GTA BOOM » Mods
Modders are working on bringing Liberty City from GTA IV into GTA V.
Leave it to GTA 5fans to make their own singleplayer DLC if Rockstar doesn’t. A team of modders has decided that Los Santos and Blaine County just aren’t big enough for them to mess around in as Trevor, Michael, and Franklin, so they decided to take Liberty City from IV and plop it right into the newest installment.
This isn’t a mod where the authors manually port over the assets from the previous game and painstakingly place all the objects. This isn’t just a graphical facelift, with the older city being loaded up in GTA V’s engine. This is more of a technical experiment, really.
Conceptually, the mod is actually more than your typical mod, which would simply affect the game files of GTA 5. This project seeks to build a virtual bridge, if you will, using OpenIV between Grand Theft Autos 4 and 5. To function, it will require both to be installed on the system running it.
Basically, it will take the files for the city from IV then convert and install them in V as if they were parts of a singleplayer DLC. The entire map of GTA IV will inhabit the same physical space as V’s island, dropped into the sea next to it.
Liberty City will not replace Los Santos or Blaine County, but appears across the sea. Using the power of OpenIV and openFormats, we were able to bring Liberty City right into GTA V’s map.
The team behind this converter tool happens to be the same guys who came up with OpenIV several years ago, a modding tool used initially for GTA IV, and later for Max Payne 3 and GTA V. The team is dedicated and experienced, making it pretty much guaranteed that this project will impress when released.
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So far there is no release date set for the launch of the conversion tool, however the team is working on it diligently. Prior to release they will still require some outside assistance with art, assets, and testing, however all of this will only become relevant in the future.
They also haven’t released any screenshots and even the teaser trailer for the mod only gives us a brief glimpse of Liberty City’s skyline off the coast of GTA V’s map. That said, considering that this will convert the game files of IV, it’s very likely that this version will look entirely identical.
Of course the mod won’t be playable in GTA Online for a number of reasons. Firstly, Rockstar does not allow modding of any kind in the multiplayer version of the gameand will hand out bans liberally when it is detected. Pretty much all mods and hacks are detected now and something as major as this is guaranteed to tick off the virtual watchdogs.
Another technical issue is that all players in a lobby must have the mod installed for it to work, and even then, there is probably a myriad of issues which would prevent this from working in a multiplayer environment. The use of custom third-party multiplayer clients is also in violation of Rockstar’s ToS.
OpenIV wants to avoid infringing any Rockstar copyrights or usage agreements. This is why the Liberty City assets for this mod won’t be downloaded, but rather require a legitimate copy of GTA IV to work. This way you’ll be using official assets from an official game, in the single player mode of another official game. Clean, with no legal issues.
Liberty City has long been rumored as the setting of GTA V’s mythic story expansion, however considering such a DLC will probably never be released, any official content bringing the new city to the game’s solo mode is out of the question. Several fake leaks also alleged its addition to Online.
Further rumors cropped up when a former Rockstar employee added images of a remastered version of GTA IV’s Liberty City to their portfolio. These screenshots showed a snippet of the game’s map with new assets and better textures, among other graphical improvements. Players assumed this was a sign of the city getting touched up for addition to GTA V.
