Grand Theft Auto 5 mod adding GTA 4's Liberty City
Coo 'eck!
A new Grand Theft Auto 5 [official site] mod will add the whole flipping city from GTA 4, the developers of GTA modding tool OpenIV have announced. Liberty City will be added to GTA 5's world, rather than replacing it, appearing just across the sea. Crumbs! Given Rockstar are seemingly more interested in expanding 5's multiplayer than its singleplayer, it'll certainly be nice to have a huge new world to play in with GTA V's toys.
I know what you're thinking: "Alice, this'll never happen. Remaking Liberty City inside GTA V is such a huge task that it'll either never get finished or be up super-janky." But wait! Rather than make the world over, they're working on a clever tool to import the data from GTA IV. It'll be a small download then chug away magically converting Liberty City and dunking it off the shore of San Andreas. That (hopefully?) dodges legal problems too.
The OpenIV gang explain in an FAQ:
"Because Liberty City takes a lot of space and we do not have rights to distribute it as our work, we decided to make this mod as an automatic convertor that converts Liberty City from your copy of GTA IV into your copy of GTA V.
"You will need to download a convertor tool with some additional assets. This tool will convert Liberty City from your copy of GTA IV into GTA V. The converter tool will create a single player DLC pack, which will be installed into your GTA V."
Another modder has already ported Liberty City to GTA V but it's a big download, has performance issues, is missing lots of details, and doesn't have anyone living in the world. It sounds like OpenIV's mod won't be perfect but should certainly be better.
Liberty City may have been built years ago now but it's still fairly pretty, so hopefully it shouldn't even look that out of place in the fanciness of GTA V.
"We are trying to make first release as soon as possible but currently we do not have information when it will happen," the gang say. For now, they offer a teensy teaser:
[Disclosure: someone I know through Cara works on GTA. She came to our flat pre-Christmas shindig and very politely tried the tequila-based I'd made. I think it could be great if I didn't balls up some of the unit conversions (who measures sugar in volume! I mean, Americans, turns out). Also, a gallon may be way more than you expect, dear metric user.]