Grand Theft Auto 6 will, I’m assured, be the most immersive videogame of all time. You simply won’t be able to discern reality from fiction anymore. Your gaze will drift from your television, to outside, to the television, to outside, and the sheer fidelity of Rockstar’s opus will be such that you can no longer tell the slightest difference between the two. You will utterly lose your mind. It’s gonna be great.
GTA 5, though? Hardly immersive at all by comparison. If I’m going to successfully mod this game into GTA 6, I’m going to need to rectify that. So I did.
I have installed Roleplay Alone, a mod which turns Rockstar’s crime sandbox into a sort of pseudo life sim, filled with all manner of strange little jobs for Michael, Franklin, and Trevor to get up to. Thrill as you mine various ores! Marvel as you package and distribute cannabis! Be amazed as you smelt things at a cement mixer somehow!
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I immediately set about my new labours. Franklin, in a $3000 cashmere jumper, manifested a two-handed mattock and began chipping away at some rocks. He did this with one hand for reasons of either incredible strength or limited animations.
This took some time. So long, in fact, that Franklin got a little bit tired according to Roleplay Alone’s newly-added energy meter. I found a rhythm: convert a few boulders to ore, then tap Y to crumple to the floor, fully clothed—as if struck down by an assassin’s bullet—to regain my depleted energy. Fortunately, the various hard-hatted men in the quarry did not mind that A) I was mining all their rocks or B) sleeping on the floor.
Is GTA 5 rendered uncannily immersive by Roleplay Alone? Well. No. But it is very entertaining to set the game’s protagonists to blue-collar tasks like mining and ore-smelting, and even more entertaining when you’re doing something completely different, forget what the Y key does now, and find yourself collapsed asleep in the road like the world’s most narcoleptic crime lord.
I do not think I will spend a lot of time mining—if for no other reason than doing it for about 15 minutes netted me only enough fake currency to buy a burger—but it’s good to know I could. Just like I could in real life. Maybe.
And besides, I can fish now.
