“Consoles don’t have a modder community!” Se7en Sins’ member and resident poster ‘Raymnd’ is out to prove that statement wrong.
Even though the game isn’t even out for PC, Raymnd has modded GTA 5 on Xbox 360 to replace Michael with war veteran Niko Bellic from the previous entry in the series.
He isn’t just claiming to have done it – Raymnd has also posted screenshots of Niko roaming about Los Santos and talking to people instead of Michael in key cut-scenes involving the character.
The mod is still a work-in-progress according to Raymnd, and the modder is currently working on making Niko’s hands and feet show up correctly. Another problem with Niko is the lack of facial animations, which probably cannot be fixed without substantial work as there are no animation files for the Serbian on disc.
Information on how Raymnd altered the game remains sparse, and only a little can be understood from his forum thread over at Se7en Sins which reads:
“After a few hours of research i found out how the file loading works in the game engine.
Happy to say this is a ‘disk2/common’-only mod (should work on both JTAG-consoles and Burned ISO).”
From the tiny explanation provided, we can assume that modding the game was relatively easy, as the file-structure is rather similar to previous Grand Theft Auto games (where simply replacing file names was enough to change models). This would mean that we can expect a ton of mods for Grand Theft Auto 5 when it makes its way to PC; if it ever gets released on PC that is.
No tutorial has been given yet by Raymnd on how players can do it themselves, nor has he uploaded any altered game files. If anyone wants to play as Niko, they’ll either have to reach out to Raymnd and wait for him to respond back, or just figure out how to mod the game themselves.
Source: Se7en Sins
