Gaming.

Spil, hardware og e-sport.

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The Best Deals Today: Doom: The Dark Ages, Star Wars Zero Company, 007 4K Blu-ray, and More - IGN IGN samler dagens tilbud på spil, film og LEGO-produkter. Blandt tilbuddene er Doom: The Dark Ages til 30,09 dollar, Star Wars Zero Company til 47,97 dollar og Metroid Prime 4: Beyond til 49,99 dollar. Der er også rabat på Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter, Shuten Order, 007-samlingen på 4K Blu-ray samt fysiske eksemplarer af Ocarina of Time-remaket til Nintendo Switch 2.

IGN Gaming for 1 time siden

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Call of Duty Fans Torn After New NetEase Game Launches Debate About 'Rip-Off' FPS That Might Actually Make Warzone Players Happy NetEase har annonceret ECC: Redline, et kommende free-to-play-skydespil til pc og mobil. Spillet bliver af mange spillere beskyldt for at ligne Call of Duty: Warzone næsten én til én, blandt andet på grund af våben, brugerflade, lydeffekter og kamerabevægelser. Andre mener dog, at det kan udfylde tomrummet for frustrerede Warzone-spillere. Der er endnu ingen udgivelsesdato.

IGN Gaming for 2 timer siden

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Tekken 8 DLC Trailer Reveals First Look at Yujiro's Uncanny In-Game Render, First Roger Jr. Gameplay Bandai Namco har vist de første glimt af Yujiro Hanma fra Baki, som bliver en kommende DLC-kæmper i Tekken 8. Traileren fokuserer primært på Roger Jr., der får tidlig adgang 11. november og fuld udgivelse 16. november. En ny Yujiro-trailer vises ved Tekken World Tour Finals den 17. januar 2027, men hans udgivelsesdato er endnu ikke bekræftet.

IGN Gaming for 6 timer siden

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‘It’s Going To Solidify as One of the Greatest Games in History’ – Developers, Players, and Analysts Reveal How GTA 5 Took Over the World IGN ser tilbage på, hvordan Grand Theft Auto 5 udviklede sig fra en efterfølger i 2013 til et globalt kulturfænomen. Spillet har solgt over 230 millioner eksemplarer, været aktivt på tre konsolgenerationer og skabt et stort fællesskab omkring især GTA Online. Artiklen undersøger også spillets fortælling, satire og betydning for spillerne frem mod GTA 6.

IGN Gaming for 7 timer siden

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Marvel Tokon DLC Roadmap Reveals First Look at Jane Foster Thor, Venom and Jubilee Coming in 2027 Arc System Works har offentliggjort den første DLC-plan for kampspillet Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls. Thor i Jane Fosters version kommer vinteren 2027, mens Venom og Jubilee føjes til spillet i henholdsvis foråret og sommeren. Indholdet er en del af Year 1 Character and Stage Pass, der koster 34,99 dollar. Spillet har samtidig mødt kritik for tekniske problemer og få aktive PC-spillere.

IGN Gaming for 7 timer siden

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'I Was Flat Out Wrong About These Devs' — Arc Raiders 2.0 Update Triggers 7-Month High in Player Count as Fans Show Up for 'Spider-Man' Grappling Hook, Free Weekend, and More Arc Raiders har oplevet en markant stigning i antallet af samtidige Steam-spillere efter lanceringen af opdateringen Frozen Trail. Spillet nåede over 166.000 spillere, det højeste niveau i syv måneder, hjulpet af en ny snedækket region, nye fjender, en grappling hook og en gratis weekend. Det er dog endnu for tidligt at afgøre, om fremgangen bliver varig.

IGN Gaming for 1 dag siden

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En af de værste film nogensinde får nu et remake, som absolut ingen har bedt om - Filmz Uwe Boll vender tilbage til spilfilmatiseringer med et remake af Alone in the Dark, der oprindeligt udkom som film i 2005. Boll og Michael Roesch vil ifølge planerne følge historien fra det nyeste spil og finde en ny skuespiller til rollen som Edward Carnby. Duoen overvejer desuden en mulig efterfølger til House of the Dead.

