Mods Blocked in Ill-Gotten Gains Update
Rockstar Games, developer and publisher of the widely acclaimed Grand Theft Auto V, bafflingly, made Script Hook V and Native Trainer incompatible with the Ill-Gotten Gains DLC which came out yesterday.
Mods are one of the major advantages PC has over consoles, and is also the source of many games' longevity, as mods keep the experience fresh years after release, and its usually the modding community that keeps a game alive after the developer has stopped supporting it. While Rockstar is hardly abandoning GTA V any time soon, mods are a long-term insurance to keep the game going.
GTA V is quite the phenomenon among gamers (since the day it was launched), and has managed to make headlines in gaming journalism every week since the launch of the PC version. What’s one of the top reasons for this? Mods.
Day-in day-out we read reports of the maps of previous titles recreated in GTA V, guns that summon sharks from the ground, or floods that obey your commands. GTA V is a great game with immense depth and replayabililty, tons of content and thousands of hours of play time, and this is only boosted by the inclusion of community made modifications. They alter the features of the game's single player component in creative and unique ways.
With the newest update to GTA Online, which contains the first part of the Ill-Gotten Gains DLC, players began reporting that legitimate, single player mods didn't work. This was first properly confirmed with Alexander Blade, winner of the "coolest name ever" award and avid modder, reported that the new code is incompatible with the Script Hook V tool.
I wonder if RockStar will say again that they are not against single player mods. Got the patch (1.0.372.2), native hashes are changed, drm code protection is applied to lots of script related functions, including natives itself. Backup your files til ScriptHookV update.
This should come as no surprise, however. While Rockstar announced back when the PC version launched that they fully support single player modding (to which they still hold, allegedly), they did mention that future updates may mess with the mods, as can be seen in this post from may.
Recent updates to GTA V PC had an unintended effect of making unplayable certain single player modifications. This was not intentional, no one has been banned for using single player modifications, and you should not worry about being banned or being relegated to the cheater pool just for using single player PC mods. Our primary focus is on protecting GTA Online against modifications that could give players an unfair advantage, disrupt gameplay, or cause griefing. It also bears mentioning that because game mods are by definition unauthorized, they may be broken by technical updates, cause instability, or affect your game in other unforeseen ways.
This can be explained quite easily: the modding disruptions are not intentional. While Rockstar was always in support of single player modding, they are adamant about keeping GTA Online mod and hack-free, to prevent cheating. Since some elements of the single player and online component are linked such as the stock market, and much of the code and framework is shared. This way, mod-proofing GTA Online interfered with the modding on the single player side of things.
After putting out a game that was bug-free at launch, doing not only decent but downright excellent ports of the game on five systems, it is clear that their programming division isn't staffed by chimps. GTA V was doing just fine before all this Ill-Gotten Gains nonsense began. Cheating in GTA Online was seldom heard of, and the players were loving their mods. The game has almost exclusively positive coverage, and the mods were fuelling this. As PC gamer ourselves, we enjoy the freedom that modding gives us. You don't tell someone "sure, learn how to fly, that's cool", and then go like "Oh well, you can't fly anymore, but here is a cool shirt. That's fair, right?".
Come on, Rockstar!
Rockstar has yet to comment on the current situation.
