GTA V’s Emphasis on Bank Robberies Explained

Rockstar Games believes that, while bank heists and robberies were featured in previous Grand Theft Auto games, GTA V will do it justice because its characters are actually specialist thieves, not like previous protagonists in the franchise.

Grand Theft Auto games, like their names suggest, are about criminal activity, specifically stealing cars to cruise around the different open worlds in order to execute various other crimes.

While bank heists also played an important role in previous games, GTA V co-writer and Rockstar Games co-founder, Dan Houser, believes that the new title will do justice to robberies.

“To cut a long story short, we always felt like we had great feedback from these bank robberies when we hadn't really done them justice,” he told IGN.

“In this game... We'll talk more about heists later on. But we wanted that to feel like robbery, but like a great thing... We wanted the act of robbery to be more fun. We wanted it to feel like GTA, but fresh. We offer you a good range of experiences.”

According to Houser, Grand Theft Auto IV and its downloadable episodes did feature bank heists but, because none of the main characters was a skilled thief, they didn’t deliver a realistic experience.

“If you bought the complete edition, if you bought GTAIV and the episodes, you played as this immigrant assassin. You played as a biker in a gang that's crumbling apart. You played as a bodyguard for a lunatic trying to live the high life. We gave you quite a range of experiences.”

“None of them were specialist thieves, and so that was a different angle to go with. It felt good story-wise. It felt good gameplay-wise. We wanted to have a couple of really strong bank robberies. It felt strong for that. It felt like that was a good device that we'd never used in the past. Repeating ourselves is a fear when we're doing games where part of the evolution is just technological.”

The three main characters in GTA V are Michael – a retired bank robber, Trevor – Michael’s former partner who’s not a drug addict, and Franklin – a young repo man who deals with the rich and famous.

Grand Theft Auto V will be out in spring, 2013, for PS3 and Xbox 360.