Filmz.dk Film for 1 dag siden

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'Anyone Who Puts Money Into This Deserves to Lose It All' — GTA 6 Leaker Doubles Down on Crypto Scheme, Threatens to Release Entire Story En GTA 6-lækker hævder, at en komplet spilbygning med hele historien vil blive frigivet, hvis Cyberleeks memecoin når en markedsværdi på 30 millioner dollar. Lækkeren kobler også yderligere gameplaymateriale til forskellige kursmål og Lucias påklædning. Fans beskylder Cyberleek for at drive et kryptosvindelnummer, mens Take-Two fortsat undersøger tidligere lækager.

IGN Gaming for 1 dag siden

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It Looks Like Star Citizen Spinoff Squadron 42 Is Actually, Really Going to Come Out Next Year as Steam Wishlists Go Live 12 Years After Development Began Cloud Imperium Games har genintroduceret singleplayer-spillet Squadron 42 med en ny trailer, Steam-ønskelister og en bekræftelse af det omfattende skuespillerensemble. Spillet kombinerer rumkamp, førstepersonsaction og en historiedrevet kampagne med blandt andre Mark Hamill, Gary Oldman og Henry Cavill. Udgivelsen er udskudt til andet kvartal 2027, mens Star Citizen fortsat mangler en fast lanceringsdato.

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Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Story Recap – What You Need To Know Ahead of Modern Warfare 4's Saga-Ending Campaign Artiklen opsummerer historien i den genstartede Modern Warfare-serie frem mod udgivelsen af Modern Warfare 4. Gennemgangen dækker begivenhederne i kampagnerne og udvalgte historiedele fra Warzone, herunder dannelsen af Task Force 141, konflikten i Urzikstan og jagten på de stjålne kemiske våben. Fokus er at give spillere et samlet overblik over sagaens komplicerede forløb.

IGN Gaming for 1 dag siden

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Spilanmeldelse: Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve - recordere.dk Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve leverer lettilgængelig og actionpræget luftkamp med mere end 30 missioner, opgraderbare fly og våben. Spillet byder også på multiplayer med blandt andet co-op og PvPvE, men singleplayer-delen står stærkest. Grafik, vejr og lyd fremhæves som seriens flotteste hidtil, mens grundopskriften i høj grad er bevaret. Spillet får 4 ud af 5 stjerner på PS5.

Rec.dk Gaming for 1 dag siden

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The Marvel Darkhold Destiny Set Looks Like A Perfect Fit For Magic - and Preorders Are Now Live Wizards of the Coast har annonceret Magic: The Gathering-sættet Marvel: Darkhold Destiny, som udkommer 9. april 2027. Forudbestillinger af blandt andet boosterbokse, Commander-decks, bundles og Scene Boxes er nu åbne. Sættet udforsker Marvels overnaturlige univers med figurer som Magik, nye helte og skurke samt en original historie, der også udgives som Marvel-tegneserie.

IGN Gaming for 1 dag siden

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For MTG's Next Marvel Set, Wizards Created its Own Superhero Story Wizards of the Coast udvider samarbejdet mellem Magic: The Gathering og Marvel med sættet Darkhold Destiny, der udkommer i april 2027. Historien følger Doctor Strange, Thor og andre helte i kampen mod Dormammu og Hela, som bruger Darkhold til at invadere multiverset. Sættet fokuserer på tre former for magi og genintroducerer Arcane-undertypen på besværgelser.

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GTA 6 Fan Says They Asked Rockstar to Send Them a Poster All the Way to Brazil — So They Did En GTA 6-fan fra Brasilien fortæller, at Rockstar Games sendte en officiel plakat fra virksomhedens kontor i New York, efter han høfligt havde spurgt om en. Historien blev delt på Reddit sammen med billeder og angivelige e-mails, men det er ikke uafhængigt bekræftet, at Rockstar stod bag forsendelsen. GTA 6 ventes udgivet 19. november 2026 til PlayStation 5 og Xbox Series X/S.

IGN Gaming for 1 dag siden

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Final Fantasy 7 Revelation: First Impressions of an Early Slice of Gameplay from an FF7 Veteran | IGN Preview IGN har prøvet en tidlig, lineær sektion af Final Fantasy VII Revelation, som foregår ved North Crater og fokuserer på historien frem for spillets åbne verden. Demoen introducerer Materia-fragmenter til hurtigere opgradering, forbedret automatisk opsamling og nye kampmuligheder gennem Cid, Vincent og FITS-systemet. Sværhedsgraden virkede lav i demoens første kapitel, men kan ændre sig inden udgivelsen.

