It’s never been entirely fair to say that GTA 5 never got story DLC. True, it never got single-player DLC: the story of Michael, Trevor and Franklin came to a definitive end that Rockstar Games never picked up again. And yet there’s been plenty of story, just not in that traditional sense: as GTA Online has gone from strange experiment to world-conquering revenue juggernaut, Rockstar has found a ton of ways to infuse narrative into the multiplayer experience. And there might be no better example of that than seeing the main(ish) character from one of GTA 4′s single-player expansions show back up in a big update for GTA Online. Gay Tony is here to take us through the big After Hours update, and we can see him in this trailer below:
As you might guess, the big update here is the ability to own a nightclub, seemingly run by Gay Tony. The nightclub serves as both an opportunity to roleplay as Cottonmouth from Luke Cage without the ignominious end as well as a base of operations for all of your other criminal enterprises–there’s also a giant garage in there for storing cars. Entertaining your patrons will be real-world acts like Solomun, Tale Of Us, Dixon and The Black Madonna and possibly others. Those real celebrities are all face-scanned and motion capped, so it’s them in the game, alright.
There are a few other clues about what we’ll be doing there in the trailer: it appears that there will be some sort of outdoor rave in the mix as well, and that the process of getting a DJ might well involve fistfights and exploding planes. Shocking, I know. I’m sure we’ll be hearing more about what’s actually in it in the coming days, but for now, it appears to indulge a kind of gameplay I always like in long-running games: that of building a big virtual space full of little virtual people that do their little virtual things. It’s like a less violent version of The Sims 4. Or at least the way I have, at times, played The Sims 4.
GTA Online: After Hours arrives tomorrow, July 24, on Xbox One, PS4 and PC. It will be a free update, though it will require the base game of GTA 5 to play.
