The OpenIV modding team is working on adding all of Grand Theft Auto IV’s Liberty City into Grand Theft Auto V. They have released their first teaser for the project, which shows a quick glimpse of the Liberty City skyline. You can check out the teaser for the GTA V mod below.
OpenIV has gone into all the details of the mod on their website, answering any questions players might have about it. Rather than replacing the game world in GTA V, Liberty City will exist alongside it, with players needing to travel across the ocean (presumably by boat or aircraft) to get to it.
In order to both reduce the amount of work involved as well as avoid potentially sticky legal situations, the team is not fully recreating the city from the ground up in GTA V, but rather using a converter tool to port assets from the player’s already purchased copy of GTA IV into their purchased copy of GTA V. Plenty of work still needs to be done to make this all work, including creating new art assets, but the bulk of the content will come straight from an installed copy of GTA IV. As an additional legal deterrent, the city will be referred to by a different name.
On Twitter, OpenIV has expressed their dissatisfaction with Rockstar’s lack of single player DLC for GTA V, claiming that they had the ability to do it if they wanted to, but instead chose to only make multiplayer DLC.
Rockstar had all the time and resources to make SP DLC or real map extension for GTA V. They choose shark cards. https://t.co/Ug82Fy85mX
— OpenIV (@OpenIV) January 1, 2017
Rockstar does allow their games to be modded, but not during online play. This means that anyone using the Liberty City mod in GTA Online will have a very high chance of being banned.
OpenIV is working to release the mod as soon as they can, but no specific date has been given.