GTA V Expanded & Enhanced: What we would love to see in 2021

Grand Theft Auto V still continues to be one of the best top-grossing titles of all time across two console generations and the future of Grand Theft Auto: Online will continue to evolve ahead in the coming years. In June 2020 at PlayStation’s Future of Play, we got our first details that Rockstar Games are working hard to deliver a new Grand Theft Auto V port for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series to bring an enriched enhanced experience to take full leverage of the new console hardware.

In the wake of to the announcement, the GTA community have been passionately speculating what brand new features could end up in the new versions. Many fans speculate the port will feature new single-player content and even crazy ideas like Liberty City but these ideas seem quite unlikely. Rockstar is known in the past to deliver some unexpected features from some previously released ports like Red Dead Redemption 2’s (2019) PC port that featured a new Photo Mode and GTA V’s PC port (2015) that also featured the Rockstar Editor that today remains the most top used feature in the game.

Speaking realistically what should we expect from these new versions in 2021? It’s safe to assume these versions will be highly aimed at improving the techinal perspectives of the game. We get Rockstar is also committed to expanding the game with additional content moving forward to ship with the port.

Let’s dive into what we’d love to see featured in GTA V’s next-generation port in 2021.

Technical Enhancements

GTA V is a seven-year-old game from 2013 and still looks fairly decent compared to modern games but some technical parts of the game are starting to look a bit grimy but it still holds up well.

The ancient 2D cloud technology in the world of Los Santos does need refinement with the use of a volumetric cloud system as seen in Rockstar’s latest title Red Dead Redemption II. It makes flying an aircraft above the skies more enjoyable and even more breathtaking with these unbelievable looking clouds.

It would be even more welcomed if Rockstar made extra efforts to further improve texture detail across Los Santos and new updates made the weather effects such as the rain effects, puddles, and thunderstorms. The game would also broadly benefit from screen-space reflections instead of just standard reflections.

To moreover, let’s discuss one particular rendering feature that’s very much known in the games industry that is RTX also known as ray-tracing. Many fans hope to see ray-tracing featured and here’s why. Ray-tracing essentially brings more realism to the lighting in the game world, it creates more real-life like shadows and reflections. It’s widely used in many upcoming titles like Cyberpunk 2077 and it really does make tremendous differences to the game lighting.

But considering the age of the game code, it may take too much work and resources to implement such a huge feature into the game engine. Although, Rockstar has a good relationship with NVIDIA so it’s safe to assume it may even happen if there’s an ongoing deal going on behind the scenes. On a plus note, nearly every next-generation title will use ray-tracing.

Lengthy Loading Improvements – GTA Online

Over the years GTA Online has received fair criticism having to experience long loading times after finishing game modes and even booting the game up. Most times it takes up to five minutes to even get into a session on current-gen console versions. But that may change with the PS5 and Xbox Series, both Microsoft & Sony are promising developers and consumers to deliver ultra-fast SSD speeds for quick loading.

But there’s only just one issue; even if the next-gen consoles can load game assets in under a few seconds matchmaking still needs some improvements. Even players with an SSD on a PC still experience long loading. We hope this is something Rockstar will fix so we don’t have to keep staying in the clouds or loading screens for too much longer.

60 FPS – on consoles

This one is pretty obvious. The next-gen versions should include a performance cap of 60 FPS for the first time on consoles. It’ll result in gameplay to be smoother and gunplay will feel much less clunky. Even if Rockstar could bump the performance up to 120 FPS would be even better for those on 120 Hz display.

Expanded – what new content?

We’d love if Rockstar expands the single-player with additional content. Even if we the game received new side quests, or if we’re lucky a few new missions featuring Micheal, Franklin and Trevor. But this seems quite unlikely. It doesn’t seem Rockstar plans on ever expanding it and wants to focus its online mode.

So what else could they expand on then? Logically it would make some sense to bring some new select exclusive GTA Online content reserved for next-generation systems and PC so more users would move to these new versions. It’s rather likely Rockstar could cease DLC updates for PS4 and Xbox One versions in a few years as we saw with the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions due to hardware limitations.

If a major DLC update for GTA Online is made just exclusive to the next-gen console versions more people would likely upgrade to the newer consoles and buy the game again. But that’s just our little guess. Although it would be very welcomed if Rockstar makes new updates to the single-player once again with new features and content and even if the Rockstar Editor was also updated to support 4K rendering as well.

That wraps it up! Until Rockstar comes out with more news in the future we’ll be sure to report as soon as possible and break everything down!