Development of Grand Theft Auto V
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 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 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.
The actors selected to portray the protagonists invested much time and research into character development. Motion capture was used to record the characters' facial and body movements. Like its predecessors, the game features an in-game radio that plays a selection of licensed music tracks. An original score was composed over several years by a team of five music producers. They worked in close collaboration, sampling and incorporating different influences into each other's ideas. The game's 2014 re-release added a first-person view option along with the traditional third-person view. To accommodate first-person, the game received a major visual and technical upgrade, as well as new gameplay features like a replay editor that lets players create gameplay videos.
History and overview
Preliminary work on Grand Theft Auto V began around Grand Theft Auto IVs 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 Leeds, Lincoln, London, New England, San Diego and Toronto studios. Technical director Adam Fowler said that while development was shared between studios in different countries, the process involved close collaboration between 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. Game development ceased by 25 August 2013, when it was submitted for manufacturing. Media analyst Arvind Bhatia estimated the game's development budget exceeded, and The Scotsman reporter Marty McLaughlin estimated that the combined development and marketing efforts exceeded , making it the most expensive video game ever made at its time.The proprietary Rockstar Advanced Game Engine was overhauled for the game to improve its draw distance rendering capabilities, and the Euphoria and Bullet engines handle further animation and environment rendering tasks. 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 3 and Xbox 360's hardware. Art director Aaron Garbut said that while the consoles' ageing hardware was tiring to work with, the team could still render detailed lighting and shadows and "maintain a consistent look". Vice president Dan Houser felt working on Grand Theft Auto IV with relatively new hardware was a challenge, but the team had since learnt to develop for the consoles more efficiently. The PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One versions fit onto one Blu-ray Disc; Xbox 360 copies are distributed on two DVDs and require an 8 GB installation on the HDD or external storage device; while the Windows version takes up seven DVDs. The team asserted any differences between the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 versions would be negligible.
Research and open world design
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 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. Houser felt 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". Garbut said 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 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 slangwe 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 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 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.
The open world includes vast tracts of countryside around the city proper. 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. The team wanted a large world without open, empty areas and condensed Southern California's countryside into a detailed play space. The game world covers about an eightieth of Los Angeles County. 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 Red Dead Redemptions worlds combined inside. To accommodate the world's size, the team overhauled the RAGE to improve its draw distance rendering capabilities. The large, open space permitted the re-introduction of fixed-wing aircraft, omitted from Grand Theft Auto IV because of its relatively smaller scale. "We wanted somewhere big fly properly", Houser explained. Lead producer Leslie Benzies noted that to avoid a "hollow" countryside area, the team populated the open world with wildlife.
Story and character development
A single-player story revolving around three lead protagonists was one of Grand Theft Auto Vs earliest design objectives. Garbut felt such a deviation from the gameplay's core structure was a risk, and recalled team concern that a departure from Grand Theft Autos traditional, single lead character set-up "might backfire". Early game conceptualisations would have told three separate stories through different protagonists. Later, Grand Theft Auto IVs 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 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 2008 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 IVs "Three Leaf Clover" missionan elaborate heist executed by lead protagonist Niko Bellic and accomplicesencouraged the team to develop the story around the heists. Houser said 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 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 San Andreas and was involved in Grand Theft Auto Vs 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 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 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 appearhis 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 for 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 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 auntI lived with my grandmotherso 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.