Rockstar Games isn’t officially supporting mods for Grand Theft Auto V, but that’s not stopping clever players. The game is slowly being opened up, and chances are, this is only the beginning.
GameSpot asked Rockstar about modding last week, and it didn’t paint a welcoming picture.
Modding took off for GTA IV PC. What are you doing to support modding for V? Is there anything within the game that supports it?
Since GTA Online has such a massive and vibrant community, our primary focus is making sure that nothing detracts from that experience or has a negative impact on the overall community of players.
In other words, the game wouldn’t have mod tools, and since the company sees GTA Online as critical to the game’s appeal, it would aggressively shut down mods impacting GTA Online. That all makes sense, and I’m not sure anyone expected GTA V to allow rampant online cheating.
But since Rockstar wasn’t providing any guidance, it wouldn’t be clear how long fans would be waiting for mods until the game was in actually people’s hands.
In less than day, there are already two mods available for GTA V.
One mod lets players deeply modify the game’s field of view, a graphics slider that’s come under criticism from fans for being too limited.
The other mod is a trainer allowing you to, well, cheat. This trainer can grant you unlimited bullets, prevent you from ever dying, and plenty more. It’s useful for just screwing around.
These are basic mods, though. What about something more ambitious?
So far, it’s unclear, but there’s been a quote floating around all day by modder Boris Voronstov, best known for his work on graphical enhancement tool, ENBSeries. You might know ENBSeries because of how beautiful it’s made so many games, including Grand Theft Auto IV.
Here’s what Voronstov said on his message board:
That doesn’t paint a pretty picture, but there’s plenty of reason to be hopeful, as other modders appear to be making progress.
“I don’t see any basis for the claims that GTA V looks hard to mod,” said DrDaxxy, creator of the field of view mod. “In fact, all that I have seen points to the opposite, and the things that caused the most headaches for GTA 4 modders all seem to be either missing or already figured out because of the familiar engine. However, Rockstar may or may not ban people for modding, and they may or may not make modding harder in the future. Each theory is plausible and grounded in good reasoning, but ultimately pure speculation due to lack of knowledge about the game’s internals and Rockstar’s decisions. But I’m hopeful, as the things we do know and have evidence for all look very good for modders, and the GTA community has always been and is still full of highly talented modders. If I had to give you a timeframe, I think we’ll see cool things coming our way within weeks or months.”
OpenIV is an important modding tool for Rockstar games, including GTA IV and Max Payne 3. The Russian developers behind OpenIV tweeted this out earlier today, in response to questions:
https://twitter.com/OpenIV
Just a few hours later, OpenIV claims to have started cracking open GTA V:
Okay, please do not expect @OpenIV release with #GTAV #PC support today or tomorrow. As soon as we will be ready, it will be announced.
— OpenIV (@OpenIV) April 13, 2015
What are we looking at here? In essence, OpenIV says it’s opened the door to basic mods. The tool itself has not yet been released, but OpenIV’s teasing suggests it’s not far off.
The first screen shots of OpenIV’s progress were posted to the GTAForums, and people have already started speculating about what’s possible:
It will take some time for things to shake out, but never count out the ingenuity of modders.
There’s still the question of how Rockstar will respond to this, though. I’ve emailed the company for comment, but have yet to hear back. It’s reasonable for players to fear Rockstar might ban players who mess around with any mods, but so long as they’re confined to the world of single player, hopefully they have nothing to fear.
It’s early days for GTA V’s life on personal computers, but it’s already looking pretty bright.
Comments
7 responses to “There Are Several Promising PC Mods For GTA V Already”
The first mod can get you banned, thus voiding your game for online play. Seems EXTREMELY risky to use for a mod, unless you already pirated the game that is!
Vorontsov is somewhat known for his tantrums, he has an inflated ego moving into narcissism from the success of ENB and seems to think his taste in games is universal and that any game he doesn’t personally like won’t succeed. His comments here are relevant I suppose, though the criticism comes from him having stability problems, not anything particularly modding related. If you’ve ever followed his work you know his comments tend to be somewhat inaccurate.
To clarify even further… Boris is just butthurt that rockstar (accidentally/ purposely???) broke his shader mod by tweaking the game shadows.
OpenIV can open the .rpf files but at this stage because of strong encryption cannot edit them, they are working hard to crack it. Rockstar upped the security because of GTA Online.
Once the encryption is cracked Rockstar cannot change it without forcing everyone to redownload 50GB of .rpf files.
I just wish Rockstar would accept what acutally makes their games fun on PC and if Online was that important just make it separate to the main game.
Hey rockstar, how about you make a mod that fixes your game that’d show all them modders.
Well Rockstar can suck my big fat one if they are not going to allow mods for this. I’ve bought the game ONCE for Xbox 360, Will not buy it again to play the same things over again on PC
Seriously, what did people expect though?
R* has never been particularly supportive of mods and that definetly wasn’t about to change with the direction that multiplayer took in V.
I can understand people wanting mods, but those who have an experience in making them for past R* titles know they did so with gradually growing resistance from R*