GTA 5 details revealed by Rockstar’s Dan Houser

The December issue of Game Informer contains details of GTA 5 as revealed by Rockstar North.

According to Rockstar vice president of creativity Dan Houser, GTA 5 will focus a lot on heists involving the three protagonists, Trevor, Michael and Franklin. He believes this is the best plot of any GTA game yet, “We’re starting to feel that’s it’s our strongest plotted game because the characters are so intertwined,” he said.

“When you’re advancing Michael’s story you’re also advancing Trevor’s story in a different way, and the meeting points are very exciting.”

He explained GTA 5′s multiple simultaneous protagonists will “cut out a lot of the transitional moments to just always put you in the action.”

“We want to move from having one character in a mission to having two of three. This makes the missions feel distinct in that they feel very high action but they will have a very different tone depending on who’s on them, how many people are on them and how much we’re using switches to make it feel different.”

Going back to heists, it will be a “big theme in the game based on missions not just from GTA 4 but from previous games people really responded to.”

“People are in love with doing bank jobs, particularly when they feel like they have prepped the bank jobs. We never felt we’d done a great job with a bank job so we decided, ‘Let’s properly invest the story and mission design for some of the mission into making some of these built-out series of heists. That was a huge part of the story missions – trying to set the game apart from games we’ve done in the past”.

They are still working out the details for mini-games, they plan to have one or two for each character to give them more separation from each other. “We just want the world to feel different for whomever you’re playing. If you’re Trevor, you’re more likely to find the world antagonistic than if you’re not.”

For the ladies man out there, sad news; romance will be left out of this one as they felt it was too “overly complex” with three characters but would look to bring it back in the future.

Those hoping to see cameos of characters from past games are out of luck as well, “The five PS2 games are one universe, and this is the high definition universe, so they don’t co-exist. You would never see CJ or Tommy Vercetti. They would be like mythical characters in this world who never existed,” he explained.

There won’t be any properties to buy this time (that’s a letdown) but GTA 5 promises to feature a “fun and vibrant economy, from earlier in the game to after you’ve completed everything.”

Source: OPM