Development of Grand Theft Auto V
An approximately 1,000-person team developed Grand Theft Auto V, an action-adventure movie game, over several years. Rockstar Games released Grand Theft Auto V on seventeen September two thousand thirteen for PlayStation three and Xbox 360, on eighteen November two thousand fourteen for PlayStation four and Xbox One, and on fourteen April two thousand fifteen for Microsoft Windows, as the fifteenth entry in the Grand Theft Auto series. Development began soon after Grand Theft Auto IV ‘ s release and was led by Rockstar North’s core 360-person team, who collaborated with several other international Rockstar Games studios. The team considered the game a spiritual successor to many of their previous projects like Crimson Dead Redemption and Max Payne Trio. After its unexpected announcement in 2011, the game was fervently promoted with press showings, cinematic trailers, viral marketing strategies and special editions. Its release date, however subject to several delays, was widely anticipated.
The game’s open world setting was modelled on Southern California and Los Angeles. Much of the development work constituted the open world’s creation, and the proprietary Rockstar Advanced Game Engine (RAGE) was overhauled to increase its draw distance render capabilities. Key team members conducted field trips around Southern California to gather research and footage, and Google Maps projections of Los Angeles were used to help design the city’s road networks. For the very first time in the series, players control three protagonists across the single-player mode. The team found the numerous protagonist design an intrinsic switch to the gameplay and narrative devices. They refined the shooting and driving mechanics, and tightened the narrative’s pacing and scope.
The actors selected to portray the protagonists invested much time and research into character development. Movability capture was used to record the characters’ facial and bod movements. Like its predecessors, the game features an in-game radio that plays a selection of licensed music tracks. The game is the very first in its series to feature an original score, composed over several years by a team of five music producers. They worked in close collaboration together, sampling and incorporating different influences into each other’s ideas. The game’s re-release added a first-person view option along with the traditional third-person view. To accommodate first-person, the game received a fundamental visual and technical upgrade, as well as fresh gameplay features like a replay editor that lets players create gameplay movies.
Contents
History and overview Edit
Preliminary work on Grand Theft Auto V began soon after Grand Theft Auto IV‘s release in April 2008; [1] utter development lasted approximately three years. [Two] Rockstar North’s core 360-person team co-opted studios around the world wielded by parent company Rockstar Games to facilitate development inbetween a total team of over 1,000. [Trio] These included Rockstar’s Leeds, London, Fresh England, San Diego and Toronto studios. [Four] Technical director Adam Fowler said that while development was collective inbetween studios in different countries, the process involved close collaboration inbetween the core team and others. This was necessary to avoid difficulties if studios did not communicate with each other as many game mechanics work in tandem. [Five] Game development ceased by twenty five August 2013, when it was submitted for manufacturing. [6] Media analyst Arvind Bhatia estimated the game’s development budget exceeded US$137 million , [7] and The Scotsman reporter Marty McLaughlin estimated that the combined development and marketing efforts exceeded GB£170 million ( US$265 million ), making it the most expensive movie game ever made at its time. [8]
The proprietary Rockstar Advanced Game Engine (RAGE) was overhauled for the game to improve its draw distance rendering capabilities, and the Euphoria and Bullet engines treat further animation and environment rendering tasks. [9] [Ten] The team found they could render the game world with greater detail than in Grand Theft Auto IV because they had become familiar with the PlayStation three and Xbox 360’s hardware. Art director Aaron Garbut said that while the consoles’ ageing hardware were tiring to work with, the team could still render detailed lighting and shadows and “maintain a consistent look”. [11] Vice president Dan Houser agreed and felt that working on Grand Theft Auto IV with relatively fresh hardware was a challenge, but added “now we know what the hardware’s capable of, so it’s become a lot lighter to budge things along and a lot more joy, too”. [12] The PlayStation Trio, PlayStation four and Xbox One versions fit onto one Blu-Ray Disc; Xbox three hundred sixty copies are distributed on two DVD discs and require an eight GB installation on the HDD or outward storage device; [13] while the Microsoft Windows (PC) version takes up seven DVD disks. [14] The team asserted that any differences inbetween the PlayStation three and Xbox three hundred sixty versions would be negligible. [15]
