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The PC development team consisted of members of the original team and PC specialists from Rockstar's other studios who had brought Grand Theft Auto IV, Max Payne 3 and L.A. Noire to the platform. The PC's recommended specifications are based on the game running a native 1080p resolution at 60 frames per second (fps); the team suggested 60 fps as the optimal performance benchmark.
Grand Theft Auto V is a 2013 action-adventure game developed by Rockstar North and published by Rockstar Games. It is the seventh main entry in the Grand Theft Auto series, following 2008's Grand Theft Auto IV, and the fifteenth instalment overall. Set within the fictional state of San Andreas, based on Southern California, the single-player ...
- Overview
- History and Overview
- Research and Open World Design
- Story and Character Development
- Gameplay Design
- Music Production
- References
A team of approximately 1,000 people developed Grand Theft Auto V over several years. Rockstar Games released the action-adventure game in September 2013 for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, in November 2014 for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, in April 2015 for Microsoft Windows, and in March 2022 for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S. The first main Grand Theft Auto series entry since Grand Theft Auto IV, its development was led by Rockstar North's core 360-person team, who collaborated with several other international Rockstar studios. The team considered the game a spiritual successor to many of their previous projects like Red Dead Redemption and Max Payne 3. 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, though subject to several delays, was widely anticipated.
The open world setting, modelled on Los Angeles and other areas of Southern California, constituted much of the development effort. 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. The proprietary Rockstar Advanced Game Engine (RAGE) was overhauled to increase its draw distance rendering capabilities. For the first time in the series, players control three protagonists throughout the single-player mode. The team found the multiple protagonist design a fundamental change to the story and gameplay devices. They refined the shooting and driving mechanics and tightened the narrative's pacing and scope.
Preliminary work on Grand Theft Auto V began around Grand Theft Auto IV's release in April 2008; full development lasted approximately three years. Rockstar North's core 360-person team co-opted studios around the world owned by parent company Rockstar Games to facilitate development between a full team of over 1,000. These included Rockstar's Leed...
Initial work on Grand Theft Auto V constituted the open world creation, where preliminary models were constructed in-engine during pre-production. The game's setting is the fictional US state of San Andreas and city of Los Santos, based on Southern California and Los Angeles respectively. San Andreas was 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 high, as it did not emulate the cities as well as they had hoped. Dan Houser felt that an effective portrayal of Los Angeles needs to emulate its urban sprawl, and that dividing the workforce between multiple cities would have detracted from capturing "what L.A. is". Art director Aaron Garbut said that PlayStation 2 era technology lacked the technical capabilities to capture Los Angeles adequately, such that San Andreas' rendition of Los Santos looked like a "backdrop or a game level with pedestrians randomly milling about". The team disregarded San Andreas as a departure point for Grand Theft Auto V because they had moved on to a new generation of consoles and wanted to build the city from scratch. According to Garbut, game hardware had "evolved so much from San Andreas" that using it as a model would have been redundant. The team's focus on one city instead of three meant that they could produce Los Santos in higher quality and at a grander scale than in the previous game.
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 video footage. 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 proper prison". He considered the open world's research and creation the most challenging aspects of the game's production. Google Maps and Street View projections of Los Angeles were used by the team to help design Los Santos' road networks. The team studied virtual globe models, census data and documentaries to reproduce the city's geographical and demographic spread. The team opted to condense the city's spread into an area that players could comfortably traverse to capture "the essence of what's really there in a city, but in a far smaller area", according to Houser. The New 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 extremely realistic version of a Los Angeles that doesn't actually exist". Garbut noted that Los Angeles was used merely as a starting point and that the team were not "dictated by reality" while building Los Santos.
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". 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 throughout the game. Eventually, the concept evolved into three interconnected stories that intertwined through the missions. According to Benzies, the team made the multiple character formula "integral to the structure of the gameplay as well as the narrative". Houser opined that Grand Theft Auto V is their "strongest plotted game because the characters are so intertwined" and that the "meeting points [between the characters' stories] are very exciting".
