5. Scale
Making number 5 on the list is the scale, the vastness of the very game itself. The original Liberty City from GTA III and GTA LCS was impressive at the time but now gamers want a bigger playground to explore. GTA VC and GTA VCS gave a smaller area than the original Liberty City but felt bigger and nicer due to the brighter colours and 80's atmosphere. GTA SA gave us the biggest GTA to this day even though it incorporated three main cities, small towns and beautiful countryside, it proved a game can have massive open areas without the loading screens of old between islands. Rockstar have said that the new title would only contain modern day California and surrounding countryside, and this was shown during the first trailer, but GTA SA only showed Los Santos during the first trailer and surprised all by showing Las Venturas (Las Vegas), San Fierro (San Francisco) and various other terrains in the second. I would love it if GTA V included all of the state of San Andreas but I highly doubt it. Even an expansion pack would be too huge to incorporate all of it. That said I hope that I am proved wrong. The only other issue Rockstar would have to address would be discs and disc swapping. No other GTA has had more than one disc to incorporate the one map (not including the Episodes from Liberty City content). Recent Rockstar games like LA Noire and Max Payne 3 have had more than one disc (though LA Noire did just to fit all the motion scan data). This does suggest that their games from now on will take up a lot of space due to the amount of detail but hopefully you dont have to swap discs to load new parts of the map while flying over Los Santos and nearby areas in your hydra or crop-duster.