Dan Houser, vice president of Rockstar Games has explained the reason behind not having a multiplayer co-op story mode and also spoke about cameos from previous characters of the Grand Theft Auto series.
"It would be impossible to do that and keep the level of precision we've got in this. You could make a great co-op game, but we felt that we're doing other bits of our multiplayer that will fulfill those desires in ways we think are very fun," said Houser in an interview to IGN.
When asked if there will be characters fromGrand Theft Auto 4, he replied, "Packie's not in it. There may be the odd... They tend to be very small. The problem is that... You touched on this earlier. Because of a lot of the choices... We've never had a game where we've annihilated so much of the cast. I loved Roman, but he may or may not be dead depending on what choices you made. It would be difficult to bring him back," he said.
He was also asked if bank robberies matter in the new game. "To cut a long story short, we always felt like we had great feedback from these bank robberies when we hadn't really done them justice. In this game... We'll talk more about heists later on. But we wanted that to feel like robbery, but like a great thing... We wanted the act of robbery to be more fun," he explained.
"We wanted it to feel like GTA, but fresh. We offer you a good range of experiences...We wanted to have a couple of really strong bank robberies. It felt strong for that. It felt like that was a good device that we'd never used in the past. Repeating ourselves is a fear when we're doing games where part of the evolution is just technological," Houser said.
The game is slated for a Spring 2013 release for PlayStation and Xbox 360. Rockstar Games is considering releasing the game for PC and Wii U.