The way you interact with scenery in a flight sim is exactly the way you interact with real scenery in a real plane. Reasonably good flight sims have been published for over 20 years precisely because the range of (plane-related) actions you can perform while sitting in a cockpit is so limited, so it doesn't take an enormous amount of computing resources to simulate almost all of them.
Because it's currently impossible to computationally simulate everything that a person walking around a city can do, a "sandbox game" like GTA must choose what direction of activity to focus on. The GTA games take place in the criminal underworld, as seen through an intentionally cartoony filter. Therefore, the infinitesimally tiny subset of all possible walking-around actions that the game grants you is limited, basically, to moving around and performing mayhem. This presents a cynical and nihilistic experience, and one that's entirely appropriate to the game's chosen theme.
You can postpone the violence as long as you'd like in order to quietly walk around and explore, but the game is very well designed to continually remind you to get back into the swing of things. (Ooh, look at that ramp. I bet you could jump clear over the canal from here. Hm, that's a mighty fine sportscar coming this way...)
Looking at the way you started your comment, I fear you're misreading me into the "GTA is a murder-trainer and must be destroyed" camp. No, I know it's just another violent video game, and it's hardly the first one. I have played and enjoyed many violent games. I just take issue when people claim that GTA is anything but.
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Because it's currently impossible to computationally simulate everything that a person walking around a city can do, a "sandbox game" like GTA must choose what direction of activity to focus on. The GTA games take place in the criminal underworld, as seen through an intentionally cartoony filter. Therefore, the infinitesimally tiny subset of all possible walking-around actions that the game grants you is limited, basically, to moving around and performing mayhem. This presents a cynical and nihilistic experience, and one that's entirely appropriate to the game's chosen theme.
You can postpone the violence as long as you'd like in order to quietly walk around and explore, but the game is very well designed to continually remind you to get back into the swing of things. (Ooh, look at that ramp. I bet you could jump clear over the canal from here. Hm, that's a mighty fine sportscar coming this way...)
Looking at the way you started your comment, I fear you're misreading me into the "GTA is a murder-trainer and must be destroyed" camp. No, I know it's just another violent video game, and it's hardly the first one. I have played and enjoyed many violent games. I just take issue when people claim that GTA is anything but.