Research and open world design Edit
Initial work on Grand Theft Auto V constituted the open world creation, where preliminary models were constructed in-engine during pre-production. [16] The game’s setting is the fictional U.S. state of San Andreas and city of Los Santos, based on Southern California and Los Angeles respectively. [17] San Andreas was very first used as Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas ‘ setting, which featured three cities separated by open countryside. The team thought that the ambition of including three cities in San Andreas was too good as it did not emulate the cities as well as they had hoped. [Legal] Houser felt that “to do a decent version of L.A. . the game has to give you a sense of that sprawl—if not fully replicate it”, and that dividing the budget and manpower inbetween numerous cities would have detracted from capturing “what L.A. is”. [Nineteen] Garbut said that PlayStation two era technology lacked the technical capabilities to capture Los Angeles decently, such that San Andreas ‘ rendition of Los Santos looked like a “backdrop or a game level with pedestrians randomly milling about”. [Nineteen] The team disregarded San Andreas as a departure point for Grand Theft Auto V because they had moved on to a fresh generation of consoles and dreamed to build the city from scrape. According to Garbut, with the stir to the PlayStation three and Xbox three hundred sixty hardware, “our processes and the fidelity of the world [had] evolved so much from San Andreas” that using it as a model would have been redundant. [Nineteen] The team’s concentrate on one city instead of three meant that they could produce Los Santos in higher quality and at greater scale than in the previous game. [Nineteen]
Los Angeles was extensively researched for the game. The team organised field research trips with tour guides and architectural historians, and captured around 250,000 photographs and many hours of movie footage. [11] Houser said, “We spoke to FBI agents that have been undercover, experts in the Mafia, street gangsters who know the slang—we even went to see a decent prison”. He considered the open world’s research and creation the most requiring aspects of the game’s production. [1] Google Maps and Street View projections of Los Angeles were used by the team to help design Los Santos’ road networks. [20] The team studied virtual globe models of the city, census data and documentaries to recreate its geographical and demographic spread. [Nineteen] The team opted to condense the city’s spread into an area that players could cozily traverse, and captured “the essence of what’s indeed there in a city, but in a far smaller area”, according to Houser. [21] The Fresh Yorker ‘s Sam Sweet opined that the “exhaustive field work . wasn’t conducted to document a living space. Rather, it was collected to create an enormously realistic version of a Los Angeles that doesn’t actually exist. The map of Los Santos is familiar but its contents are condensed”. [22] Garbut noted that Los Angeles was used merely as a beginning point and that the team were not “dictated by reality” while building Los Santos. [16]
The open world includes vast tracts of countryside around the city decent. [23] Research took the team to California’s rural regions; Garbut recalled a visit he took with Houser to Bombay Beach that inspired them to set Trevor’s initial story against the Salton Sea. [16] The team wished a large world without open, empty spaces, and condensed Southern California’s countryside into a diverse and detailed playing space. [11] The game world covers forty nine square miles (130 km two )—about an eightieth of Los Angeles County. [22] Its scale is greater than Rockstar’s previous open world games; Garbut estimated it is large enough to fit San Andreas, Grand Theft Auto IV and Crimson Dead Redemption ‘ s worlds combined inwards. [24] To accommodate the world’s size, the team overhauled the RAGE to improve its draw distance rendering capabilities. [Nineteen] The large, open space necessitated the re-introduction of fixed-wing aircraft, omitted from Grand Theft Auto IV because of its relatively smaller scale. [25] “We desired somewhere big [to let players] fly decently”, Houser explained. [26] The team populated the world with wildlife; lead producer Leslie Benzies felt that “because of the scale of the map and the different kinds of areas involved, a countryside without animals would feel fairly hollow”. [27]
