Great Next-gen 'Focus'
It's very apparent that Rockstar has always wanted to really go in this 'realistic' styled universe since the begining, since they lept at the chance now and sacrafised the great things from it's past games in the series that it worked on instead of technical details.
The older games, being on older consoles especially ones such as San Andreas, really showed how Rockstar was doing everything concevable to increase the technical/visual boundry for the game, but because of the limitation they focused their talents on what they COULd do with almost no limitations. Which is story, sound and general design and flow.
GTA IV lacks the 'increase' of the largest things of the last games, and instead focused maining on technical concepts, which is a great step forward for their first game out of the gate for this generation of hardware. I'm personally hoping that their next game in the series includes 'some' tweaks and other smooth touches to their fine work on their game engine, but really puts the majority of their effort back into story and the basic areas they used to be limited to and now must choose to work on.
I really enjoyed GTA IV because it was one of the first GTA's I really got a chance to lovingly play for however long I wanted. I felt a little robbed when most of the reasons for playing even after the story diminished, there are no random missions which would easily be possible but just aren't there. Literally nothing to do to 'continue' to progress or gain income and do things, instead you are basically forced to save the game then just reload everytime you feel like playing and just play from that spot on and never save another time after.
