GTA mods have already delivered us a better, truly HD version of San Andreas, alongside a fan-made sequel to Vice City. But as rumours about the GTA 6 release date get hotter and hotter, and fans speculate on what they want to see in Rockstar’s next sandbox, what could be better than a GTA mod that lets you design your own missions, and perhaps remake your own new version of San Andreas Definitive Edition?
After entering early access in May, mod SA: Mission Maker has just received a huge new update adding a catalogue of mission design and development features to GTA: San Andreas. We’ve all been there, playing through agonising jobs like N.O.E., Robbing Uncle Sam, and every single one mission you do for Zero – “Rockstar is good”, you wind up thinking, “but even I could do better than this”. Well, now you have the chance to prove it. Create custom objectives, spawn points, animations, and enemy behaviours – everything that goes into a San Andreas mission is at your fingertips, right down to placing markers around the map, like the telltale big “R” that stands for “Ryder” that you use to start a new mission strand.
Spend enough time getting to grips with Mission Maker, and you can essentially create a whole new GTA game for yourself from the ground up. And don’t be intimidated. This isn’t like a sophisticated set of programming and development tools – the whole point of this mod is to work like LittleBigPlanet or Dreams, where you get simple menus to instantaneously create scenarios and scenes. It’s a great way to experiment and invent while we wait for GTA 6, which based on some of our own sleuthing, might be headed back to Vice City.
Elsewhere, GTA V is still going strong thanks to some other, excellent mods, and if you’re feeling kind of done with cops and robbers, and want a change from Grand Theft Auto, you can check out our guide to the best PC sandbox games.