Are you ready for a serious time drain?
Game enthusiasts and developers are taking the Grand Theft Auto games’ world and expanding it beyond your wildest dreams. Come and join the fun.
Back To The Future: Hill Valley, an add-on modification for GTA Vice City and San Andreas introduced me to the incredibly extensive world of GTA modding. You install the BTTF mod over your existing GTA installation and the game turns it into something quite different. You get access to all the time machines available in the movies and to some of the movies time zones and scenery. It’s very polished and great fun if you liked the Back To The Future world.
Looking beyond that mod, there are countless of others available. They range from new and improved vehicles, additional missions and entire makeovers of the game.
One of the greatest additions is probably “Design Your Own Mission” (DYOM) for GTA San Andreas. It lets you create custom missions from inside the game. No programming knowledge required. According to the central DYOM repository there are currently 10230 missions available. Read that again, ten thousand two hundred thirty missions. That’s a few lifetimes of playing.
In my previous post, I already mentioned I wanted to become a little more creative with my gaming. The Back To The Future mod had been sitting in my todo list for a very long time. So during the holidays I finally tried it out. I was impressed with the quality and the possibilities. Further investigating the GTA mod scene, I discovered a black hole that will swallow you whole and any free time you might have with it.
I don’t think Rockstar actively supports the mod scene. Which might explain why the current GTA IV mods all seem to be fairly small. While I understand the reasons why they might not want to invest time in this, I think this is a missed opportunity.
A lot of great material to get me started. If you like, you can share your favorite GTA mods in the comments.