GTA V

We’ve been waiting on official news to come from Rockstar on the release date of GTA V and today we have it and whilst this would usually be major cause for excitement, the news is somewhat disappointing as we won’t be getting the spring release date we all thought and will actually have to wait till closer to the end of the year to get our hands on 2013′s most anticipated game.

GTA V is CONFIRMED for release on September 17th 2013 and we know that thanks to this message they posted on NewsWire just a few minutes ago…

“Dear all,

Today, we have an official release date to share with you: Grand Theft Auto V will arrive in stores on September 17, 2013.

We know this is about four months later than originally planned and we know that this short delay will come as a disappointment to many of you, but, trust us, it will be worth the extra time. GTAV is a massively ambitious and complex game and it simply needs a little more polish to be of the standard we and, more importantly, you require.

To all Grand Theft Auto fans, please accept our apologies for the delay, and our promise that the entire team here is working very hard to make the game all it can be. We are doing all we can to help ensure it will meet if not exceed your expectations come September – we thank you for your support and patience.

Yours, The GTA Team”

Every company knows that you can’t deliver bad news without a more upbeat note to finish on so they did offer us a little teaser of what we can expect to be revealed over the next few months in a press release that arrived shortly after their admission that GTA V was delayed once again…

“Los Santos: a sprawling sun-soaked metropolis full of self-help gurus, starlets and fading celebrities, once the envy of the Western world, now struggling to stay afloat in an era of economic uncertainty and cheap reality TV. Amidst the turmoil, three very different criminals plot their own chances of survival and success: Franklin, a former street gangster, now looking for real opportunities and serious money; Michael, a professional ex-con whose retirement is a lot less rosy than he hoped it would be; and Trevor, a violent maniac driven by the chance of a cheap high and the next big score. Running out of options, the crew risks everything in a series of daring and dangerous heists that could set them up for life.

“Grand Theft Auto V continues to push the series forward in new ways; Rockstar North are creating our deepest, most beautiful and most immersive world yet,” said Sam Houser, Founder of Rockstar Games. “We are very excited for people to learn more about the game in the coming months.”

The September release date moves the launch back from its original projected release window of spring 2013 in order to allow additional development time. The biggest, most dynamic and most diverse open world Rockstar Games has yet created, Grand Theft Auto V blends storytelling and gameplay in new ways as players repeatedly jump in and out of the lives of the game’s three lead characters, playing all sides of the game’s interwoven story.

All the classic hallmarks of the groundbreaking series return, including incredible attention to detail and Grand Theft Auto’s darkly humorous take on modern culture, alongside a brand new and ambitious approach to open world multiplayer.”

There is no doubt that GTA V will be worth the wait and we can only assume that the reason for the delay is that the team at Rockstar are continuing to strive for a game that delivers only the highest standards…

Whilst we wait with baited breath for the official artwork of the box to turn up online at some point this month, something interesting has surfaced online in the shape of what could be the first promotional poster for GTA V.

No real surprises here as Rockstar stick with their “helicopter in the corner and main image” format which has served them so well over the years.

The only real thing of note here is that the promotional piece clearly features the words “PRE-ORDER NOW – SPRING 2013″ which perhaps confirms that Rockstar are not planning on delaying this release any further than need be.

Whilst we have expected this news to arrive this week what we had not banked on is the release of a SECOND piece of artwork that is arguably more aesthetically pleasing than the first.

The second features no helicopter which makes it all the more mysterious…

It does feature one of our main characters wearing a pair of women’s tights as a disguise (which works very well as I have no idea if that is Michael, Franklin or Trevor).

Does this kind of artwork indicate that our protagonists will be more of a thinking man’s sort of criminal?

Let us know your thoughts!

PS – Could anyone explain why all GTA titles have a rating of “RP” on the promotional works?

I think we all know this is going to be rated “M” upon release…

When Rockstar released the first Trevor related piece of artwork we learned that he was pretty hooked on drugs and was described a career criminal.

This means the guy is pretty unhinged with a tendency to act like a complete sociopath most of the time and it’s because of these details (and the thousands more we don’t know yet) that Trevor is arguably the most intriguing character in the GTA series thus far.

