While fans eagerly anticipate Grand Theft Auto 6, players are still getting plenty of mileage out of the game’s predecessor. Rockstar is continuing to provide official updates for GTA Online, and players are building their own role-play servers set in San Andreas. These servers’ players build their own cultures, implementing homebrewed mechanics and new ways to role-play. One of these servers is PurpleRP, which recently launched a 1.0 update that includes racing and boosting systems, housing and property, agriculture, drugs, and turf systems. The server currently hosts hundreds of players every day.
GTA Online lets players dabble in a dozen professions, from a humble taxi driver to a prestigious nightclub owner. But none of these lifestyles provide much in the way of depth; they’re essentially just an excuse to undertake new missions. On role-play servers, a player’s career is a big deal: Cops go out on patrol with their partners, criminals join gangs to plan heists or go to war with a rival syndicate, and a variety of citizens work at shops, run agencies, and found their own companies.
PurpleRP offers unique mechanics for medical services, the department of justice, auto mechanics, and other professions. There are also custom NPCs hanging out around this version of San Andreas, giving out tasks to passing players like washing nearby cars or completing race challenges.
These custom servers offer a very different experience to GTA Online, with an emphasis on player property, creative expression, and building a progressive narrative. They feel like broader versions of a Sims game, with plenty of crossover into the realm of cops and robbers. While there’s obviously the abstract role-play you’d expect on such servers, there are also mechanics taken from action RPGs.
While FiveM, a popular mod, serves as a broad framework, developers are able to write their own scripts and develop their own internal systems. For instance, players can earn profession points, which allow them to excel at a particular field like scavenging, hunting, cooking, or carpentry. Criminals start with petty crime, but slowly build experience to access greater heists. Players can rent apartments and slowly save up to buy new homes, which they can then decorate and use as backdrops for domestic role-play.
Even though we can expect Grand Theft Auto 6 to arrive later this year, volunteer developers and a community of players continue to invest their time in ongoing experiences like PurpleRP. These worlds have taken on lives of their own, and they’re growing increasingly sophisticated.
Rockstar clearly sees the promise in role-play servers, because the company acquired FiveM, the mod that enables players to run their own role-play servers, in 2023. We don’t know what the future of that deal looks like, but fan developers are already building their own versions of large-scale role-play environments, and it seems likely that Rockstar will take inspiration from these bustling communities.
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