Hell, you can't even rotate the camera around the car; there's LT/RT for right- and left-view, and a rear-view, but when driving the car, R-stick manipulation does nothing. After playing anything later, it feels like your neck is in a neckbrace.
I wonder if any open world game will attempt to create a complete city.
Probably not; it represents a tremendous amount of effort for relatively little return in gameplay. Even if it were managed through procedural generation, you're still looking at a huge portion of effort on someone's part to make sure all the unused scenery doesn't break anything in the game.
I've spoken with people who played GTA3 and still thought that they could enter any building; they had been successfully manipulated into not noticing they are only able to enter a very select few buildings.
I don't know that you're right about GTA4, actually. There are a LOT of interiors which only appear in cutscenes. Playable interiors, it had, what...? Each of Niko's safe houses, all date spots like bars and strip clubs, Ammu-Nations, portside warehouse where his cousin was held, industrial slum/ghetto building which Niko could invade by frontal assault or sewer entrance, industrial factory (though it was just for sniper spot to an outdoor position), and several apartment buildings -- one while tailing a target, and another where Niko escapes a narc bust. That's off the top of my head, there may be more.
That's a LOT more than San Andreas or Vice City had, by my count.
