Players have clamored for single-player GTA V DLC since its release, and four years later, none has arrived. Often, fans rationalized that the success of GTA Online was too immense for Rockstar to develop single-player DLC, and that doom and gloom around single-player games has only deepened this year.
Rockstar, however, says it is not abandoning the type of single-player content that has defined the studio in the past.
In an interview with Game Informer, Rockstar’s director of design Imran Sarwar said that Grand Theft Auto’s move away from scripted single-player content was “not really a conscious decision, it’s just what happened,” but that the company would still “love to do more single-player add-ons for games in the future.”
“As a company we love single-player more than anything, and believe in it absolutely — for storytelling and a sense of immersion in a world, multiplayer games don’t rival single-player games,” Sarwar told Game Informer.
“With GTA V, 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 realising that potential also sucked up a lot of resources.”
All told, Sarwar identifies three factors that influenced the lack of single-player GTA content: beefing up GTA Online, which initially shipped in a dire shape, porting GTA V to current-gen consoles, and developing Red Dead Redemption 2.
“The combination of these three factors means for [GTA V], we did not feel single-player expansions were either possible or necessary” Sarwar told Game Informer.
“But we may well do them for future projects. 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, but we still love single-player open-world games more than anything. I don’t think you could make a game like GTA V if you did not like single-player games and trying to expand their possibilities!”
The whole interview is worth reading over at Game Informer, where Sarwar also addresses complaints about GTA Online being too grindy, the difficulty of balancing PvE content and PvP content, and more.
Comments
9 responses to “Rockstar Explains Why GTA V Never Got Single-Player DLC”
I guess I’ll be waiting many many more years for anything single player GTA….It’s unfortunate because I don’t really enjoy multiplayer stuff anymore. Unless i have a nice little group of friends and we can do our own things without being hassled by randoms. As I’ve gotten older these random people online are generally annoying and cheap. I just don’t care anymore.
Just focus on RDR2…that helps a little.
Well i must say i am glad it is more than just money.
My annoyance is still that the new vehicles don’t make it to the SP side of the game. Surely it cant take that many resources to implement if they’re already going in the Online game. As someone who doesn’t play online anymore i wont get to experience these new vehicles at all and that is was really annoys me about the DLC strategy from Rockstar.
I haven’t personally used any of the GTA modding but I don’t think they care if you mod Single player.
From a quick look there’s at least one SP mod that lets you buy the online vehicles from the in-game website
*Edit – The mod I was looking at was recently broken by a patch, but there are probably others out there.
So I guess at least the modding community picks up the slack on stuff like that, I might actually check it out as I didn’t become an online billionaire in GTA either.
That’s all well and good for PC players…
Translation: “Multiplayer content is cheaper to create, and we like making buttloads of money.”
Agreed, but I’m not too bothered. R* make huge, polished games that must cost a buttload to make. If the price we must pay for that are these cheap cash generators between major releases, then so be it.
See also: unobtrusive microtransactions, remasters.
Plus microtransactions. You don’t want to waste that fancy new hat on just single player.
Because service based models make more money than expansions.
That’s the answer…..
Actually, it would be easy to add a SP DLC. Vechiles, weapons, etc are stored to disk (obviously) for MP use, meaning with little effort, a certain vehicle, for example, can be loaded in. It’s all about the money… That’s why
“…Rockstar’s director of design Imran Sarwar said that Grand Theft Auto’s move away from scripted single-player content was “not really a conscious decision, it’s just what happened…”
Absolute garbage! Nothing “just happens” in big corporations, especially where Bean Counters are involved. They shafted single players for the sake of micro-transaction driven profit and are too gutless to admit it.
“We get more money out of you saps while putting less creative effort into the game itself. Keep buying those Shark Cards, suckers.”