A massive novel mod for GTA 5 will let you fully recreate Liberty City as Michael, Trevor and Franklin if you fancy going back to Niko’s venerable haunts before GTA 6

2025 has already had plenty of GTA-related topics for three days thanks to alleged leaks and definitely real predictions for GTA 6, which is set to release later this year. However, GTA 5 is still in development, and the modding team recently released a massive project for it that will allow you to explore Liberty City as Mike, Franklin, and Trevor.

The mod is called “Liberty City Protection Project” and as revealed by its creators in an interview RockstarIntelhas been working since 2018, and its current 12-person development team called World Travel is the result of combining many different GTA modding projects.

The team released the first version of their work on December 25 and it looks really impressive. Essentially, the group attempted to completely recreate Liberty City as it existed in GTA IV, complete with a fully functioning subway system, a functioning police force, and surrounding traffic.

If you download the current single-player version of the mod – which is still being worked on – in GTA 5, LC will be a separate map from San Andreas that you can fly to at any time, while the multiplayer version for FiveM replaces Los Santos due to “due to restrictions”.

While the “map, vehicles, pedestrians, interiors, atmosphere, radio stations and more” are designed to reflect what you’ll experience as Niko, Luis and Johnny (even classic Easter eggs like the Statue of Happiness beating heart), the team also put in some work to keep the environment from looking too shabby compared to LS on state-of-the-art hardware, thanks to the optional HD texture pack.

We’ve also put a lot of effort into making Liberty City feel much more active than before by adding additional scenarios and details you might come across while exploring, such as pedestrians getting a parking ticket. On the other hand, some AI scaling has been used to support deliver textures and that looks some of them may break your immersion a bit if you stare at them for too long – or for more than two seconds.

The team behind the mod – which you can download via World Travel Discord Server – told RockstarIntel that they were initially hesitant to release the game publicly due to fear of potential DMCA action from Rockstar, which has a history of doing such things with GTA mods. However, the group hopes that the developer has since changed its approach acquisition of the Cfx.re modding team – the people behind the RPG mods FiveM and RedM.

It will be engaging to see how things play out, but in the meantime, the LC Preservation Project is an engaging thing for GTA fans to consider checking out.