What is this all about?

A first person shooter (and possibly a heavy driving element, since that has been requested a lot!) based on Sheffield. GTA Sheffield, anyone?
It’ll be set in 2030, to give me a bit of creative control over buildings occupants, and the level of technology used.

My intention is to have a free roaming portion to the game, where a player can wander around the city center, and beyond – and even enter buildings, which will be skirmish maps (think laser quest/paintball layouts for a real world comparison).

Speaking of real world, the level is based on OpenStreetmap data, and using the blender-osm plugin, even I am surprised at the amount of detail this pulls in: Actual building heights, number of floors, benches, advertising panels, green areas – and most importantly during the development process, building names.
This is literally being developed in a real-world scale.

I want to keep it as Sheffield as possible, the soundtrack will be all local Sheffield bands (unfortunately, I think Pulp and Human League would probably object to me stealing their music and using it without permission: their labels at least – personally I think Jarvis Cocker would be all for it?!)

The project will be as open-source and transparent as possible, and I will try to document my progress daily (or at least every two days, we have a lot of breweries here #justsaying)

I’m designing the game with three quotes in mind that I want you to utter while playing it:

‘This game is beautiful’
‘The attention to detail is amazing’
‘The story is so dark!’

The dilemma I’m currently facing is: as one single game developer, do I go for realism – or face my inbox overflowing (or worse, court cases) from two or three hundred corporations’ legal teams hitting me with Cease and Desist letters, and suing me for copyright infringement because I turned their store on the high street into a killing floor?
This is why it’ll be set in 2030, and focus will be placed on local businesses, in this world – they will be the big player corporations.