Is Trevor so unhinged that the mere fact the vending machine doesn’t sell Dr Pepper has led him to blow up somebodies vehicle?

Has he decided that a quick visit to the Pay “N” Spray isn’t going to be enough to evade the cops in this scenario?

Is there anybody in the car?

The answer to all of these questions is still unknown but we can speculate all day long as to what Trevor is doing in this particular scene.

My guess is that he doesn’t like the guy who owned the pick up truck and is taking the only logical course of action somebody on drugs could take.

In the next screenshot of Trevor we see him playing a rather serious game of hide and seek with the local police force.

With 3 cars at the scene (and more inevitably arriving shortly after as they do in GTA) it is hard to see exactly how Trevor is going to find a way down from that ladder and more importantly, get back to safety.

Trouble for Michael and Franklin no doubt shortly follows after this takes place…

The Rockstar Team are being incredibly secretive about what exactly GTA V will contain but are giving the fans just enough to get excited about the 2013 release.

As a Christmas gift they’ve gone and released 5 more screenshots and whilst these are massively open to interpretation as how they’ll actually fit into the game, the screenshots do show that we’ll be in for an absolute treat when this game does hit the shelves…

Even the most hardened criminal would probably err on the side of caution if scuba diving outside a cage with extremely large sharks was in the mission brief but in GTA V, it appears though dangerous sharks are just another object getting in the way of the US dollar.

Living in a world of ruthless criminals who all own guns and wouldn’t think twice about murder is what you would think would lead our characters to their unfortunate demise but who knows, maybe Rockstar will go for an ironic ending and our lead characters will go down to the tune of nature…

Every criminal knows that sometimes you just cannot get the job done without a submarine and now Rockstar have decided to feature a story based on all the submarine based crimes you hear about on the news (yeah, me neither).

This kind of out of the box thinking is what separates Rockstar from every single video game creators out there and I for one can speak for everyone when I talk of my excitement for discovering exactly what this screenshot is all about.

Flying helicopters around the seemingly never ending world of GTA is no doubt one of everyone’s favorite part times and in GTA V it looks as though we’ll be able to go that one step further and fly a pretty serious plane.

At what point in the story our lead characters decide it’s about time they invest some of their hard earned money in flying lessons and a license is still unknown however.

Pets have not featured in GTA to date but in this screenshot it appears as though we’ll now have the ability to pop down to the local pet store and choose a best friend to join us on our criminal journey.

The jury is out on the pink collar but providing your chosen pet doesn’t expect long walks in the countryside every day this should be a lovely addition to the GTA series.

To finish we have a screenshot of Michael and his entourage which might just be the most intriguing shot of all.

Take note of how dapper our men look – the fashion stakes look as though they’ve really gone up in this installment.

It’s also important to note the two shades of Michael’s face.

The left side is extremely dark which perhaps is a visual metaphor for his life in the underworld and the right side of his face remains light which may be a visual metaphor for his family life.

Equally, it could just be Rockstar toying with us and watching us all jump to numerous incorrect conclusions based on the very small amount of information we have.

Who knows?

December 7th 2012 played host to the rather prestigious 2012 Spike’s Video Game Awards and unsurprisingly the most anticipated game of all time was voted the most anticipated game of 2013 and whilst it was expected to win (at least by us) it was up against some pretty stiff competition.

The 2013 installment of Call Of Duty is always hotly anticipated and there is plenty of interest in the rebooted and revamped Tomb Raider and Splinter Cell series.

Even the likes of Gears of War: Judgement and Command & Conquer: Generals 2 could of pipped GTA V to the post but ultimately, the GTA series is what gamers most look forward to in the industry.

And we know this because unlike other awards that are dished out at the Spike awards, this particular award is voted for by the gaming community and not simply a panel of people who probably rarely turn on their consoles.

All that’s left now is for GTA V to live up to the hype when it’s released later this year…

The fact that we’ll play as one of THREE main protagonists in GTA V is now common knowledge and whilst we’ve seen numerous shots of Michael and Franklin, what we have not seen much of so far is Trevor who is described as the “unhinged, unpredictable, psychopathic drug addict career criminal” which sounds quite brilliant.