IGN Gaming for 1 dag siden

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Konami Planning 'Second and Third Waves' of New Silent Hill Games as It Looks Into 'A Number of Projects' Konami planlægger flere nye Silent Hill-spil efter en succesfuld første bølge, oplyser producer Motoi Okamoto i et interview med Famitsu. Selskabet vil endnu ikke afsløre konkrete detaljer, men arbejder allerede på en række projekter. Den første bølge omfattede blandt andet genindspilningen af Silent Hill 2, Silent Hill f og Silent Hill: Townfall, mens Bloober Team også arbejder på en genindspilning af det originale Silent Hill.

IGN Gaming for 1 dag siden

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'We're Moving Fast' — Blumhouse Partners With MatPat to Make Amanda the Adventurer Movie, Confirms More Indie Horror Game Adaptations Are Coming Blumhouse har indgået et samarbejde med YouTube-profilen Matthew “MatPat” Patrick om at filmatisere virale indie-horrorspil. Den første planlagte film bliver Amanda the Adventurer, som følger et mysterium omkring et uhyggeligt animeret børneprogram. Projektet er stadig i udvikling, men parterne forhandler allerede med manuskriptforfattere og instruktører om at få filmen realiseret.

IGN Film for 1 dag siden

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Magic: The Gathering at NYCC Live Blog – Get Ready for Darkhold Destiny Wizards of the Coast har annonceret Darkhold Destiny, et nyt Marvel-sæt til Magic: The Gathering under Universes Beyond-brandet. Afsløringen fandt sted i forbindelse med New York Comic Con, men kortene og sættets konkrete mekanikker er endnu ikke offentliggjort. IGN beskriver sættet som en mere original fortolkning af Marvel-universet, der passer bedre til Magic-verdenen end tidligere crossover-sæt.

IGN Gaming for 2 dage siden

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Gears of War: E-Day Sales Start Soft as Analyst Warns Game Pass Is 'Cannibalizing' Premium Revenue on Xbox En analyse fra Alinea Analytics anslår, at Gears of War: E-Day solgte omkring 230.000 eksemplarer på PC og Xbox i den første uge. Tallet er ikke bekræftet af Microsoft og omfatter 168.000 Steam-salg samt 62.000 salg i Xbox-økosystemet. Samtidig skulle cirka 1,7 millioner have spillet via Game Pass, hvilket ifølge analysen har flyttet interessen fra køb til abonnementer.

IGN Gaming for 2 dage siden

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'Scrib Doon!' — LucasFilm Games Producer Responds after Galactic Racer Character Biddy Blas Goes Viral Figuren Biddy Blas fra Star Wars: Galactic Racer er blevet viral på sociale medier på grund af sin overdrevne stemmeskuespil og komiske dialog. Lucasfilm Games-producent Craig Derrick har reageret på den store opmærksomhed og takket fans for interessen. Figuren kan blandt andet narre spillere med en eksplosiv gave, mens spillets multiplayer-grænse snart bliver udvidet.

IGN Gaming for 2 dage siden

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'We Are Not Against Creativity' — Skate Developer Addresses Community Mods After ReSkate Goes Viral Skate-udvikleren Full Circle anerkender fan-modifikationer efter den store interesse for ReSkate, en uofficiel platform med offline-spil, private servere og brugerskabte baner. Studiet vil dog slå ned på mods, der omgår betalt indhold eller udnytter uudgivne funktioner. Samtidig arbejder Full Circle på officielle værktøjer, der skal give spillerne større frihed til at skabe indhold.

IGN Gaming for 2 dage siden

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Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 Launch Rollout Adds DMZ Early Access Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 giver forudbestillere tidlig adgang til både kampagnen og den genarbejdede DMZ-spiltilstand. Kampagnen åbner 16. oktober, DMZ følger 20. oktober, mens den fulde lancering finder sted 23. oktober på pc og konsoller. Infinity Ward beskriver DMZ som en mere omfattende extraction shooter med vedvarende progression i det åbne område Hajin Exclusion Zone.

IGN Gaming for 2 dage siden

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October’s Humble Choice Lineup Is Officially Live, Featuring Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii, Psychonauts 2, and 6 More Games Humble Choice’ens oktoberudvalg 2026 er lanceret med otte pc-spil til 14,99 dollar om måneden. Pakken inkluderer blandt andet Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii, Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, Psychonauts 2 og Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor. Medlemskabet giver også en gratis måned med IGN Plus, rabatter i Humble-butikken og et bidrag til velgørenhedsorganisationen Hilarity for Charity.

