It’s been over seven years since the release of Grand Theft Auto V – a game that continues to defy all limits. After making $800 million in its first 24 hours, it has since sold more than 135m copies – more than double Michael Jackson’s Thriller. The game still regularly re-enters the top ten UK game charts and with the announcement of the PS5 and Xbox Series X updates of the game, it has spanned three different console generations. There’s simply nothing else like it.
Those are just the raw numbers. Beyond Grand Theft Auto V’s critically acclaimed single player, the series’ longer-lasting impact has been more permanently secured by Grand Theft Auto: Online. After a rough start, a miraculous turnaround and many years of subsequent free updates, Online has expanded from an adversarial large-scale multiplayer mode – arguably one of the first battle royales of its day – to a varied and persistent digital world akin to something as broad as Destiny, World Of Warcraft or The Division. Millions of players log in every month, building their own in-game businesses, gambling in casinos, going on outrageously chaotic shootouts, winning races and even visiting authentic in-game nightclubs to see real DJs play realistic sets.
This week it gets its biggest ever update: the Cayo Perico Heist. It’s the culmination of years of learning that introduces another multi-layered robbery mission set on a brand new Caribbean island for players to visit, explore, rob and then escape from. Cayo Perico marks the first time in many years that Grand Theft Auto has left the North American continent and the first time GTA V has added a new play space outside of the game’s main map of Los Santos. It’s taken almost 12 months of development – all from home – and features everyone from Julian Casablancas to Dr Dre.
“The challenges involved in that were incredible in the beginning,” Tarek Hamad tells me. As director of design production at Rockstar North, it’s his job to manage the schedule of the entire project. He’s talking to me alongside Scott Butchard, design director, who oversees the conception of ideas from start to finish, taking concepts from the drawing board to a playable reality.
Cayo Perico takes place on a tropical island owned by an infamous drug lord, El Rubio. Your online character is enlisted by the Madrazo family (a name familiar to GTA V fans) to infiltrate El Rubio’s heavily secured base and escape with enough incriminating evidence to bust the kingpin, not to mention his precious valuables.
The update adds a whole new paradise, new weapons, an entire armed submarine that operates as your underwater HQ and a metric ton of music from more of the world’s best artists. The Music Locker is a new “social space” for players to hang out as a group and it’s where you’ll start your Cayo Perico adventure, all while listening to world-class DJs such as Moodymann, Keinemusik and Palms Trax. These acts were motion captured by Rockstar to get as close to their real mannerisms as possible. There are also entirely new radio stations, curated by Casablancas, Joy Orbison and more. Seven years on from release, Grand Theft Auto V has cultural pulling power like few other video games.
“It was a new space,” Butchard explains, talking about the appeal of diving into an area outside of Los Santos, one with idyllic beaches and sunset parties, where there’s no time limit and you can explore providing you don’t get caught. “A lot of it came from the years we’ve been adding to the map, little bits of pieces. With Arena War I quite liked how we started doing the new signage and stuff around Maze Bank. The Diamond Casino & Resort update gave us a new space that really resonated with players and really gave Los Santos a breath of fresh life to it. So when we started talking about the idea of music and then potentially an island, it felt like that would be awesome. It would feel completely new, give people a bit of a break, go somewhere alien.”
The challenge of such a large-scale development has been emphasised even further by Covid-19, which shifted the entire Edinburgh-based studio – and thousands of staff globally – to remote working. “What’s amazing is that, at the beginning, when working from home properly kicked off, there were lots of challenges to overcome,” Hamad says, “but we actually hit the ground running very fast with our support network and infrastructure globally. We found ourselves really moving as one very very quickly.”
Rockstar has become familiar to this sort of adaptation. The last few years have marked several major changes for the company. Rockstar cofounder Dan Houser – brother of existing president Sam Houser – departed earlier this year. This came a year or so after Rockstar reorganised into one almost singular developmental entity – rather than siloed studios working on separate games.
Furthermore, in 2018, Rockstar became the focus of ongoing pressure to improve working conditions and reduce “crunch culture” in game development. Since then, and with the movement to WFH, Hamad explains how there’s been an increased focus on work-life balances. “I think that at the forefront of everybody’s minds, more so this year than ever before, is that everyone’s quality of life is really protected,” he says. “There’s been a real effort on every single level that everyone working from home understands that now that we’ve blurred the boundaries between home and the workplace, their home life comes first, that their quality of life comes first.”
Working from home has been a big transition and Houser’s departure was shocking news to the gaming world, but seeing the introduction to Cayo Perico’s main story mode, something is certain: Grand Theft Auto feels no less funny or sharp in its writing and despite the technology under the hood being comparably old, it still has the flair and personality to carry it through. The characters in Cayo Perico have a wit and sense of personality that other games can’t muster. Your submarine captain, Pavel, has more laugh out loud lines in his opening introduction than some entire games.
Perhaps the most appealing part about the update, though, is that it’s designed to be played either solo or with friends. “It’s something that’s been on our minds for quite some time and the community has been vocal about it,” Butchard says. From a design perspective, the new island was a chance to balance the experience. ”It’s something we’re keen to carry forward,” he adds. “We want to respect teams and players who want to play co-op. But at the same time still allow solo players to still get just as valid an experience out of it. There’s perks to both. If you go in there by yourself, you’re taking 100 per cent of the cut and it’s a lot easier to do stealth and plan when you’re not on comms. With multiple players you can split up and do multiple things at once. You can take more of the secondary objectives, so I could send Tarek off to the control tower to take down air defences while I start looting from the wee cash piles.”
Those types of choice are rife, with absurd options such as sneaking onto the island via a stealth jet or smuggling yourself into one of the island’s docks by sea. There’s finer points, too, such as getting hold of fingerprint cloners to access other areas. In all it feels like a big, ultra-refined level reminiscent of something from Hitman – a rich, replayable hub for experimentation and fun and one that rewards you however you play, rather than penalising you for not having a committed group of friends along for the ride.
That seamless blend of solo and multi-play seems to be where Grand Theft Auto is headed next. “I think you can see that with Online and I think going forward we’re going to inject more of that single-player element in there,” Butchard concludes. Whatever lies ahead for the inevitable sixth entry in the iconic series, Hamad is conclusive when we ask if Rockstar will continue to tell single-player stories, even as Online goes from strength to strength: “Absolutely.”
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