Whether he has a taste for cocaine, heroine or crystal is still unknown but missions with an unhinged drug addict at the helm are unlikely to involve anything you’ve seen on the likes of Splinter Cell, Hitman or Metal Gear Solid before.

We’ve built our website predominately for gamers who are awaiting GTA V on the Xbox 360 or PS3 but this week the attention turned to GTA V on the Wii U as monster gaming website IGN decided to misquote an interview with Nintendo’s President of America and get all Wii U users overly excited for apparently no reason whatsoever.

The headline read “GTA V Coming To Wii U” which was incredibly misleading as there was no evidence to support such a claim.

The article talked of there being a “Good Chance” GTA V would make it to the Wii U format though several comments prior to this interview and after it have contradicted the idea.

“The folks [Rockstar] there have said very nice public comments about the Wii U. In the end, it is Nintendo’s responsibility to have a large installed base, to have development tools that help the developers and publishers create great content, and essentially create an environment where teams like Rockstar can bring their very best content to our platform, and if we do that hopefully the very best content throughout the entire industry will show up on Wii U. ”

- Reggie Fils-Aime, Nintendo’s President of America

This is from the interview where the supposed “Good Chance” came from and whilst yes, you could perhaps say there is a “Good Chance” of GTA V making Wii U at some point because of the fact that Rockstar is ultimately a business that wants to make money and there is money to be made on the Wii platform, the interview indicates no such thing happening anytime soon and this is further backed up by Dan Houser himself.

IGN: GTA V is only confirmed for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Why not the PC, Wii U and so on?

“Everything else is up for consideration. That’s all I can give you. The main thing is we are not… we are a third-party publisher. We’re not Nintendo, we’re not Sony, we’re not Microsoft. We love all of them in different ways. But we can do what we want wherever there’s the appropriate business opportunity and chance to find a market. If that’s on Apple we put something on Apple. Wherever it might be. I think that’s the fun in what we do. We see ourselves as a content company that uses technology. We don’t make it; we use it to make the most fun stuff.”

- Dan Houser

The reason that it’s important to mention this is that it’s an absolute given and painfully obvious and therefore is not newsworthy.

Just like how GTA has eventually made it’s way on to our iPhone’s, iPod’s & iPad’s it is somewhat inevitable that it will eventually end up on our Wii U’s (and PC’s for that matter) but when Rockstar themselves are not sure on a release date for their most lucrative consoles (being the Xbox 360 & PS3) it is highly unlikely/never going to happen that they decide to release information on GTA V arriving on other platforms.

We’ll be the first to have news on the release of GTA V on the PC, Wii U and even iPhone but don’t expect that to happen for a good few months after the release of GTA V on the consoles as Rockstar like to keep their customers on their toes…

With more and more details being released about the latest Grand Theft Auto, it appears that the game is becoming more and more popular and it hasn’t even been released yet, thankfully Call of Duty Black Ops 2 has been released, but Rockstar have said that they believe GTA V will redefine the concept of open-world gaming, considering Rockstar already did that with GTA III, which was released back in 2001, I’m sure they’ve got a number of surprises up their sleeves for the multiplayer mode of GTA V. It’s clear that they’ve spent a lot of time planning out the multiplayer mode, I always found with the previous GTA games, once you’ve completed the storyline it’s hard to find things to do which keep you interested in the game, obviously having a multiplayer mode is going to change that completely.

Gamers often get bored of playing by themselves, online gaming is becoming increasingly popular, with more and more people getting high speed internet connections, more people playing video games, of course being able to play with your friends over the internet is a great advantage, plus it means you don’t half your screen size playing split-screen. GTA V is due for release in Spring 2013 and it’s being called the greatest open-world game in history, it hasn’t even been released yet! It’s hard to tell what to expect when it comes to Rockstar and their games, we know they are looking players to submit their suggestions about the online world of GTA, they’ve also spent a lot of time designing the whole GTA world, creating the crime ridden city isn’t a quick job, looking at the trailers the views, new cars and graphics look great.

