The new neons beneath Franklin’s Pegassi Zentorno bake the asphalt below in a soft, yellow glow. It’s night and his car is parked on the verge of a quiet street somewhere in Vinewood Hills. This is my first glimpse of GTA V on a current generation console. The angular panels on the Zentorno (a shark-mouthed hypercar that looks like it eats pedestrians and craps Lamborghini Sesto Elementos) gleam in the moonlight. I thought the cars in the original GTA V looked great, but this thing leaves them for dust.

The draw distance is now jaw-dropping.

“ It’s beautiful, it’s denser than ever, and I’ve barely scratched the surface.

Beyond the gravel that lines the road’s edges, weeds and unruly bushes carpet the hillside. Los Santos itself lies to Franklin’s left, blanketed in light and stretching far further into the visible distance than ever before.Switching to new-generation GTA V’s freshly-added first-person view I watch Franklin slide under the Zentorno’s scissor-door and into the brand-new, fully-modelled cabin. His hands clutch the wheel, the dash illuminates, and he peels onto the road. The headlamps highlight hanging fog wafting across sections of the street with a rolling glare as Franklin winds down into Vinewood. The Zentorno is just one of the vehicles Rockstar has added to the game over the past year via its regular, free GTA Online updates. I don’t know whether this is Franklin’s personal ride, or if he pinched it, but either is possible; vehicles from the GTA Online updates now form part of the ambient vehicle population in the new-generation version for increased traffic diversity.This is GTA V on a current generation console; the PS4, to be specific. This is not simply GTA V upscaled; that much is already clear. This is GTA V upgraded, on every level.

“ We’ve spent more man-hours on this than most games get from start to finish.

"Damn, this thing has two cupholders? I'm calling everybody!"

“ It’s a core belief here that all the little details add together into something way more than the sum of their parts.

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“ It’s a whole new experience.

The aforementioned pedestrian-eater.

“ We took each individual piece and looked at how much further we could polish it – nothing about this process is automated.

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“ From Red Dead Redemption, we knew what the world gains by adding vegetation.

Forget Buck Hunter HD; this should be in every pub in the world.

“ Our lighting and graphics teams have made a lot of changes, all to give the world more realism and dynamism and to ensure the world itself just feels more vital and alive.

