Over the past few weeks, you’ve seen videos and screenshots of the ambitious game Grand Theft Auto 5 a mod that was intended to introduce GTA4the metropolis of Liberty City to play, along with NPCs to meet and activities to perform.
I hope you didn’t get too excited about this. Rockstar has already closed the Liberty City Preservation project, which will make it unavailable to players in the future.
The GTA 5 Liberty City Preservation project has been closed
Given the scale of the promises, the Liberty City conservation project seemed too good to be true. Well, that’s because it was, but it wasn’t the creators’ fault.
After the project gained momentum with Grand Theft Auto fans, it also attracted the attention of Rockstar itself. Given Rockstar’s reputation for such projects, it was only going one way. In a statement on the project’s Discord server, developer nkjellman shared a message stating, “after speaking with Rockstar Games, we have decided to end the Liberty City Preservation project.”
As rumors began to circulate, nkjellman also shared another message, claiming it was not a DMCA but “rather a friendly takedown agreed to by all parties involved.” While the team may not have faced the full force of Rockstar’s legal team, it certainly sounds like the developer provided enough of a terrifying nudge to result in this takedown.
Ultimately, the removal of this mod should come as no surprise to anyone. Rockstar has been notoriously frivolous in the past when it comes to content takedowns, even going so far as to violate the DMCA on the YouTube channel of Mike Dailly, one of GTA the original creators of the series for showing early prototypes of older games. Rockstar isn’t quite like Nintendo in this regard, but it certainly has form.
There is a question “why?” all this. There are rumors that Rockstar was at one point working on its own long-canceled expansion for Liberty City. GTA5but with a sixth game on the horizon, that seems extremely unlikely at this point. Maybe we’ll finally understand it Grand Theft Auto 4 the remaster we’ve all been waiting for? Probably not, but it’s worth having dreams.
