Right now though it’s all hands on deck for GTA Online, ”plus we have some other things” like DLC and ‘stuff’ - ”I don’t know how to describe it exactly”. It’s called ‘Bully 2’ hopefully.
”We’ve got about 45 years worth of ideas we want to do,” Benzies told Develop. Getting GTA Online off the ground and more content in GTA V comes first.
”We don’t know what GTA VI will be, but we’ve got some ideas. GTA Online is the focus right now. There ain’t no rest between finishing V and then Online.” There’s plenty of canvas left in Los Santos and the outlying Blaine County, with a whole prison complex left untouched by any story element or side mission - it’s ripe for a breakout/in.
What’s Rockstar Games’ method of madness in creating this huge worlds?
“Where is it going to be set is the first question. Then that defines the missions; you’re doing different things in LA than in New York or Miami. The map and story get worked up together, and the story is a basic flow of how it works out so you can layer the missions in,” explained Leslie Benzies.
“For this one we were down in London and the idea of the three characters popped up again. We’d actually considered it for San Andreas because there were three cities, but it didn’t work from a tech point of view because the three characters need three times as much memory, three types of animation, and so on.”
“We throw stuff in the pot, and the good stuff stays and the bad stuff disappears – there are a lot of gatekeepers at the studio, who ensure not much of the chaff makes it through. Some of the good ideas, like the three characters, stick around.” Three characters back in GTA: San Andreas? Minds would have tripped.
Going 3D with Grand Theft Auto wasn’t a ‘sure thing’ for the developer - they had many doubts.
”GTA III was good, but… it was unexpected. Being able to actually make it was a bit of a shock to us. The fact it all works and was good fun was a surprise. A lot of people in the studio at the time said we couldn’t do it,” he recalled.
Vice City swept in and out just a year later. “It was over so quickly,” he said. “It was a nine month production. Forget the ‘experience’ – it just happened. We were on such a high from III we just ran through it.”
Then San Andreas: ”It was good, it combined all the stuff we had done so far. It felt the most cohesive and the scale was huge,” Benzies added. Grand Theft Auto IV was an entirely different beast. ”GTA IV was dark times,” he admitted. “We’d been Hot Coffee-d. We were thinking ‘We make video games, and the US are doing this to us?!’”
Now Rockstar has a new challenge with GTA Online which is suffering from enormous traffic trying to get into sessions with other players to start pulling heists, racing and spending their cash on bling. For now all micro-transactions have been suspended until the situation settles.
