Rockstar creative director, Dan Houser, has put the final nail in the online coffin of GTA San Andreas, by claiming that "San Andreas will not be online."
It is not clear yet if GTA San Andreas, scheduled for release on PS2 sometime near the holiday season this year, will be released on other formats, although an XBox and possibly PC version of the game are likely to surface in 2005. It is unlikely however, that online play will feature on any version of the game since Mr. Houser suggests that the issues are not clearly technical but related to the story.
We have a lot of script writers working on GTA, and they use so many scenarios to build the story - it's impossible to do that in an online game, that problem has not been solved, he explains.
For the time being then, GTA will get no official online play since Rockstar believes that it would have an overall negative effect on the game experience. Fans of the genre will be begging for a PC version of the game since that may prompt some inventive people to create online mods, much like the Multi Theft Auto mod for Vice City. It is certain that Rockstar study those mods and make sure that they get the most out of the community's efforts. After all even Mr. Houser admits that GTA will eventually move online, we are thinking about it, but it's simply better to do the things we want to see in GTA in a single-player game. I'm not saying that online games aren't fun, but I do believe that online games are not yet ready for the immersive gameplay that GTA has to offer.