Gameplay design Edit
Grand Theft Auto V ‘ s numerous protagonist design was envisioned to improve the series core mechanics. The team sought to innovate game storytelling and negate stale familiarity by not evolving the gameplay’s core structure. [28] “We didn’t want to do the same thing over again”, said Houser. [Nineteen] The numerous protagonist idea was very first raised during San Andreas ‘ development, but contemporaneous hardware limitations made it infeasible. [29] Garbut explained, “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”. [Two] After Grand Theft Auto IV ‘ s release, the team developed The Lost and Damned and The Ballad of Gay Tony, episodic content packages that followed fresh protagonists. The three interwoven stories received positive remarks, so the team structured Grand Theft Auto V around this model. [26]
The development team found that players experienced greater freedom when controlling three characters in missions. Lead mission designer Imran Sarwar felt they opened up more strategic manoeuvres. He cited a combat script with the lead protagonists where Michael De Santa sets up at a sniper outpost and provides covering fire for Trevor Philips, who makes a frontal brunt on the enemy position while Franklin Clinton manipulates flank points. [30] Benzies felt that character switching streamlines the interplay inbetween free wander and linear mission gameplay, as it eliminates San Andreas ‘ cumbersome long distance drives to mission commence points. Players may “explore the entire map without having to worry about the long drive back”, according to Benzies. [27] Houser noted the mechanic’s use during missions negated long drives as well. [Nineteen] The open world’s dynamic mission content is a feature borrowed from Crimson Dead Redemption, where it was received positively. Dynamic missions present themselves while players explore the open world, and may be accepted or overlooked. The team implemented dynamic content all via the open world. In Los Santos for example, players may encounter an armoured van and attempt to intercept it to steal its contents. [Nineteen]
The team overhauled the game’s shooting and driving mechanics to match the standards of its contemporaries. Public reception to the team’s previous games (such as Grand Theft Auto IV, Crimson Dead Redemption and Max Payne Trio) was considered during the process. [31] [32] To increase the rhythm of shootouts, the team eliminated hard locking—a central mechanic in Grand Theft Auto IV that instantly locks onto the enemy nearest to the crosshair. Associate technical director Phil Hooker found hard locking “too disorientating” and immersion-breaking, “as you didn’t have to think about enemy locations”. [33] He said that Grand Theft Auto IV players “just rely on holding and shooting until a target is dead”, so Grand Theft Auto V introduces a timer that cracks the lock on a target after a few seconds. [33] The team refined Crimson Dead Redemption ‘ s cover system for the game, with enhanced fluidity moving into and out of cover. [33] Regarding the reworked vehicle mechanics, [32] Houser felt the game took influence from racing games and corrected Grand Theft Auto IV ‘ s “boat-like” driving controls. [Nineteen]
Story and character development Edit
A single-player story revolving around three lead protagonists was one of Grand Theft Auto V ‘ s earliest design objectives. Garbut felt that such a deviation from the gameplay’s core structure was a risk, and recalled team concern that a departure from Grand Theft Auto ‘ s traditional, single lead character set-up “might backfire”. [16] Early game conceptualisations would have told three separate stories through different protagonists. Later, Grand Theft Auto IV ‘ s stories inspired the concept that story trajectories would meet via the game. Eventually, the concept evolved into three interconnected stories that intertwined through the missions. [34] According to Benzies, the team made the numerous character formula “integral to the structure of the gameplay as well as the narrative”. [27] Houser opined that Grand Theft Auto V is their “strongest plotted game because the characters are so intertwined” and that the “meeting points [inbetween the characters’ stories] are very arousing”. [24]
