If you’ve been eagerly tapping your fingers and waiting for the deluge of Grand Theft Auto 5 mods to begin, you may have to wait a little longer. As a result of Rockstar’s tight knit online integration and the use of its Rockstar Social Club, the actual files needed to get create your modded masterpiece, are reportedly extremely hard to modify.
Skyrim and GTA IV modding community, ENBdev, have been looking at modifying Rockstar’s open-world game, but have explained that Rockstar seem to be doing everything to prevent these files from being tampered with. This is presumably in an effort to prevent any form of cheating in Grand Theft Auto Online, but this is having a knock-on effect for the single-player too.

“Rockstar did everything to prevent modding of GTA V,” ENBSeries wrote on their website. “So at this moment, it’s impossible to do anything via editing the game files.”
“Bad news,” concurs modder Frostav on Reddit. “This game looks very locked down right now. It might be a while before we can get into the game. This is the most a GTA game has ever been locked down before. I can’t even access simple stuff like the car-handling files.”
We had our doubts about the modding potential of Grand Theft Auto 5 last week, when Rockstar, in response to being asked what it was doing to support the modding community, said “Since GTA Online has such a massive and vibrant community, our primary focus is making sure that nothing detracts from that experience or has a negative impact on the overall community of players.” Hardly embracing the modding community with open arms is it?
Still, on the plus side there is still absolutely stacks of things to see and do in GTA 5 as it is, and it’s surely only a matter of time before the most ardent creators brute-force there way to modding it.
Do you think locking mods down was the right thing to do for Rockstar, in order to prevent cheating? Once it’s been broken open, what mods are you looking forward to?