On Christmas Eve, as highlighted by our sister site Tom’s Hardware, the entire GTA 5 source code was dumped online, seemingly protesting the sentence handed down to the 18-year-old who leaked the GTA 6 footage last year.
Despite being the source code for a decade-old game, the leak will doubtless cause a massive headache for Rockstar as it makes life a lot easier for those looking to find exploits in the still-popular GTA 5 online game.
But it also gives the world an insight into what might have been if said online mode hadn’t quickly become a massive cash cow for the company. According to Insider Gaming, the leak references no fewer than eight pieces of DLC which ultimately never saw the light of day.
These are reportedly the names of the content in question:
- “SP Assassination Pack”
- "SP Manhunt Pack"
- "SP Norman Pack"
- "Agent Trevor"
- "Relationship Pack"
- "Enterprise DLC"
- "Prologue DLC"
- "LibertyV DLC"
Unfortunately, names are all we have to go on, and it’s impossible to know how far along any one of these was, or how substantial they might have been. The “SP [single player?] Assassination Pack”, for example, might just be a bunch of weapon skins for all we know.
But it’s still fun to speculate. “Prologue” sounds like a bit of story before the game’s events, while “LibertyV” suggests a jaunt back to Liberty City.
Beyond that, could “Agent Trevor” have been a new solo campaign where Trevor flips and starts to work undercover for the FBI? Would the “Relationship Pack” have brought dates and relationships back into GTA 5, like in GTA 4? Most intriguingly, could the “SP Manhunt Pack” be related to Rockstar’s grizzly 2003 adventure Manhunt?
We’ll probably never know for sure. But we do have some insight into why Rockstar never brought out single player DLC for the game, despite producing a handful for Red Dead Redemption and GTA 4 in the Xbox 360/PS3 era.
“With GTA 5, the single-player game was absolutely massive and very, very complete,” Rockstar Design Director Imran Sarwar told Game Informer back in 2017, arguing that it was essentially “three games in one.”
As GTA 5 came out just one month before the PS4 and Xbox One arrived, it was then full speed ahead for the next-gen versions which emerged a year later, complete with improved graphics, higher traffic density and a brand-new first-person mode. Then the online mode took off in a big way, and Red Dead Redemption 2 required extra help: there simply wasn’t the time or resource to tell more tales from San Andreas.
Hopefully circumstances are different enough now for single-player DLC to become viable again for the upcoming GTA 6, when it launches in 2025.
