From embarking on daring heists to engaging in everyday mayhem,Grand Theft Auto Onlinehas no shortage of things for players to do. But a vibrant player community on a moddedGrand Theft Auto 5servercalled New Day RP is building something genuinely impressive: a fully functioning digital city.
Nearly a decade into its life,GTA Onlineremains popular on every platform, but the modding scene is one of its strongest today. Most roleplayers use a variety of mods, as New Day does with FiveM, in order to add new items, locations, scripts, events, and more to the game. New Day is far from the only roleplaying scene in the game, as plenty ofroleplayers have found success inGTA Onlineand have left a major impact on the culture surrounding the game, and all of them are impressive—New Day included. Game Rant recently spoke with Tiberione, owner of the New Day server, about his group’s culture and goals.
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On New Day, players can not only engage in crime both petty and grand, but they can buy stuffed animals from player-run shops. The possibilities are endless: players can go to player-run hospitals with a sickness, be first responders checking the scene of a car accident, or run for office in the server’s player-elected government.
As Tiberione explained, it’s interesting to see what players can come up with inGrand Theft Auto 5’s worldwhen given a “blank canvas.”
We have everything from restaurants and car dealerships to tarot card readers and interior designers. If you think of it, there’s probably a business for it. Toy shops, bars, entertainment companies, recording labels for people that make in-character music which then we play over the in-character radio, which is another business. There’s taxi companies. I mean, there’s so much.
It’s always really interesting to me to see what people want to put time into, and if you give people the blank canvas that they want and say ‘okay, well, we can put into some items for you come up with a business plan, show it to us, we’ll approve it, and we’ll get you some items.'
However, there is a certain culture to New Day as with all servers. Players shouldn’t expect to bust out Iron Man armor in New Day, as the server wants players to keep the experience grounded in the world ofGrand Theft Auto. That doesn’t mean, however, that there aren’t plenty ofGrand Theft Auto 5modsdesigned to support New Day. Tiberione works with a team of around 20 volunteer developers to provide everything from custom items, buildings, and decorations to new heists, script-based events, and more.
Of course, Tiberione said, the cops-and-robbers style of roleplay exists on the server as well. “It wouldn’t beGTARP without it, or evenGTAreally,” he said.
That RP is a lot more involved than cops shooting criminals, however. The various law enforcement communities on New Day arrest criminals, who then face the server’s player-run court system. Players participate as lawyers and judges, respectively arguing their cases and determining the consequences for criminal players who get caught. Those judges are appointed by the players in the San Andreas state government, of which Tiberione was once governor. That system was born in New Day’s equivalent inRed Dead Redemption 2 Online’s roleplay scene, Wild West.
[It’s] not everybody’s cup of tea is to be in an elected in-character government. But it was a much better way than having the judges write the laws, which is typically how roleplay communities do it, or like out-of-character the staff just do it. This way, you can go to your elected representative and go, ‘I think this should be illegal’ or ‘I think that we should pass funding for this or this, that and the other.’ I think we’ve passed like 230 laws that the roleplayers have been elected and then wrote, and then the governor signed.
Tiberione, in his daily life, is an aviation specialist, so helped develop the much-needed safety guidelines for the in-universe equivalent to the Federal Aviation Administration known as the San Andreas Flight Authority. Though, he emphasized, the server doesn’t expect people to be experts in what they do in-game. As alawyer inGrand Theft Auto, he relies on Google to be his paralegal. The combination of those two factors helps give the world a sense of realism, but also of fun and adventure, he explained.
Not everybody gets to be a lawyer in real life. I’ll never be a lawyer, but in a roleplay community, it’s an opportunity that I get. I’m not a good lawyer. I mean, I’m a Google lawyer to look up amendments. I’m from Canada, I don’t even know what the Constitution is in the US! I have to look it up. But it’s getting to form arguments, to be a police officer and enforce the law, which are these things that I’d never get the opportunity to do in real life.
New Day is open to new players every few months, with the next application window coming in April. People interested in whatNew Day has to offer can check their website for information. New Day also keeps a detailed calendar of upcoming player-run events, store openings, and more that has something going on every day.
Grand Theft Auto Onlineis available now for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
