Waiting For GTA VI? Modders Just Released The Perfect Way To Pass The Time
16 years later, Libery City is back.
Whether Rockstar Games will hit its promised 2025 release date for Grand Theft Auto VI is still up in the air. History dictates that the storied developer won’t. Either way, gamers will be waiting at least most of the year before they play the next chapter in the crime saga. So what do they do in the meantime? Well for those on PC, the modding community has a pretty awesome way to take the edge off the 12 year-wait.
The Liberty City Restoration Project is a large-scale mod for 2013’s Grand Theft Auto V that allows players to take a one-way plane ticket to the five boroughs featured in 2008’s Grand Theft Auto IV. The mod is more than just a simple port of Rockstar’s approximation of New York City into a new engine. It is a six-year, collaborative effort to integrate a functioning, bustling Liberty City as players remember it into Grand Theft Auto V.
Whereas other map import mods typically feature empty streets bereft of life, the Liberty City Restoration Project feels like players have loaded up the original game with a fresh coat of paint. Car models exclusive to the East Coast city return, for one. Pedestrians go about their business, doing everything from seeking shelter and using umbrellas in the rain to answering cellphone calls. Star Junction, Liberty City’s version of Times Square, is full of traffic and tourists. Coffee shops and internet cafes have customers and road congestion changes based on the time of day. Even Liberty City’s fully-functioning subway system works as it did in the 2008 classic. To sweeten the deal, players can also experience Liberty City in first-person for the first time, a feature from the Grand Theft Auto V remasters.
The mod was led by creator Nkjellman, who brought together a dozen others in the Grand Theft Auto mod community to work on different parts of bringing Liberty City back to life. They worked on updating vehicles, textures, interiors, and dynamic occurrences that can happen as players explore the city. The team created over 4,500 different scenarios, according to Rockstar Intel, including cops ticketing parked cars, mechanics working on vehicles in the streets, and even groups of cyclists biking through city parks.
The team isn’t done with this mod either. Plans to restore the rest of Grand Theft Auto IV’s interiors with their original physics and damage models are already in the works, along with adding destructible elements like windows. On top of that, they’re improving the game’s lighting to make the city look even more lifelike.
In the first week of its release, the mod has earned over 25,000 downloads through Grand Theft Auto V’s modding client FiveM. While Rockstar Games is notoriously litigious about some of the mods that crop up in the community, there’s a pretty good chance the publisher leaves this one alone. It acquired the creator of FiveM, Cfx.re in 2023, so there’s little chance the Restoration Project isn’t already on their radar.
Liberty City has a fresh coat of paint thanks to being imported into GTA 5 and improved by the creators of the Liberty City Preservation Project.
The project is impressive, but more to the point, it’s a dream come true for fans of the 2008 game. While a Grand Theft Auto IV remaster was allegedly in the works (alongside a Red Dead Redemption remaster), the negative reception to the messy GTA Trilogy in 2021 caused them to shelve those plans. It was a crushing blow for the fan base, as the poor reception to the Definitive Editions had little to do with fan interest in the project, and everything to do with mishandled updates of those classic PlayStation 2-era games.
In the absence of a GTA IV re-release, the majority of fans will simply have to wait for Grand Theft Auto VI. The sixth mainline entry will take players to the state of Leonida, the home of fan-favorite location Vice City. There have been no updates since the reveal trailer dropped in December 2023. The game is still set for 2025 publisher Take Two’s last update, though Rockstar insiders told Bloomberg that company executives could have decided on delaying the without yet telling the rest of the team.
If it is released by the end of 2025, it will be Rockstar’s first game since 2018’s Red Dead Redemption 2.
