GTA 5 Suffers Slowdown due to Anti-Mod Measure?

Here’s a curious case for you: according to some prominent GTA 5 modders, Rockstar’s stance on Mods isn’t nearly as benevolent as the company claims it is.

First, some background. Back in May of this year, Rockstar—in response to some recent anti-modding measures being thrown around the market—said that they would never stop players from modding their single-player games of GTA 5, and insisted that they would only intervene in the case of mods or cheats being used in multiplayer. A fair and even stance--you don’t want to take anyone’s mods away, but you don’t want people abusing them either. We gave out our kudos and moved on.

But recently, GTA V got a new update, Ill Gotten Gains Pt. 2, and things have gotten rather… sketchy. PC gamers have reported all around the web that their games have slowed down and performance has gotten worse. No one was quite sure why, until the creators of the LSPDFR (Los Santos Police Department First Response) mods came forward with a suggestion: it was the work of Rockstar, who inserted 3 MB of dummy code to confuse and slow modders—which happened to have the side effect of slowing down the game as well.

The team continued to say that with all that dummy code in the program, it takes roughly five times longer for scripts to complete, and that strain shows in the game, regardless of if you’re using mods or not. Rockstar claims to be aware of the framerate and lag issues and is working to fix it, but in the meantime, all we have is the words of the LSPDFR folks, who, to be fair, has very little to gain from slandering Rockstar Games, so I don’t think we strictly have to question their motives.

I wouldn’t be in this business if I were surprised that a developer would double back on something they said, but even then, it’s a bit strange to see this from Rockstar. Now, it’s entirely possible this dummy code was designed to merely interrupt cheaters and hackers, but since this is for the single-player mode and NOT playing online… seems like an odd choice in priorities. Rockstar has been asked for comment, but for the time being, remains silent.

It’s possible it’s all a misunderstanding, or some miscommunication, but… I won’t hold my breath on any of that, personally. We’ll have to see.