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'It's Not an Industry Secret' — Wardogs Dev Holding Back Certain Features Because of Xbox Series S, but Working to 'Very Low-End Hardware' Has Its Benefits Udvikleren Bulkhead siger, at Xbox Series S begrænser, hvilke funktioner der kan tilføjes til Wardogs, blandt andet dynamisk vejr, fordi konsollens ydeevne sætter en nedre grænse. Samtidig har arbejdet med den svagere hardware gjort det lettere at optimere spillet til mindre kraftige pc’er. Wardogs kommer først til konsoller i 2028, mens sæson 2 lanceres 15. oktober.

IGN Gaming for 2 dage siden

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Wardogs Season 2 Adds a New Gambling Mechanic That Lets You Bet on Yourself — Here's How It Works Wardogs Season 2 lanceres 15. oktober med blandt andet et nyt vejrsystem og regn i kampene. En ny Wager Vendor-mekanik lader spillere satse på egne præstationer, eksempelvis et bestemt antal drab eller genoplivninger, med mulighed for store gevinster eller tab. Funktionen bliver dog først tilgængelig, når spillerne har opbygget nok penge i spillet.

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Gaming Underholdning IGN for 7 timer siden

‘It’s Going To Solidify as One of the Greatest Games in History’ – Developers, Players, and Analysts Reveal How GTA 5 Took Over the World

IGN ser tilbage på, hvordan Grand Theft Auto 5 udviklede sig fra en efterfølger i 2013 til et globalt kulturfænomen. Spillet har solgt over 230 millioner eksemplarer, været aktivt på tre konsolgenerationer og skabt et stort fællesskab omkring især GTA Online. Artiklen undersøger også spillets fortælling, satire og betydning for spillerne frem mod GTA 6.

Fra IGN

There are over 230 million copies of Grand Theft Auto 5 in the world. As the second-highest selling game of all time, it has been played for billions of hours by players across the globe, making it one of the most significant pastimes in the entire world. That’s an impressive achievement for what in 2013 was simply the highly-anticipated next entry in Rockstar’s beloved (and notorious) open-world crime series. But GTA 5 proved to be much, much more than a typical sequel. It has become home to a huge, expressive, and loyal community, one which has made a digital hobby of everything from warring alien clans to producing slick vehicle stunt movies.

This is the story of how a video game became much more than a crime simulator.

Ash Skyqueen’s avatar weaves between the traffic of busy Dorset Drive on a motorbike spouting flames. Suddenly she veers, mounting the pavement at high speed and rebounding from the roof of a bus stop to achieve incredible air. Momentum carries her through a perfect circle, barely bigger than a human body, that forms the second ‘O’ of the ‘LIQUOR HOLE’ store sign. Pulling the ripcord of her parachute, she lands with a slight stagger at the door of the rundown booze establishment on Eclipse Boulevard - a couple of streets over from where her jump began.

It’s the first feat in a stunt montage which Ash put together to celebrate ten years of GTA 5 – the game that gave her freedom, companionship and goals when she was robbed of all three. “I’d had a ruptured disc in my spine, so I was bed bound shortly after the game came out,” she says. “All day every day for about three years straight, it became my therapy in a way. You’re stuck in bed, can’t do anything, can’t work, no social life, a pretty miserable existence. And then I’m suddenly connected to a community of people doing the same thing. It kept me from going insane.”

It’s a striking demonstration of why GTA 5 has remained a deeply important game to millions of players. A pillar of pop culture, it was erected in 2013 and has loomed over the entertainment industries during every year since. Thanks to the enduring love for its single-player story campaign and its ever-popular, seemingly invincible online mode, GTA 5 has spanned three console generations and made around $10 billion dollars for publisher Take-Two – over 3 times more than the highest-grossing movie ever. When Shawn Levy and Ryan Reynolds made Free Guy, a Hollywood comedy about the social connection and wanton violence of online games, it was GTA they chose to riff on.

Where previous Grand Theft Auto entries were cinema-riffing crime simulators that routinely broke sales records, GTA 5 has evolved beyond those confines. It has become an alternate world where players can escape to a funhouse mirror version of LA – the most mythologised city on the planet. There they become whoever they want to be: stunt specialist, bank robber, nightclub kid, hitchhiker or filmmaker.