The central story theme is the "pursuit of the almighty dollar". Missions follow 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. "We wanted this post-crash feeling, because it works thematically in this game about bank robbers", Houser explained. The positive reaction to Grand Theft Auto IV's "Three Leaf Clover" mission—an elaborate heist executed by lead protagonist Niko Bellic and accomplices—encouraged the team to develop the story around the heists. 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 wanted Grand Theft Auto V to achieve it. He felt that a strong bank robbery mission "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".
The game has players control three characters: Michael De Santa, Franklin Clinton and Trevor Philips. The team wrote each character to embody a game protagonist archetype; Michael represents 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 guy some of the time" and Trevor "the maniac who isn't a hypocrite". He considered that the three lead characters helped move 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. Ned Luke portrayed Michael, Shawn "Solo" Fonteno portrayed Franklin, and Steven Ogg portrayed Trevor. Fonteno first became aware of the acting job through his friend DJ Pooh, who worked on GTA San Andreas and was involved in Grand Theft Auto V's music production.
When Luke's agent advised him of the casting call, he initially did not want to audition for the part because it was in a video game. After reading the audition material and learning more about the project, he became interested. He reflected, "I went immediately after reading the material from 'I'm not doing it' to 'nobody else is doing it'. It was just brilliant". During the initial audition process, Ogg noticed on-set chemistry between him and Luke, which he felt helped secure them the roles. "When [Luke] and I went in the room together we immediately had something", he explained. 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.
Work for the actors began in 2010. Their performances were mostly recorded using motion capture technology. Dialogue for scenes with characters seated in vehicles was recorded in studios. Because the actors had their dialogue and movements recorded on-set, they found their performances no different to film or television roles. Their dialogue was scripted such that they could not ad-lib; however, with directorial approval they sometimes made small changes to their performances. To prepare for his role as Michael, Luke gained 25 pounds and studied Rockstar's previous games, starting 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 1983 film Scarface.
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, definitely informed his development throughout the game". Ogg cites Tom Hardy's portrayal of English criminal Charles Bronson in the 2008 biopic Bronson as a strong stylistic influence. He opined that while Trevor embodies the violent, psychopathic Grand Theft Auto anti-hero archetype, he wanted to evoke player sympathy to Trevor's story. "To elicit other emotions was tough, and it was the biggest challenge and it's something that meant a lot to me", Ogg explained. 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. Having not worked as an actor since portraying Face in the 2001 film The Wash, he sought counsel from Luke and Ogg to refine his acting skills.
s multiple 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. "We didn't want to do the same thing over again", said Houser. The multiple protagonist idea was first raised during GTA San Andreas' development but contemporaneous hardware restrictions made it infeasible. 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". 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 new protagonists. The three interwoven stories received positive remarks, so the team structured Grand Theft Auto V around this model.
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 scenario where Michael sets up at a sniper outpost to cover Trevor, who makes a frontal assault on the enemy position while Franklin manipulates flank points. Benzies felt that character switching streamlines the interplay between free roam and linear mission gameplay, as it eliminates GTA San Andreas' cumbersome long-distance drives to mission start points. Players may "explore the whole map without having to worry about the long drive back", according to Benzies. Houser noted the mechanic's use during missions negated long drives as well. The team implemented dynamic mission content throughout the open world, a feature borrowed from Red Dead Redemption. Dynamic missions present themselves while players explore the open world and may be accepted or ignored. In Los Santos, for example, players may encounter an armored truck and try to intercept it to steal its contents.
is the first game in its series to use an original score. Music supervisor Ivan Pavlovich summarised the original score idea as "daunting", because it was unprecedented for a Grand Theft Auto game. Like most previous series entries, the game uses licensed music tracks provided by an in-game radio as well. Pavlovich hoped that the original score would enhance the licensed music use, not detract from it. He further noted the balancing act between the score's "ambient subtext and tensions" and the game's on-screen action. To work on the score, Rockstar engaged The Alchemist, Oh No and Tangerine Dream with Woody Jackson, who had previously worked on Red Dead Redemption, L.A. Noire and Max Payne 3's music. The team of producers collaborated over several years to create more than twenty hours of music that scores both the game's missions and dynamic gameplay throughout the single-player and multiplayer modes.