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“We’ve spent more man-hours on this than most games get from start to finish,” says Rockstar Games art director Aaron Garbut. He describes the “sheer volume of work” as the main similarity between bringing GTA V to new-generation consoles and PC and making a game from scratch.“The work for first-person pushed this even further, making us address areas we would not normally have reason to address. Every weapon has been entirely redone with far, far more detail. Almost every animation has been redone. Every car has been modelled with a higher level of detail and a full interior and the world as a whole has had much more detail added.”The detail is everywhere you look. The layers upon layers of granular detail astonished me in GTA V on PS3 and Xbox 360 – and it still does, considering those devices were conceived at some point in the Bronze Age – but this goes far, far beyond that. The stamped lettering on a rifle. The myriad dials everywhere you look in the cab of a fire engine. The blink of a handbrake warning light in your dash cluster when you tug it to trigger a drift. Step into the dank and grimy Yellow Jack Inn, for instance, on the outskirts of Sandy Shores in first-person and you can now feel the despair. Even the smallest, handwritten notes stand up to close scrutiny. That weird scrap of paper in the vestibule from the individual promising to embiggen your “penice”? It’s no longer a pixelated bit of set dressing that’s not really intended to be examined too thoroughly; now it feels like you could reach in and pluck it from the notice board. The detail has become utterly immense and, viewed through this new first-person lens, astonishingly immersive.Garbut explains more about how the new first-person view has been a driving factor for this amplified devotion to detail.“There’s something incredible about running around this world in first-person, glancing down at Trevor’s hands, now your hands and seeing the tattoos, the dirt under his nails, putting on a pair of sunglasses and watching as the screen tints to match their colour, stealing a car, watching as your fingers hotwire it and then glance up and see the dash kick into life and the rev-counter jump as you floor it and the ABS light flicker on as you skid round corners.“Maybe heading over to the airport, police giving chase, glancing down and noticing the owner has left an old cup and some cigarette ends in the ashtray. Pull up at the airport, taking note of the song playing on the radio’s display on your dash. Dive out and into a plane or a helicopter, watching as you pull on your helmet and the HUD springs into gear, climbing higher and looking at your HUD move with your head and the various dials, compass, warning lights, artificial horizon and every other detail moves and blinks on your helicopters control panel.“And then with a click you’re in third person and there’s your character again in front of you – it’s a whole other new experience.”This is all achieved, on PS4 at least, via a tap of the touchpad. There’s no menu shuffling required to switch between the two views and nothing to stop you switching between them whenever you see fit. I’m certainly smitten with the new first-person view, though. There’s something a lot more intimate and desperate about GTA V’s most-frantic moments, like a car chase, in first-person – and it’s this new level of fidelity that sells it. Spider-web cracks branch out from bullet holes in the windscreen. Glance over your shoulder, across the back seats and out through the rear glass (replete with its demister element) and you’ll see the cop cars lunging at you from behind to shunt you into a violent spin. It’s like a long-take in an action movie that you’re living.“We took each individual piece and looked at how much further we could polish it – nothing about this process is automated,” says Garbut. “This is the team going in by hand and looking at every aspect of the game and seeing how we could apply additional memory or additional processing power.”“I think we had a great starting point but that’s what it was, a start, which has let us drill down into so much more detail and solidity. To hone everything well beyond the point we’d normally be happy and bring it to a new level.”Garbut is incredibly proud of what the team achieved on the older consoles but, after a year in the new-gen Los Santos he finds it “very, very hard to go back to the previous versions.”“It’s more than a quick texture up-res, it feels like the world has come into focus,” he says. “It runs smoother, it plays smoother, and it feels like it has really evolved into something so much more.”“I love the visceral quality of playing in first-person and the way it really connects you to the world. I love that I’ve been living in this world, playing these same missions for five years and between the changes across the engine and the addition of first-person it feels entirely fresh. Exploring this world I’m so familiar with seems new again.”With just a few hours of GTA V on PS4 under my belt I’m not quite ready to write off the PS3/Xbox 360 version yet but the differences are quite stark, perhaps few more so the game’s excellent new foliage system. It adds a huge amount of life to the map’s less built-up regions and, according to Garbut, was one of the first things the team tackled.“It’s something as an art team we focus on a lot – break up the hard edges, break up the straight lines and you get something much more real. We then updated all our bushes, plants and trees with much, much more detailed equivalents and then worked on a much more advanced wind system so the branches and leaves blow more realistically. We worked on a layered approach to the grass, starting with hand placed weeds along the bottom of fences and walls, complete with little bits of litter trapped in between, then we layered a base level of grasses of various types over the world.“This gave us a base layer that looked pretty good. Then we built out a set of feature plants, flowering grasses, taller plants, etcetera. This we layered on top, paying attention to dropping it in a natural way, following how these plants spread and grow. Then beyond that we layered high frequency detail; small stones, blown leaves, and in the city litter and the like.”Sowing the countryside with more realistic flora is a huge part of what makes new-generation GTA V feel real in a way its predecessor could not, but light is what sets everything off and is a crucial part of what sells a game’s looks. I already admire how authentic the light in GTA V on PS3 and Xbox 360 is and recall having more than one accident after being distracted by the skewing shadows of my car as I rolled under multiple street lights. New-generation GTA V, however, has three times the light sources than GTA V on PS3 and Xbox 360.“This will dive a little into the more technical areas, but we have a much improved screen space ambient occlusion (SSAO) solution that gives us far more solidity than we had before. Most lights now have dynamic shadows, and there are modelled caustic spread patterns on car headlights and many of our placed lights – basically, this is the effect when light is refracted through another material, like water in a pool or in this case the glass in front of the bulb.“Shadows now cast through the fog itself, so we see lovely shafts of light. Cutscene lighting and much of the city lighting was entirely redone. We have massively upgraded reflections – it’s especially noticeable with all the neon and building lights reflected in the cars at night.“We have lots more volumetric fog going on, whether the atmospheric glow of building lights in the sky at night or the way the lights in general dissipate in foggy weather. When it begins to rain, these reflections are more noticeable in the puddles and the rain itself now refracts the light around it.”On top of these lighting changes there’s also a dynamic depth of field effect that sharpens up where you’re looking and softens where you aren’t, like a camera’s autofocus. Garbut explains the skin shaders and terrain shaders are new, too.“This is all rendering a world with a draw distance several times what it was before,” he continues, “with way more visible detail and movement way further into the distance, with far more particle effects, from the drips of rain from a canopy to the smoke from an industrial chimney, the swirl of litter in an alley on a windy day or the way the rooftop A/C units which now have visibly turning fans pump out vapour. Many of these new particle systems now receive and sometimes cast shadows. All of this rendering with way better antialiasing.”

“ [I]t feels like a giant leap rather than a tentative step into the next generation.

Perhaps the biggest compliment I can pay new-generation GTA V is that, after playing well over 100 hours of GTA V on Xbox 360, it feels brand-new to me again. Sure the layout of the environment and the mission progression is the same, but it’s completely stuffed with new things to see, hear, and do. From the readable packets in a cigarette machine where there were previously only low-resolution blurs to the more-realistic fur on the game’s wildlife. From hearing the police scanner and phone calls through the DualShock 4 speaker to the subtle squeak of Michael’s middle-aged backside on vinyl upholstery as he scootches into an old van. From the satisfaction of landing the new Dodo seaplane on rough water in first-person to the thrill of destroying a car with a single shot from the game’s wild new experimental railgun.“We always try to make big expansive games, and we always try to fill them with a massive amount of things for players to find, whether it’s through playing missions or simply stumbling on surprising little details in the world itself,” says Garbut. “To us, they are places as much as they are games.”“That’s an amazing thing. I’m incredibly proud of what the team has achieved and it feels like a giant leap rather than a tentative step into the next generation.”

Luke is Games Editor at IGN AU. You can find him on IGNor on Twitter, or chat with him and the rest of the Australian team by joining the IGN Australia