GTA 5 Liberty City Mod Taken Down by Rockstar Games

ign.com:

A mod dedicated to recreating Liberty City within Grand Theft Auto 5, as a mod, has shut down.

Insider-Gaming reports that the Liberty City Preservation Project, a mod meant to recreate the setting of GTA 4 as a mod for GTA 5, has been taken down at the request of Rockstar Games. In a statement on Discord, user nkjellman said "Due to the unexpected attention that our project received and after speaking with Rockstar Games, we have decided to take down the Liberty City Preservation Project."

There's a new mod on the block for GTAV "Liberty City Preservation Project", I tried out the mod. It's AMAZING, it has a working subway network, the police and ambient traffic are faithful and it's so polished.

Amazing work to the team of devs who worked on this! pic.twitter.com/aLLtOMvwsc

Rockstar is well-known for asking modders to take down various mods like this AI-powered GTA 5 story mode mod, or a VR mod for Red Dead Redemption 2. The Liberty City Preservation Project take down is also not without direct precedent as Rockstar issued a take-down for a mod that tried to recreate Grand Theft Auto Vice City within GTA 5.

One interesting development is that while Rockstar is judicious when it comes to taking down mods, they also sometimes hire those very modders to work at Rockstar Games. And some mods, like the Vice City mod, were taken down only for Rockstar themselves to announce remasters of those very games.

This isn't to say Rockstar is working on a GTA 4 remaster, by any means, but there's certainly precedent. Still it may be years away before we get an answer as we know Rockstar is currently hard at work trying to ready the highly-anticipated Grand Theft Auto 6 for a 2025 launch.

Matt Kim is IGN's Senior Features Editor.