The GTA Campaign, Re-Tuned

In some ways, GTA 5 was a course correction for Rockstar. While 2008’s Grand Theft Auto 4 had been rapturously received, it was a narrower interpretation of what the series could be. Some players chafed against its dour and grounded tone, as well as the unforgiving driving simulation that threatened to hurl speeding players through the windscreen. It was a largely straight-faced vision that left a space for rivals like Saints Row developer Volition, who filled the vacuum with gleefully absurd city sandboxes populated by dildo-toting gangsters and gimp chariots.

GTA 5, however, saw Rockstar reclaim its lost territory in the single-player space without compromising its serious storytelling chops. The developer turned up all the dials on its screaming satire, filling its campaign missions with ludicrous plane, train, and helicopter setpieces in which the bodies hit the floor without moral consequence. The driving was made friendlier, and the oppressive skyscrapers of GTA 4 replaced by the open freeways of the San Andreas countryside. Yet GTA 5 also told the ambitious tale of three controllable protagonists at totally different points in their lives – Franklin, the young and hungry Scarface-in-waiting; Michael, the washed-up cuckold; and Trevor, the psychopathic embodiment of the five-star Wanted level.

As clear as that ambition is to see in the final product, Mike York had nothing close to a sense of that full picture when he first joined the GTA 5 development team as an animator, two and a half years before its launch.

“A lot of times during production you’re thrown in there, and you don’t know what the story is and how it plays out,” he says. “There are a lot of scenes where I didn’t even know what came before or after. I was so out of the loop with the story of the game. They just threw me a cutscene with Tanisha and Franklin and were like, ‘Hey, can you do the body animation on this?’ But I had no idea how it connected. All I knew is, ‘Damn, this girl looks mad at Franklin. She looks like she just broke up with him.’”

Even in the final six months of development, when members of the team were “all hands on deck” and testing the game for eight hours every day, it was impossible to perceive GTA 5 in its entirety.

“As a tester, you’re trying to play through the whole game over and over and over again,” York says. “But the game is very long. A lot of times I would play the game from the very beginning, up until 60% or 70%, and then a new build of the game would come out where they fixed a bunch of bugs. And so I only played the game from start to finish all the way one time, and that was after I was done from the project and played it at my house by myself.”

I was shocked about how massive it was, how big the world was, and how cool it was to switch characters.

Only then could York finally appreciate the enormous puzzle he’d been contributing pieces to for so long. “I think the biggest thing I was shocked about was how massive it was, how big the world was, and how cool the system was of being able to switch characters,” he says. “I thought that was unique, and I knew that players hadn’t seen that before.” It’s a system that Rockstar’s peers in the triple-A sphere are only now catching up to - infusing Spider-Man 2 and Assassin’s Creed Shadows with swappable protagonists whose stories are entwined.

As an American, York appreciated Rockstar North’s Scottish perspective - an outsider’s view of the quirks and comedy inherent in LA culture. “I think they have a pretty good eye, a good touch on our society,” he says. “And that’s because, even though the main studio is in Edinburgh, a lot of the people that work there are from the US, or all they do is watch US TV shows and play US games. They’re engulfed in our culture in general. So even though they live in the UK, they have a good pulse on everything that’s going around here.”

When the midnight launch came, Ash Skyqueen and her sister stood in line at the Metrocentre shopping mall in the north-east of England. Like so many others, she took the game home and pushed it straight into the console. Behind the scenes, the development team were “stoked, walking around the office and telling people, ‘Oh my God, did you see we just sold this many?’ There were a lot of funny comments from people on YouTube channels and we were all geeking out about that.”

Simultaneously, however, Rockstar was readying to launch GTA Online - the platform that would take Los Santos multiplayer. “We were trying to get prepared for that, too,” York says. “So half of it is excitement, and the other half is trying to get some stuff done for Online.”

The Live-Service Frontier

GTA Online arrived only two weeks after its parent game and immediately ran into problems. There were difficulties with servers, crashes and lost character progress. The IGN review of the time criticised the repetitive missions and oddly mute player avatars, who contributed little to cutscenes with established GTA characters like Trevor. “I’m left with the overbearing impression,” wrote Keza MacDonald, “that Grand Theft Auto Online as it stands right now is still a colour sketch of what it will probably one day become.”

In 2017, Rockstar’s then director of design, Imran Sarwar, offered an unusually frank assessment of GTA Online’s formative period. “To be totally honest it did not begin very well at all,” he told Game Informer. “It’s one of our biggest regrets that we lost millions of players in that first year that have never experienced how much we have improved and added to the game since the early days.”

