Rockstar has announced a First Person Mode for the GTA 5 remake on PS4, Xbox One and PC with a shocking level of depth, and it may completely change the way you play GTA.
Third-person games get modded into first person perspective all the time but it’s not often we see that task undertaken by the developers themselves. It takes a moment of consideration to realize, if you’re not a programmer yourself, but it’s not nearly as simple as “the perspective is here, now move it down and forward a bit to here.” Creating a first person view for a game built around a third person view is difficult; it takes a significant level of tweaking and the addition of brand new animations to make that change.
Rob Nelson, Animation Director on GTA 5, says that the weapons alone required the addition of roughly 3,000 animations, “There’s stuff that just doesn’t exist in third-person: the weapon recoil, the reloads, the weapon switching. All of the weapons have been up-rezzed and animated properly, so the shells come out the right way and have the right muzzle flashes.”
From the details released thus far, it’s clear this is so much more than some tacked-on feature. The First Person Mode will come with customizable control options like chossing whether to switch to third or first person when in cover, turn ragdoll or the combat roll on or off and set varying degrees of aim assist. The addition of first person is more than a scrapped together mod, this is a full-featured component of the game that will allow players to experience a new and improved San Andreas from a first person perespective entirely, in the classic third person, or a combination of the two as they see fit.
Rockstar is known well for their mindblowing attention to detail and this is no exception; each character has their own idle animations and characteristic details in their arms and hands, each vehicle has it’s own dashboard and cockpit with breathtaking detail all the way from real-time damage to displaying the radio station you’re currently listening to. It’s something that Rockstar has always wanted as an option for the game but just didn’t have the resources for in the last generation.
“We’ve always been in interested in it, but it’s never really been an option for us. I don’t think we could’ve put it in the [last-gen version] because we were too busy making the game. We were too busy working on our third-person controls and the missions.”
“We were out of memory on the old consoles for animations. We were constantly fighting about what we could have and what we could still push in, and what other areas you could steal memory back from – audio, art, maps – for animation. So we could’ve added all the atoms to make a first-person mode to the level we wanted. We weren’t sure the world would have held up the way we would’ve wanted it to.” – Rob Nelson
If you have any doubts about the level of detail put into this feature, or how much of a new experience it brings to the game, the below video is all you need to see. GTAV wil be on PS4 and Xbox One in the perspective of your choosing, November 18th, and on PC January 27th.
WARNING the gameplay trailer has some NSFW language–and that’s the only warning you get, it is GTA after all.
