Rockstar Games announced GTA Online for Grand Theft Auto 5, which is stand-alone multiplayer game.
Grand Theft Auto Online will launch on October 1st 2013 coming with every retail copy of GTA 5 on PS3 and Xbox 360. Take a look at the official multiplayer trailer at the bottom of the page. And here's the official statement from Rockstar Games:
"Grand Theft Auto Online is a dynamic and persistent online world for 16 players that begins by sharing gameplay features, geography and mechanics with Grand Theft Auto 5, but will continue to expand and evolve after its launch with new content created by Rockstar Games and the grand theft auto community. Grand Theft Auto Online takes the fundamental grand theft auto concepts of freedom, ambient activity and mission-based gameplay and makes them available to multiple players in an incredibly detailed and responsive online world."
"In Grand Theft Auto Online, players have the freedom to explore alone or with friends, work cooperatively to complete missions, band together to participate in activities and ambient events, or compete in traditional game modes with the entire community, all with the personality and refined mechanics of Grand Theft Auto 5."
"Players can invest in their character through customizing their appearance, improving their stats, owning customized vehicles, purchasing personal property, and taking part in missions, jobs and activities to earn reputation and cash to open up new opportunities to rise through the criminal ranks. The world of grand theft auto online will constantly grow and change as new content is added, creating the first ever persistent and dynamic grand theft auto game world."
Here and here are some more details about GTA Online.
Rockstar North president Leslie Benzies discussed the option to create custom deathmatches and races: “Well, let’s take the most simple example: a deathmatch. You open up the Creator, you place all your spawn points, place some props, place cars, place planes, place anything you want around the world. When you’re happy you’ve playtested it, when you’re happy to publish, hit the button, and it sends it up to the Cloud – our Social Club Cloud. That’s then available for everyone else in the world to use.”
“So, when [your friend] boots their game up, they could pick you as a preferred creator, and then all your content will get sucked back into [their game]. It’s constantly evolving. Everybody creates things. You choose whose content you want to see. You set up a blue marker, and that’s kind of the instigator of the mission.”
“You walk in there, and then it triggers whatever you’ve created. And that will constantly be evolving, so we’ll be creating content all the time – every day you’ll boot up the game and there’ll be new things coming in.”
“Initially, you’ll be able to create races and deathmatches, which are probably the simplest. And then, over time, when we feel comfortable that people are ready to get the new creators, they will be released.”
“So it’ll be a trickle, but it’ll be a constant release of new creators and new content. We don’t want to overdo it. It’s a complex system. That’s another reason for the two week delay between single-player and Online. We want to give people an opportunity to actually get their heads around what’s happened, because even single-player is a big advancement from the old games. There’s a lot of new things to learn.”
Benzies also said that Rockstar North wants to show that GTA Online and GTA 5 – while existing in the same engine – are separate games. The studio wants GTA Online to be something bigger, more long-standing. He said that GTA Online is set before the events of GTA 5 and that your custom avatar will appear in the game’s world map on October 1 2013.
Rockstar North president Leslie Benzies also spoke about the possibility that GTA Online is coming to next-gen formats later on. “There’s very few games like GTA Online – so we’ll play it by ear and see what the consumers want. We’ll get the current gen version out first and see what happens in the future.”
Players can create races and deathmatches and then upload them to the cloud for all to share. “Everything’s going to the Cloud, isn’t it? It’s the future, and the boxes become less relevant. It’s more about the content. It’s more about the data than the hardware. And, yeah, whether you’re on your iPad, your iPhone, your Android or your console, to me it doesn’t matter what it is. It’s a game.”