It’s one of our biggest regrets that we lost millions of players in that first year.

Rockstar had promised players cooperative heists – huge multistage missions featuring lavish story sequences in the mode of single-player GTA. But the company’s first attempts didn’t live up to its own standards and had to be redesigned from scratch, leading to several delays.

“GTA Online was slowly failing - and quickly losing players - right up until the middle of 2014,” Sarwar said. “The updates were not interesting enough, and as a company we did not realise how challenging it was going to be to have a team that essentially ran a content service, not make normal games.”

This is not the obvious oversight it might seem today. When GTA Online launched, the live service model was in its nascency. Fortunately, as Rockstar fumbled around trying to figure out the shape of its multiplayer platform, it had a critically acclaimed single-player game to lean on. “GTA 5 helped prop up GTA Online in the early days when Rockstar was still exploring how it wanted the online component to work,” says James McWhirter, senior games analyst at Omdia. “There was a lot of experimentation going on behind the scenes.”

Some of those experiments were in economics. If there’s a comparison to be drawn, it’s Team Fortress 2 – the competitive FPS that Valve used as a testing ground for new business models that have since become standard in Counter-Strike, Dota 2, and a host of other games besides. Ultimately, GTA 5 has made its billions through multiple different methods.

“It’s simultaneously pulling all of those levers,” McWhirter says. “You’ve got the upfront sales for GTA 5 itself, the full game. You’ve got in-game purchases via GTA Online, and now Rockstar have begun to lean into subscriptions with GTA+.”

None of that would have panned out if the GTA Online team hadn’t solved its biggest creative problem: heists. As Rockstar began to update its world with unique new stories and complex missions that demanded coordination and mastery from their players, GTA Online genuinely started to look like the future of the series rather than a flawed spin-off. Even resolutely solo players braved the servers for fear of being left behind.

“I was kind of shocked by how much extra story and missions they put into Online,” York says, who left Rockstar in 2017 – a few years before the likes of the Cayo Perico and Diamond Casino heists were added. “They really went all out, I felt, adding all kinds of stuff to do in there.”

Online Superiority

GTA Online’s turnaround and subsequent financial success came at the cost of single-player expansions. Actor Steven Ogg filmed scenes for a solo campaign that would have featured Trevor as an undercover agent, but it never emerged thanks to GTA Online sucking up many of the resources once earmarked for DLC.

“I can’t speak for the company, obviously,” York says. “But I think that they wanted to do a little bit of both. And I think they did have strong intent with DLC stuff, but the Online just did better. That happens a lot at studios, where they’ll have a DLC lined up that they’ll have plans for, and then they’ll completely shut it down because they realise something else is way more important - or they don’t even know if that DLC is going to perform well at all. They’d rather just not take the risk on it.”

Similar to Minecraft or Fortnite, it’s a virtual world first and foremost, and a game second.

GTA Online effectively took the place of traditional expansions, becoming an endgame for solo players who had exhausted every mission and diversion in GTA 5. Unusually for newcomers to an MMO, they arrived with dozens of hours of investment in its world and characters. “You know the map and where the streets are,” York says. “You finally get your own character.”

“I played it like a single-player expansion at first,” Ash Skyqueen says. “Played through everything I could by myself, and kept playing. The mechanics have always been what appeals, so it was easy to sit there and figure out what I could do.”

It’s with this spirit of exploration that GTA’s developers and players outgrew the limitations of the series’ original premise. “The more comfortable we were pushing beyond the traditional GTA concepts and experimenting more freely, we were able to introduce things like Cunning Stunts, the Special Vehicle Races, and adversary modes like Power Play, Tiny Racers, or Slasher,” Sarwar told Game Informer.

The backdrop of Los Santos, recognisable as a contemporary city only slightly adjacent to our own world, proved helpfully malleable. “One of the updates GTA Online brought in was a TrackMania style game, racing in the cloud with a top-down perspective, almost like Micro Machines,” McWhirter says. “That just wouldn’t have been possible in Red Dead Redemption. Anything with a real world analog can be realised in GTA Online, so it’s a much more potent canvas for content updates over a long period of time. Whereas Red Dead is a lot more tied to its fiction. You couldn’t have flying horses, like having flying cars added to GTA Online.”

