Rockstar Games was not able to include a “huge volume of plans and ideas” for Grand Theft Auto V that would have pushed the game even further, art director Aaron Garbut recalled in an interview with Edge.
“As a group of people, we’re never short of ideas. There are always things that come up during development that you want to add,” Garbut said. “Often we do, but the closer you get to release, the less that happens. I don’t feel like the game fell short, but there is undoubtedly a huge volume of plans and ideas that we wanted to do to push it further.”
Not having these features in GTAV didn’t hurt sales or reviews it seems, as the game was widely praised and generated more than $1 billion in three days. The open-world action game has shipped over 29 million copies so far.
Your imagination will have to suffice, as Garbut did not provide any details regarding the “plans and ideas” that didn’t make the final version of GTAV. We may see these features included in a new entry in the series, as Rockstar North president Leslie Benzies acknowledged in October that the studio has plenty of ideas for GTA 6.
Also in the interview, Garbut said if Rockstar had elected to create an authentic representation of Los Angeles for GTAV, the game’s fictional Los Santos would have been less convincing and compelling. This is because, Garbut said, the version of Los Angeles that most players know–from representations in movies and TV–is more interesting than the reality.
“I’d never want to rebuild a city. I think that would be a lot less satisfying both for us to build and for the player to play. In a lot of ways, it would be less convincing, too,” Garbut said. “Only a relatively small subset of players ever get to know the real LA or New York. Most experience it through film and TV, or through short visits, and that’s a highly edited representation.”
“We do the same: we take the feel of a city, the one we get through visiting and through experiencing it our whole lives through media, and build that,” he added. “We compress, we edit, we emphasise certain things and we end up with something that in some ways, I think, feels more like the popular perception of the place than the actual city. Only because the popular perception isn’t the real city, if that makes sense.”
Finally, Garbut described Rockstar’s three-character approach for GTAV as a “leap of faith” that could have ended poorly if it wasn’t executed properly.
“It was an interesting idea, and it felt like we could do interesting things with it, but it also felt like a change to the core of the game that might backfire,” Garbut said. “I think it really worked out.”
