GTA 5 Removes Potentially Offensive Feature

The new GTA 5 update was apparently supposed to come with an additional feature, but this feature was cut at some point late into its development, possibly because of the moderation nightmare it would have been for Rockstar Games. According to a new datamining leak,the recent Los Santos Drug Wars: The Last Dose update was originally going to let players not only customize the name of their own acid lab, but the drug itself. As the video below shows, the feature has been implemented in the game, but was cut seemingly at the last second. The question is: why?

Some have floated the obvious: giving players the ability to name their own drug could be a moderation nightmare Rockstar Games didn’t want to have. However, the same moderation issues apply to the drug lab name customization, so this is something Rockstar Games is already calculating for. It could be that it’s simply a step to far. It’s one thing to name your own drug business, but giving players the ability to name the drugs as well is certainly pushing the envelope a bit more. That said, this is GTA 5, where you can run over people en masse and fire a rocket into a traffic jam you purposefully created to use said rocket on. We don’t think pushing the envelope would be an issue.

These two theories don’t fully satisfy, however, it’s unclear what other reasons there could be that the feature was added and then removed before release other than Rockstar Games is saving it to add at a later date. That said, WildBrick142, the Twitter user who discovered the feature, notes there is some evidence that it may be unfinished, which would then explain why it wasn’t added. The only problem with ths speculation is that the evidence for this isn’t great. 

A fun piece of #GTAOnline #cutcontent from the latest DLC: R* planned for you to be able to name your Acid Product, not just the Lab. First time naming is free, then it's $5000 to rename.
The feature is fully* supported and functional, so here's hoping it'll be available next DLC pic.twitter.com/LkGvY9Lj9m

— WildBrick142 ❄️ (@WildBrick142) April 24, 2023

And by "fully" i mean, it works but appears to be unfinished – the game might not use the name you give it, depending on the Sell Mission.
It's also not something that will be enabled with a tunable update. It would at the very least require a background script update to enable. pic.twitter.com/E9DqAGJWWz

— WildBrick142 ❄️ (@WildBrick142) April 24, 2023

It’s unclear why Rockstar Games scrapped this feature. It could be because the potential offensiveness of the feature. It could also be because work on it wasn’t complete. And of course, there could also be a reason we haven’t thought of. Whatever the case, we will keep you updated. At the moment of publishing, Rockstar Games has not commented on the feature and the speculaton surronding it and its removal, but if this changes, we will update the story accordingly.