Gta 5's Character-swapping System Was A Stroke Of Genius That Was...

Real Multiple Protagonists recreates a long-forgotten source code quirk from a game now 21 years old.

As I flitted between Peter Parker and Miles Morales boroughs-apart in Spider-Man 2's New York City, I thought: why haven't more games copied the character-swapping system from GTA 5?

Marvel's Spider-Man 2 first swung onto PS5 consoles towards the end of 2023, and breached the shores of Steam at the beginning of this year. Grand Theft Auto 5, on the other hand, followed the same two-year console-to-desktop pilgrimage a full decade earlier.

That first time switching between Michael or Franklin or Trevor was a wonderful feeling, as the camera moved skyward, birds-eye-view and in slow-motion, before darting in a different direction across the map and landing back at ground level; you now in control of someone else altogether.

Off the top of my head, I can't think of a game that comes close to the same feeling and masterful execution of the mechanic besides Insomniac's Spidey sequel. Back in 2013, it was a watershed moment for the Grand Theft Auto series as a whole.

Not only was it cool, it was the first time we were able to guide different playable protagonists through missions and swap paths on the fly—something that lent itself well to GTA 5's often open-ended and chaotic mission structure in story mode, and something that wouldn't necessarily have worked quite as well in the darker, more brooding GTA 4.

Way back in 2004, however, GTA San Andreas was originally planned to include multiple characters and, similarly, an on-the-fly character-switching system. And while this discovery was first made by Silent on GTA Forums years later in 2012, modder Kaizo's latest project, Real Multiple Protagonists, is the first to fully implement the system properly as per Rockstar's original still-present source code.

"GTA: San Andreas' native two-player mode lets you switch characters, but this requires not only knowing how the two-player mode works on the surface, but also digging into the code, removing its limitations, patching validations so that the game treats player two not as a co-op character, but as another fully independent player entity," Kaizo explains. "And to clarify, this isn't some trick on my part, the mechanic of assigning CJ's priorities to another player entity is already natively present in Rockstar's code but unused."

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Source: PC Gamer