I see city hall in the reflection, might work as there's a contruction site near city all visible in the overview just at the end of the trailer, but that leads too far off topic i guess.

Well you could have CJ running around like an undernourished hippie aswell as a buffed out hooligan aswell as an obese gangster from the hood and it's still the same character, altho not every look blends in with the rags-to-riches-bro from the hood (not to mention the cutscenes). No difference if you had more options to customize the looks of the protagonist.

You can have in-depth character customization as in the anonymous Saints Row and still are a defined person. I can imagine the game revolves around e.g. Joe Smith, 35yrs and of caucasian heritage, but exactly how this guy looks is up to the player. Doubt this will happen at all, I guess the best in character customization will be the likes of San Andreas, but it's not impossible if the person has a name and background, which I guess is certain for 5's character

no. anyway, the "horse"-reflection looks more like a reflection of city hall with some pedestrians on front of it. the dog in the cage... yeah might be one, the first screen it looks like some 4legged thing with its rear legs on the ground and its fore legs on the frame, and at the seemingly same location something small is moving "down" (just too pixelated and small to definitely tell it's a barking dog tho)... but as many said already, there's a good chance that there's more than one dog in Los Santos.

I'd like a slowmo bullet cam for sniping kills, but only random not on every kill... maybe like in ghost warrior other than that, I'd find it nice that after disabling a target (different hitzones ftw, euphoria gave us the correct animation, no give us the respective damage behavior) and go to melee range, a special finishing move, not necessarily a killing shot, maybe smashing the brains out with the but of a shotgun... some variety like in assassins creed, 4 or 5 different animations for each weapon for real executions I think it would be a nice twist to be able to place a few bullets in the legs or arms before the lethal shot is fired, maybe linked with some additional information given by the victim. I liked IV's approach to this, the longer you wait to execute, the more information they gave you. But I didn't like how you could only kill and not force more information out, or just give them a reminder not to fuck with u by poppin their kneekaps or something. maybe bleeding to death would be a nice twist aswell, but I fear that would be too much realism

As I just read something about assassins creed in the countryside topic, I came to wonder about the wanted system and the realism of it. Will it be the same like in GTA IV or will they change it again like they did from SA to IV (what was certainly a needed change, always pissed me off that you couldn't really run away from them)? While I think it will be about the same as in IV - maybe minor tweaks but not entirely different - I guess something like the templar awareness in a.c. wouldn't hurt the game. Cops looking for someone after a certain crime or a series of crimes committed, even when the search radius has been vacated, would add not just some realism but also new approaches to the gameplay... and something more of a challange. Of course this needs some balance so the action part wont be swapped for a tactical/stealth thing which is definitely not the idea of a GTA game, but will still fit into the more realistic approach to gameplay that came with IV. So what are your thoughts/expectations/wishes concerning the wanted system?

why am i thinking of customizable tomb stones here... i guess i should get some sleep

there will definitely be some sort of movie studios as this is the mostly known thing about LA/Hollywood. I doubt tho that there will be another amusement park beside the rides located on Sta Monica Pier, because the other 2 known parks are too far off with Disneyland in Anaheim and the Universal Studios thing "behind the mountains", where I guess the countryside will start already, pretty much like it was in San Andreas where LS ended in the Vinewood Hills.

very much to my liking. I'd rather delve into one bigass city with loads of details and a nice rural area around it with maybe a handfull of smaller towns than that what happened in San Andreas. Don't get me wrong, the gameplay was the best of all GTAs imho and with all the countryside it really felt huge and, more important, like an authentic state, but the cities where a joke in terms of size. Now with the focus on one city plus it's backdrop I guess we will get a Los Santos that will live up to it's standard (in terms of what it's supposed to be in the GTA world) size-wise and with the backdrop will feel like an authentic city. I don't know yet how they will cut out the city limits, which was surely easy with limiting the scenery to islands, but I guess R* will come up with something good here (there's rumors about infinite desert and mountains higher than the vertical limit achievable w/o cheating) so we can be sure it suits the needs. After all, I guess we can be happy that 5 is limited to one big city and not turns out to be a San Andreas 2.0. I have a feeling such thing wouldn't live up to the expectations... yet

I sort of dont like me always referring to mafia2, but instead of customizable license plate holders, I'd rather see customizable license plate (as in afore mentioned game). a new license plate makes much more sense to evade cops than just respraying the car, imho. the holders themselves... naa I don tink dad wud b c00l. same goes for writing like this btw

my uncle works at R* (after he got fired from Nintendo for leaking too much that is) and he said the trailer is just fake to make all the kids drool and whine in expectation for more info and a release until, after MP3, they call it quits for GTA, because they were pissed after all the bad news from "real GTA fans" that felt bullshitted with GTA4 for the lack of purple dildos and narcotics and other fun stuff. sorry.