Why Grand Theft Auto V Never Received a Story Expansion

To call Grand Theft Auto V a massive success would still be an understatement, but despite its overwhelmingly positive reception from players, some were left hoping for some type of story mode expansion.

Grand Theft Auto has quite a few elements working for it, storytelling being one of the major components that went into the creation of it and previous games in the series. From the outside, the games could very well look like just a bunch of shooting, bad driving, and other questionable behavior, but Grand Theft Auto veterans will know the plots open up immensely once you get inside.

The latest installment in the series was no exception to Rockstar's storytelling prowess, but unlike its predecessor, Grand Theft Auto IV, the story ended without a continuation. It wasn't an underwhelming spot to wrap up the narrative, but when keeping story expansions like The Ballad of Gay Tony and The Lost and Damned in mind, it does lead to some questions as to why Grand Theft Auto V didn't receive the same treatment.

Speaking to Game Informer, Rockstar's director of design Imran Sarwar explained why the story expansions were passed up in favor of instead working on GTA Online and other projects, specifically Red Dead Redemption II.

"No, it was not really a conscious decision, it's just what happened," Sarwar said. "With GTA V, the single-player game was absolutely massive and very, very complete. It was three games in one. The next-gen versions took a year of everyone's time to get right, then the online component had a lot of potential but to come close to realizing that potential, also sucked up a lot of resources. And then there are other games – in particular Red Dead Redemption II. The combination of these three factors means for this game, we did not feel single-player expansions were either possible or necessary."

The online component of Grand Theft Auto V has certainly fleshed out to be quite the ongoing experience, so Rockstar can probably be forgiven for rerouting resources to that instead of the story expansions, especially if it means more of the Rockstar team has been working on Red Dead Redemption II.