LSPDFR Progress Report

Earlier this year we teased what would be the next big step in LSPDFR and called it “detective mode” for the lack of a better name. Whilst RDRFR and COVID-19 have impacted our work on it quite a bit, we still managed to get a lot of the necessary behind the scenes work done and wanted to take a moment to share with you where we currently are.

The original idea was to have a game mode focused more on in-depth investigations, following leads, and collecting evidence. This is still very much what we want to build, but we realized during development that to make cases dynamic yet unique we wanted you to be able to interact with suspects in a more non-linear fashion. Every suspect in a case should have their own routine, their own life and you should be able to interact with them as you see fit. Hence, we set out to develop a basic “life simulation” mode for peds in GTA V that allows us to assign a workplace, a home, personal vehicle, acquaintances, hobbies and more to a ped. 

When you drive to a suspect’s home at night, chances are their car is parked outside and they are at home. In the morning you can see them exit their house and head to work. While most peds will just follow their regular 9 to 5 work schedule, there is a chance they might conduct a meeting during lunch or after work. This meeting could be just a regular meet up with a friend or it could be related to the case you are investigating. The same is true for a gym meet up after work. Perhaps none of people there are involved with their wrongdoing in any way – but maybe they are. You can take pictures of suspicious activity and build your case or choose to intervene right there. It could work in your favor and you could find contraband on one or more of the suspects or you spook them, and they will lay low for the next few weeks. We believe that by adding these seemingly random events we can provide a lot more fun when investigating a ped as you are not only building a case in the game but also in your head of what you think the suspect might be up to. GTA V is very limited when it comes to ped interaction but with the right amount of fine tuning we think that we can tell engaging stories that are interesting to follow.

Most of the work on the “life simulation” part has been completed and we have a basic work – life cycle ready. We did not want to just spawn peds at either their home or work but simulate the actual experience even though GTA’s AI might make it tough sometimes. That means that you can follow someone from their home to work and you can also encounter them on their way to work randomly. You can find their car parked outside of work and see them drive home and (try to) park there. You can follow them walk out for lunch and return to work. There are countless opportunities to make the experience even richer and we hope to include more randomized scenarios soon so that we can ship a first tech showcase for you to play through. We want to develop this with you to make sure we build what people truly enjoy.

We hope you enjoy what we are working on and would like to thank you again for your continued support. If you have any questions or feedback, please do not hesitate to leave it here.