Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser has revealed that GTA 5’s long-rumored single-player DLC was about halfway finished before it was canceled.
From the moment GTA 5 was released back in 2013, everyone wondered when the game would receive some single-player DLC. GTA 4 treated us to the excellent The Lost and the Damned and The Ballad of Gay Tony expansions, with Red Dead Redemption getting Undead Nightmare, so surely Rockstar’s biggest game would get something? Well as we sit, months away from GTA 6 with only 12 years of mediocre GTA Online content to show for it, it’s clear that isn’t in the cards.
However, GTA 5 writer and co-founder of Rockstar Dan Houser has revealed what happened to the GTA 5 DLC. Speaking to Lex Fridman, Houser acknowledged that the rumored DLC featuring Trevor as a secret agent was once what Rockstar was working on for the game. “It was cute, it never quite came together, and it was never finished,” Houser recalls, saying it was “about half-done when it was abandoned.”
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However, it may have been for the greater good, as Houser adds: “I think if that had come out, [we] probably wouldn’t have gotten to make Red Dead 2.”
Even so, the Rockstar founder says that he has a lot of love for the DLC model Rockstar went with in GTA 4 and the first Red Dead. “I like making the stories,” Houser says, adding that “I love the model of GTA 4 where you had the extra stories coming afterwards. Or Red Dead 1 when you had the zombie pack coming afterwards. I like just doing these extra things.” While it didn’t come to fruition for GTA 5, Houser explains he “would’ve personally liked to have done more of that” at Rockstar.
Rockstar Games co-founder Dan Houser couldn’t kill GTA 4’s Niko Bellic as fans needed to be able “to play forever,” so he killed Red Dead Redemption’s John Marston instead
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