real life
gta iv
It's true that a part of the city looks like that. It's even true that the part of the city that looks like that is quite big. It's still more colorful than most of the places in GTA IV, not to mention that GTA IV likes to pretend that's what the entire city looks like. We've got red brick, beige, bright white, dark red, brown, and black. In the very back of the picture you can almost see what looks like a rainbow on top of a building!
That picture was also taken in late fall or early winter on a cloudy day. If it were summer there would be a bright row of green on either side of the street.
Try comparing Star Junction to Time Square. Or Middle Park to Central Park.
We're not saying GTA IV looked terrible, or Rockstar doesn't know how to draw or anything like that. But they took the easy way out, they made everything gray like every other game. They could have taken the art to a whole new level by simply using color. They could have enriched the color pallet without going totally overboard and still had their dirty looking city. They didn't. They took a city that is already mostly metal and concrete, stripped everything that looked remotely alive out of it, and replaced it with fake grass and plastic trees.
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