Former GTA 6 dev highlights "labor of love" GTA 5 map expansion mod, and doesn't know how its environment artist finds the time for the "tremendous amount of work" required

One former Rockstar Games environment artist is full of praise for this massive GTA 5 mod that adds a whole new area into the game, noting what a "tremendous amount of work" it must have been for the mod's own environment artist.

David O'Reilly was at Rockstar Games for over 12 years before his departure in 2023, in which time he worked on Red Dead Redemption 2, GTA 5, and the still unreleased GTA 6. Needless to say, he knows the original world of the 2013 game very well, so hearing his thoughts on this fan-made expansion, Roxwood County, is particularly interesting.

Roxwood County is a work-in-progress mod that's been available for a couple of years now via a paid subscription, and playable within FiveM. It's being developed by a team of modders known as The Ambitioneers, although O'Reilly notes that as far as he's aware, there's only one environment artist working on the expansion, who goes by Kalit.

The seriously impressive expansion is directly connected to Los Santos, and comes complete with a new mountain, water park, racetrack, and more. O'Reilly is clearly pretty blown away as he explores it all in his latest YouTube video (below), calling it a "labor of love" for the mod team.

"Isn't that great that people are out there willing to make all this [for] our favorite games?" he adds. "I mean, that's brilliant. I worked on GTA 5 but I was getting paid for it, I wasn't coming home and then doing stuff."

Since the Roxwood County expansion is attached to the main Los Santos map, it means you can still see the city we all know and love in the distance from across a body of water. "I never thought I'd be looking back across it from a fanmade bit of terrain," O'Reilly notes. "Well done, that's cool."

The environment artist also has plenty of compliments for the construction of Roxwood County itself, highlighting that it has "atmosphere." He explains; "The lighting and all that is in-engine of course, isn't it, but it's the placement of everything, the construction of the landscape, the silhouettes, the building lights, the road layout.

"There's a coherent sort of form to the whole thing. It's not just like slap-dash chucked in any old place. There's an echo of Mount Chiliad in the mountain there. I'd say it's well considered, it's a nice layout of a map."

Going back to the fact that – to his knowledge – there's only one environment artist working on Roxwood County, O'Reilly offers plenty of acknowledgement for their efforts in particular, pointing out that it's "an unbelievable amount of terrain work for one person." He adds: "That's a tremendous amount of work. I don't know how you find the time to do it."

Again, it's worth noting that Roxwood County isn't even finished yet – as O'Reilly discovered during his exploration of the mod, there are occasional roadwork signs placed down before certain roads suddenly end, clearly signalling that there's more to be done.

It's still a spectacular project in its current state, though, and mercifully offers another way for GTA fans to pass the time before GTA 6 eventually launches at some point this fall.

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