The single-player was…very, very complete
Grand Theft Auto V was such a smashing success that everyone assumed Rockstar would be hard at work on a potential DLC campaign. The city of Los Santos was vast and the characters were all set up to have some sort of continuation, so what happened? Was GTA Online really that insanely popular that Rockstar never even considered extra single-player content? The answer, it turns out, is a little from column A and a little from column B.
Speaking to Game Informer in a new interview, Imran Sarwar (Rockstar’s director of design) stated that Rockstar never thought expansions were, “possible or necessary,” and that the lack of single-player content, “was not really a conscious decision, it’s just what happened.”
“With GTA 5,” Sarwar states, “the single-player game was absolutely massive and very, very complete. It was three games in one. The next-gen versions took a year of everyone’s time to get right, then the online component had a lot of potential, but to come close to realizing that potential also sucked up a lot of resources…The combination of these three factors means for this game, we did not feel single-player expansions were either possible or necessary, but we may well do them for future projects.”
The interview then goes into some details about when GTA Online may finally stop receiving updates and how Rockstar is gearing up to promote Red Dead Redemption 2. At least from the sound of things, Rockstar is pretty keen to push out more single-player content with Red Dead Redemption 2 and that their passion still lies with open-world games.
Sarwar shared, “at Rockstar, we will always have bandwidth issues because we are perfectionists and to make huge complex games takes a lot of time and resources. Not everything is always possible,” he stressed, “but we still love single-player open-world games more than anything. I don’t think you could make a game like GTA5 if you did not like single-player games and trying to expand their possibilities!”
This all sounds reasonably fair, even if most people won’t accept that explanation. I do still kind of think Rockstar saw all the cash pouring in from GTA Online and shifted their focus towards that, but its not like the end result of Grand Theft Auto V was disappointing for anyone. The game is still one of the best selling pieces of software ever created and even with ridiculous microtransactions in the multiplayer portion, the single-player campaign is a fully complete and realized vision. You can’t be too upset with that.
Rockstar Discusses Past, Present, And Future Of Grand Theft Auto Online [Game Informer]
