GTA 5 News: Rockstar Director Explains Origin of 3 Playable Characters in Game

Grand Theft Auto 5 was one of the biggest success stories of 2013, thanks to its huge sales and innovative technical achievements. One of the most popular aspects of the game is the ability to switch between the three playable characters (Michael, Trevor, and Franklin) on the fly, which allows players to experience missions and content in many different ways depending on the character in use. Rockstar North art director Aaron Garbut, recently revealed that the use of the three playable characters was a gamble by the development team, but one that ultimately worked out for the best:

"[Having] multiple characters was a leap of faith. It was an interesting idea, and it felt like we could do interesting things with it, but it also felt like a change to the core of the game that might backfire. I think it really worked out. It's so hard during development to get perspective - you get so used to looking for the problems that it becomes almost impossible to step back and see the positives. On this project, despite living in that world for years, playing the missions again and again, it felt fun," Garbut told Edge magazine. 

Garbut also explained that before making any decisions on what sort of characters to include in the game, Rockstar first focused on building Los Santos and the surrounding countryside:

"The world is always designed before the game. That's just the way we do things. We have a chunk of preproduction where a subset of the art team lay out and build a white box city. We get the roads feeling good, the vistas working well and look at the skyline and landmarks. We spend a long time driving and building and tweaking and getting everything in place and feeling balanced, making sure the districts we have chosen will blend together naturally and as a whole create the feeling of the city. As missions and story come together, I work with the level designers to place missions and key locations and to utilise as much of the world as we can."

Garbut also went on to say that, while the exact characters were not put into the game until later, the development team had some basic ideas for what the characters would be like and where they would live:

"We did know the [biographies] for the three characters right at the start, so we knew we wanted to create an area for Trevor out in the sticks. Towards the beginning of preproduction, I met up with [Rockstar president] Sam [Houser] in LA, and we spent a week together driving about, just exploring and talking. During that trip, we drove out into the desert and eventually ended up visiting Salton Sea [in California]. We went to an amazing spot called Bombay Beach and expected a real-life Trevor to burst out on us at any second."