GTA 5 arrives on PC this month, more than 18 months after its original release and five months after a new-gen console port.
That doesn’t mean it was an afterthought, though; all indications suggest the PC version of GTA 5 may be the best one yet, with loads of features, fantastic graphics scalability, 4K support, and much more.
Speaking in an interview with PC Gamer, a group of Rockstar North staffers including director of technology Phil Hooker, director of engineering Klaas Schilstra and technical director Adam Fowler said the PC version has been in the works all this time.
“We were always going to bring GTA 5 to PC. We planned from day one for a PC build and we made technical decisions based off the fact that we would be doing a PC version of the game,” Rockstar said.
“While we started development of the PC version quite early, we decided to focus the bulk of our attention on the PS3 and XB360 versions first in order to push that as far as we possibly could before turning our attention to the PS4 and Xbox One versions,” the team continued.
“And then using the shared architecture underpinning the new consoles to help ourselves ramp up into the PC version and push the game as far as we possibly could, knowing we would have the opportunity to make the game look and feel better than it ever has.”
Rockstar Toronto president Kevin Hoare said the publisher has changed how it develops PC games over the years; it no longer ports console builds to PC, but keeps the PC in mind when developing every version. As a side effect, this meant Rockstar had an easier time of it when developing the new-gen versions.
“We knew that we would eventually create a PC version so early development was done in parallel with the console versions,” he said.
“In fact, some of the early preparations we made for PC, like 64 bit & DX11 support, paid off very handsomely when the PS4 and Xbox One architectures were announced.
“That early work made the process of transitioning to the new consoles a lot easier and allowed us to hit the ground running. The artists also prepared for PC by authoring their source art at PC-ready resolutions, even though we had to use massively reduced versions for the PS3 and XB360.”