Early in the game's development, the music team were shown an early build before starting work on the score. Their work was mostly completed later in development, but they continued composing until its final build was submitted for manufacturing. Edgar Froese, Tangerine Dream's founding member, initially rejected the offer of producing music for a video game. After he was flown to the studio and shown the game, he was impressed by its scale and cinematic nature, and changed his mind. Froese's first eight months of work on the score produced 62 hours of music. He recorded with Tangerine Dream in Austria, but further work was conducted at Jackson's United States studio, which The Alchemist and Oh No used as well.
Jackson's initial role was to provide the score for Trevor's missions, and he took influence from artists such as The Mars Volta and Queens of the Stone Age. When he learnt that the team would be building off each other's work, he voiced concern that the finished product could be disjointed. After sharing his work with the team, however, he was particularly impressed by Froese's contributions. "Edgar evolved the music, made it into a whole other thing", Jackson said. Froese had interpolated funk sounds with Jackson's hip-hop influences. Froese and Jackson then sent their work between The Alchemist and Oh No, who heavily sampled it. The Alchemist opined, "We were sampling, taking a piece form [sic] here, a piece from there... We pitched stuff up, chopped it, tweaked it. Then we chose the tracks that worked and everyone came in and layered on that". DJ Shadow then mixed the team's creations and matched it to the gameplay. Pavlovich considered "how to make the hip-hop and rock score not sound like they were instrumentals of songs on the radio, but rather something unique to the score" a challenge.
Pavlovich found that while Rockstar assigned the team missions to write music for, some of their random creations influenced other missions and sparked inspiration for further score development. He discussed a "stem-based" system used to make music fit dynamic game factors where the team would compose music to underscore outcomes players could make immediately after completing missions. Each of these stems, Froese reflected, included up to 62 five-minute WAV files, which were sent to Pavlovich in New York. "He then created, very professionally, a mix down for each of the eight stems needed for a mission and sent out the material to the other artists involved", Froese elaborated. Oh No drew from scenes within the game to make his work feel contextually pertinent with the action on-screen. The iconographic introduction of Los Santos early in the game, for example, inspired him to "create a smooth West Coast vibe that embodied" the city. He supplied horns, electric and bass guitars, and percussion parts to fit with the car chase scenes. "We wanted everything to set the right tone", he explained.
1.Inside Rockstar North - Part 1: The Vision
2.Inside Rockstar North - Part 2: The Studio
3.Inside Rockstar North - Part 3: The Tech
4.Grand Theft Auto V Has Gone Gold
5.GTA V dev costs over $137 million, says analyst
6.GTA V Tipped to Rake in $1bn in Sales
Sep 17, 2013 · Grand Theft Auto V (also known as Grand Theft Auto Five, GTA 5 or GTA V) is a video game and a sandbox-crime game developed by Rockstar North and Rockstar Games. It is the fifteenth installment in the Grand Theft Auto series and the successor of Grand Theft Auto IV. The original edition was released on September 17th, 2013 for the Xbox 360 and ...
- Rockstar North
- Rockstar Games
- Grand Theft Auto V
- 3 min
Nov 8, 2023 · Game changer. Since the crime series first went 3D in 2001, Grand Theft Auto had always been a trailblazer for open world games, giving players the freedom to do what they wanted, which usually left a trail of wanton murderous destruction and the police in their rearview mirror. But the five year leap from GTA 4 to GTA 5 was extraordinary.
- Alan Wen
Aug 3, 2022 · The other benefit of launching late is that GTA 5 hit the PC with everything else ready in position. Heists will be live from day one, while all the DLC from the last 18 months will come part and ...
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Grand Theft Auto V Main Theme (Oh No - "Welcome to Los Santos") Grand Theft Auto V (also known as Grand Theft Auto Five, GTA 5, GTA V[2], and Grand Theft Auto V: Story Mode[3]) is a video game developed by Rockstar North. It is the fifteenth instalment in the Grand Theft Auto series and the fifth game title in the HD Universe of the series. The original edition was released on September 17th ...
