After nearly ten years,Grand Theft Auto Onlineremains popular and beloved by many. Part of its continued popularity stems fromGrand Theft Auto Online’s active and vibrant roleplaying communitythat keeps finding ways to make it feel fresh. But the future is coming:Grand Theft Auto 6is in development and is likely to become a hub for online roleplaying just as its predecessor has been.
A lot of the success of theGTA Onlineroleplaying community has been in spite of some severe limitations the game is burdened with by default. The New Day RP server, for example, boasts 400 concurrent players at their peak hours, despite the servers for the base game only allowing 32 concurrent players. That means a substantial feat of engineering for the coders both supporting New Day itself and the modding platform their community is based on, FiveM. Game Rant recently spoke with New Day RP founder Tiberione about these challenges and how, hopefully,GTA 6can overcome them.
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That solution hasn’t always been perfect. Because the roleplaying community is stretching an old game engine well past its limitations, a host of small glitches frequently crop up. The current system causes characters to occasionally not appear right for some other players, as well as not displaying what they’re doing properly. Moreover, roleplayers have existed in a gray area for Rockstar, being neither officially supported nor opposed. The community has been given some basicGTARP guidelines from Rockstar, but fears run high that Rockstar may take a more hostile stance on modding in the next generation of the game. It’s hard to say how it’ll swing with GTA 6, but there are a lot of ways it could continue supporting the community.
Obviously,Red Dead Redemption 2is technically a lot stronger thanGTAgiven the age gap between the two, but taking and upgrading that technology, expanding server support, and more are just a couple of things Tiberione hopes to see in thenext iteration ofGTA Online.
We run into a lot of those [technical] issues because we have 400 players on at our peak hours. Even though the game is only designed for 32, they’ve managed to make it so you can add a lot more. I hope that GTA 6 Online natively will support some more, which will be good for us. … I’m really excited about some of the technology that they’ve put into it.
Especially with what they did with Red Dead Redemption 2, functionally, that game is in many, many, many aspects better than GTA. I mean, it makes sense. It’s six years older. I think that carrying forward those improvements into the GTA environment will be fantastic. I hope that we get to see it in the next couple of years.
Tiberione is also hopeful about the rumoredVice City setting forGrand Theft Auto 6. After nearly a decade in San Andreas, a new city with a different cultural backdrop could help the roleplaying scene grow even deeper and richer. After so long in one spot, the new horizons of Vice City can bring freshness to the community as well, he explained.
Vice City was one of my favorite GTA games. I know a lot of people feel similarly, so I’m excited that we may get to go back to that, to that location and a new generation game … I think that providing a new environment, a new map that people don’t know, in a new state with a different sort of vibe to it will provide a good opportunity for really fresh roleplay, and we’ll find that when we go to GTA 6, the quality of roleplay will go up significantly because everything will be new to people. It won’t be the same stuff that they’ve done for years, so I think that there’s a really good opportunity in the RP aspect of people being exposed to this new environment and getting to come up with new roleplay stories that are kind of in tune with that.
If Rockstar helps communities like New Day grow and flourish, it’s easy to see how the roleplayers could help keepGrand Theft Auto 6’s shelf-life up and running long after its initial run dies down, as they have with the current version. RP was a big reasonGTA 5was the most-watched game on Twitchin 2021, after all, and it’s a big driver in bringing players back to the game. With how rich and robust FiveM continues to make the current generation of online heisting fresh, the sky may well be the limit for the next game in Rockstar’s flagship franchise.
That said, Tiberione has another hope forGTA 6, not as head of a roleplay server but as a fan of Rockstar’s storytelling and world.
“To be honest with you,” he said, “I really hope they put some more effort into doingsingle-player DLC.”
