Rockstar Took A Leap Of Faith With GTA 5’s Three Protagonists

Most of the time when playing a video game, the number of protagonists that the gamer controls is usually one. This is more or less the standard, even in games such as Baldur’s Gate where your character is the main character and basically you lose the game if your main character dies, versus  the other five members of your party. Rockstar decided to turn things on its head with Grand Theft Auto 5 when they introduced not one, not two, but three protagonists which gamers could control throughout the entire game. It was an interesting idea and given the various successes of the game, it looks like Rockstar’s idea paid off, but was this something the developers knew would happen? As it turns out, not really.

In a recent interview with Edge, Rockstar North’s art director Aaron Garbut revealed that including three protagonists in the game was something of a leap of faith, and that there was a good chance it could propel the game to new heights of success, but at the same time could backfire really badly on them as well. “[Having] multiple characters was a leap of faith. It was an interesting idea, and it felt like we could do interesting things with it, but it also felt like a change to the core of the game that might backfire. I think it really worked out.” GTA 5 has been met with rave reviews to date but what do you guys think? Was one of the reasons the game played so well was because of the use of three protagonists, versus one?

Tyler Lee
Categories: Gaming
Tags: GTA 5, Rockstar