The Latest GTA Heads to Southern California for Booty, Beaches, & Banknotes

Grand Theft Auto V is the follow up to 2008’s record-breaking, critically-acclaimed Grand Theft Auto IV and a bold new direction in open-world freedom, storytelling, mission-based, online, & multiplayer gameplay. Grand Theft Auto V focuses on the pursuit of the almighty dollar in a re-imagined, present-day Southern California in the city of Los Santos and surrounding hills, countryside and beaches. Developed by series creator Rockstar North, Grand Theft Auto V is considered the largest and most ambitious game Rockstar has ever created.

Sam Houser, Founder of Rockstar Games, described this next installment as “another radical reinvention of the Grand Theft Auto universe,” and says Rockstar is “incredibly excited to share our new vision with our fans.”

While there is still no release date, I’ve managed to gather a few game stills,  as well as the  official trailer:

I also collected additional info through one of Rockstar’s websites Asked & Answered articles – truths and trivia about their games featuring a broad range of questions extracted from the site’s Social Club member Newswire comments, tweets, and Mouthoff emails. These were the pertinent questions and answers I collected from one recent release called “Asked & Answered: Max Payne 3 and Grand Theft Auto V”:

“GTA4 was brilliant and I really enjoyed it and still do; but what disappointed me was the lack of planes and jets. Can you tell me why you didn’t include them?”

The city was simply too small for effective and enjoyable flying. It was the first time we made a high definition open world, and it was a massive amount of work to make something on that scale – we simply could not make an environment big enough for planes to work properly. Fear not, they are returning in what is our biggest open world game to date.

Why is GTA4’s Liberty City so different from the Liberty City in GTA3???”

In the same way that Liberty City in the original Grand Theft Auto is different from the version seen in GTA3, the advances in hardware that preceded Grand Theft Auto IV’s release opened up so many more opportunities to build out and re-invent the game world from what we were able to do in previous games. Liberty City in GTA3 is loosely based on a series of East Coast and mid-western cities – New York, Philly, Detroit, Baltimore etc – but without being any one in particular. With Vice City we began experimenting with cities that were more direct spoofs or impersonations of places. For GTAIV’s Liberty City, we really wanted to make a high definition, incredibly detailed digital impression of New York (but still given the Rockstar ‘twist’), as this was something we had not done before and we felt was interesting.

“Is there any possibility GTA III or Vice City will become available to purchase/download on the Xbox live marketplace like San Andreas has?”

Due to compatibility issues and other technical limitations, we do not have any plans to make Grand Theft Auto III or Vice City available on the Xbox LIVE Marketplace

“http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eewX3uhCNkQ This link is a video I have found of apparent lighting test of GTA V. Can you disclose weather this is real or fake?  Thank you in advance :)”

Now that we’ve announced GTAV, all the way up until game launch (and probably beyond) there is going to be no shortage of non-stop hoaxes, faked footage and screens, rampant rumors and speculation. As a rule, we are not going to get into the game of confirming or denying each of these as they happen as there is simply too much of it. Half of them we don’t even understand – for example, we have no idea what ‘the build model’ is, so have no idea if it is complete or not! Instead, we’ll leave it to fans like yourselves to decide what’s legit and what’s phony. Please assume if you don’t hear it here, it is probably mostly fakes and almost definitely not the complete truth.

One thing we’ll say definitively though is – there is absolutely no ‘beta’ test for the game. If you see ads or solicitations to join a beta program, beware as this could be a dodgy online phishing scam.

“Why don’t you give us more news??”

As we have said before, we have often had long gaps between asset releases on previous games and will continue to do so in the future. We are sorry if you find this frustrating, but please understand, we don’t do this because we ‘don’t care about our fans’ ‘don’t respect our fans’ ‘hate GTA fans etc’ – precisely the opposite! We do it because we want to make sure we only release 100% correct information, and because we want to keep plenty back for the actual game release so there are still lots of surprises when you play it. The only things we care about are that you enjoy the experience of actually playing the game and that we release accurate information. We just have not been in a position to show more of the game than the trailer and will not be for a while yet. (End)