The game’s central story theme is the “pursuit of the almighty dollar”. [35] Missions go after the lead characters’ efforts to plan and execute complicated heists to accrue wealth for themselves. The team focused on money as the central theme in response to the 2007–08 financial crisis, as its effects turn the main characters back to a life of crime. [36] “We desired this post-crash feeling, because it works thematically in this game about bank robbers”, Houser explained. [37] The positive reaction to Grand Theft Auto IV ‘ s “Three Leaf Clover” mission—in which an elaborate heist is coordinated and executed by lead protagonist Niko Bellic and accomplices—encouraged the team to develop the story around the heists. [38] Houser said that while “Three Leaf Clover” was well-received, the team had not captured the thrill of the robbery to their best abilities and desired Grand Theft Auto V to achieve it. He explained, “We dreamed to have a duo of truly strong bank robberies . It felt like that was a good device that we’d never used in the past. Repeating ourselves is a fear when we’re doing games where part of the evolution is just technological”. [39]
The team wrote each character to embody a game protagonist archetype; Michael embodies greed, Franklin ambition and Trevor insanity. Houser felt Michael and Trevor were written to juxtapose each other, with Michael “like the criminal who wants to compartmentalise and be a good boy some of the time” and Trevor “the maniac who isn’t a hypocrite”. [12] He considered that the three lead characters helped budge the game’s story into more original territory than its predecessors, which traditionally followed a single protagonist rising through the ranks of a criminal underworld. [12] Ned Luke portrayed Michael, Shawn “Solo” Fonteno portrayed Franklin and Steven Ogg portrayed Trevor. Fonteno very first became aware of the acting job through his friend DJ Pooh, who worked on San Andreas and was involved in Grand Theft Auto V ‘ s music production. [40] When Luke’s agent advised him of the casting call, he primarily did not want to casting for the part because it was in a movie game. After reading the casting material and learning more about the project, he became interested. He reflected, “I went instantly after reading the material from ‘I’m not doing it’ to ‘nobody else is doing it’. It was just brilliant”. [40] During the initial casting process, Ogg noticed an on-set chemistry inbetween him and Luke, which he felt helped secure them the roles. [41] “When [Luke] and I went in the room together we instantly had something”, he explained. [42] While the actors knew their auditions were for Rockstar Games, it was not until they signed contracts that they learnt it was a Grand Theft Auto title. [40]
Work for the actors began in 2010. [40] Their spectacles were mostly recorded using movement capture technology. [Eighteen] Dialogue for scenes with characters seated in vehicles was recorded in studios. [43] Because the actors had their dialogue and movements recorded on-set, they found their spectacles no different to film or television roles. Their dialogue was scripted such that they could not ad-lib; however they sometimes made petite switches to the spectacle with directorial approval. [43] To prepare for his role as Michael, Luke gained twenty five pounds and studied Rockstar’s previous games, kicking off with Grand Theft Auto IV. He considered Michael’s characterisation to be an amalgamation of Hugh Beaumont’s portrayal of Ward Cleaver in the American sitcom Leave It to Beaver (1957–63) and Al Pacino’s portrayal of Tony Montana in the one thousand nine hundred eighty three film Scarface. [40]
Ogg felt Trevor’s characterisation developed over time. He said, “Nuances and character traits that began to appear—his walk, his manner of speech, his reactions, undoubtedly informed his development across the game”. [42] Ogg cites Tom Hardy’s depiction of English criminal Charles Bronson in the two thousand eight biopic Bronson as a strong stylistic influence. [42] He opined that while Trevor embodies the violent, psychopathic Grand Theft Auto anti-hero archetype, he wished to evoke player sympathy to Trevor’s story. “To elicit other emotions was raunchy, and it was the fattest challenge and it’s something that meant a lot to me”, Ogg explained. [40] Fonteno felt that growing up in South Los Angeles and being exposed to drug trafficking and gang culture authenticated his portrayal of Franklin. “I lived his life before . He’s been surrounded by drugs, the crime, living with his aunt—I lived with my grandmother—so there was a lot of familiarity”, Fonteno said. [40] Having not worked as an actor since portraying Face in the two thousand one film The Wash, he sought counsel from Luke and Ogg to refine his acting abilities. [40]