That flexibility has enabled Rockstar to transform GTA into a platform for many different kinds of experiences, capable of holding player attention indefinitely. “Similar to Minecraft or Fortnite, it’s a virtual world first and foremost, and a game second,” McWhirter says. “In terms of GTA Online, the racing updates with the crazy track editors are a good example of how content that could perhaps normally make for a standalone game became a bolt-on for GTA Online.”

Over time, these bolt-ons have replaced smaller game releases in Rockstar’s catalogue, for better or worse. “I would consider GTA Online to be the modern day equivalent of the double-A titles that Take-Two used to push out between those blockbuster games,” McWhirter says. “If we go back to the PS3 and 360 generation, there were games like Rockstar Games Presents Table Tennis and Bully, which we don’t really see anymore because teams are busy making content for GTA Online instead. Because that’s more valuable for the publisher. It helps them buy time between major GTA releases.”

More Than Multiplayer

For players like Ash Skyqueen, a new content drop in GTA Online serves a dual purpose. Beyond the extra heists and missions to play through, every update is a toy box filled with fresh animations and props to be repurposed in fan-made movies.

Skyqueen got into making machinima through her community of stunters, who made use of a modding tool named MenyooSP. “It gives you access to everything,” she says. “I can set up a secondary character, give it a list of actions and animations to carry out, and then manually control my character and do what I need to do.”

In her own movies, Skyqueen is star, stuntperson and director - the latter role enabled by the official video editor Rockstar added to GTA 5 back in 2015. One of her most popular creations, the silent short film Siren, evokes the intro cutscene of GTA 3 – following a Bonnie and Clyde-esque couple who wreak havoc as the FIB closes in. In the climax, a pre-programmed prison bus travels down the freeway - before Ash swings in on her bike to take down the convoy.

“There’s a lot of choreography involved,” she says. “I’ll often just sit there with a nine-hour long YouTube video of all the GTA story cutscenes, keeping my eye out for something that I can use in a different context.”

180,000 viewers have watched Siren. Almost a million people have watched her Liqour Hole stunt. And Skyqueen hopes Rockstar will implement some of MenyooSP’s innovations officially in GTA 6. “I know they take note of this kind of stuff, and they certainly have promoted work that’s been made with it.”

The ongoing success of GTA 5 raises questions about its eventual fate, once Rockstar’s sequel launches in November 2026. Will the studio run two versions of GTA Online simultaneously, at the risk of cannibalising its own playerbase? If not, and the GTA Online audience is migrated to a new Floridian setting, how will Rockstar account for all the properties and vehicles players have paid for?

“If a new online mode is a completely separate thing from GTA 5 Online, managing continuously between two live service games is something that is currently unproven and it could be fraught,” McWhirter says. “I think that’s probably the biggest risk for them.” The situation brings to mind the arrival of EverQuest 2 in the mid noughties, when developer Sony Online Entertainment discovered that players typically played just one MMO and stuck with it. In such a context, a sequel’s biggest threat can be its own predecessor.

“I think GTA 5 is going to solidify as one of the greatest games in history,” York says. “I think its legacy is already etched. It was revolutionary in so many aspects - in character switching and story. I’m shocked that people are still playing GTA 5, and it goes to show you how good that game is.”

While admitting to a certain amount of bias as a former member of the development team, York believes that GTA 5 will be bigger than its own sequel once the dust settles. “I feel like GTA 5 was something special in gaming culture and history, and it’s gonna leave a lasting mark,” he says. “Games will come and go around it. My intuition is that GTA 6 will come out, people will love it, but it won’t be GTA 5. And people will constantly compare it to GTA 5. It’s going to be the most nostalgic for people, it’s going to be the one that affected them most as kids. And so I just feel like GTA 5 is going to be the GTA to be remembered. It’s gonna supersede Vice City. This is the one that marked history.”

For Ash Skyqueen, who can no longer drive around a city in real life, GTA 5 is much more than a game. “It gives me that little bit of freedom back that I lost with the injury,” she says. “Though it’s simulated, it has such a good feel to it. I’ll always get on at Christmas when they turn on the snow. You’re walking around the streets at night, and it gives you that same vibe as in real life. In other games it’s just an aesthetic. But you can feel that stillness that comes with a dark snowy night. I don’t know how they do it.”

Jeremy Peel is a freelance journalist and friend to anyone who will look at photos of his dogs.

GTA 5 Grand Theft Auto Rockstar Games Take-Two GTA Online GTA 6

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