I’m looking forward to playing GTA online, but the story line mode has changed too, instead of controlling a single character like in the previous games, you can swap between three playable characters, each character having a different objective. Typically you expect to be playing the game character throughout the game, but with the massive map GTA V has, it does make sense to have different story lines for different characters, giving the game a much more world-like feel to it. With the additional characters, it means that there are going to be even more challenges to complete, different objectives for each character and tons of robbery missions.

We can predict what the storyline is going to be like, complete missions, move up in the world, it’s the multiplayer mode which has got everyone talking, we know that they’ll be GTA Crews, gangs, guilds, whatever you want to call them, but does this mean you can start your own crew online? Having the multiplayer mode has opened up a whole new realm of GTA gaming, being able to control certain areas of the game; online multiplayer turf-wars would definitely be interesting to play.

Grand Theft Auto V, the game everyone seems to be talking about, but nobody but Rockstar have any real ideas of when it’s going to be released, that’s because the game is still being developed, the combined campaign and multiplayer modes are going to take a lot of time to develop and test. It’s been interesting to see how Rockstar have marketed their latest Grand Theft Auto, we’ve only been given tiny bits of information from Rockstar, an official trailer, etc, there has been some ‘fake gameplay’ videos of GTA-V on Youtube, but only Rockstar have the real features up their sleeves.
Rockstar have been keeping it quite to get the world-wide-web talking about their latest instalment of Grand Theft Auto, they’ve clearly been taken a lot of suggestions on-board and decided to go with what their fan-base wants, which was mainly an online multiplayer mode, so Rockstar are creating GTA-V Crews. Which is the feature I’m most looking forward to using, but the question is, when will the game be released? Most people were hoping for a December 2012 release, in time for Christmas, but Rockstar have yet to release a date, which just leaves everyone wondering when will they?
Considering Rockstar only created the Grand Theft Auto Facebook Page earlier this month, it’s pretty much certain that GTA-V won’t be out in 2012, most sources are claiming March 2013 which seems a lot more logical, considering Rockstar are still developing the game and encouraging users to submit in their suggestions regarding GTA-V Crews.
Seems like they’ve still got a lot of the game to create before their going to be able to set a release date, of course they’ll be working on a deadline basis, but when creating the virtual world of grand theft auto, the amount of work involved is unreal. Think of Dialbo III, which was in development for something like 6 years before it was released by Blizzard earlier this year, the first GTA was released back in 1997, GTA IV was released in 2008, followed by additional games in 2009, such as Chinatown Wars etc.

Since 1997, GTA has come a long way from what it began has, nobody really knows when they decided to start working on GTA-V, but judging by the trailers, Rockstar have spent a lot of time researching the GTA market, gathering up user-feedback to ensure that GTA-V is a great improvement from GTA-IV. I found the GTA games released in 2009 were just mini versions of GTA, GTA-V is going to be whole new world of Grand Theft Auto, from the trailers you can tell the high definition graphics are going to blow you away!

Grand Theft Auto V has become one of most anticipated games of 2012, take aside all of the hype around first-person shooters, Call of Duty etc, GTA is one of the most popular games for the gameplay, not the internet interaction. GTA has always had its unique storyline, crazy twists and massive expositions, the number of games which have clearly been based around GTA is unreal and GTA-V is going to fly off the shelves.

Despite being a mainly offline game in the past, there have been a number of rumours greatly improved in-game currency/trading, the economy inside GTA has been improved over the years, so it’s not a surprise that players will be able to ‘make money’ by selling guns, stealing cars.

More business opportunities, bringing out the “Mafia” side of GTA, the storyline is the most talked about topic, but all there is to go on is the trailers, lovely landscapes, amazing graphics etc. They are pulling out all of the stops for the game, there no doubt it will live up to the hype.

Although recently games with high levels of violence, mainly first-person shooters have gotten a lot of negative attention from the media, I can see GTA V becoming a new target for the “anti-gaming” campaigns, I’m looking forward to causing havoc on the beautiful islands, beautiful cars and of course, top quality graphics.