You just can't keep a good, human trafficking, murderous eastern-European killing machine down.
Niko is among one of the few Rockstar mainstays players can select as a parent to influence the physical appearance of their online characters. But evidently, that wasn't enough for "Raymnd."
"After a few hours of research," the talented modder figured out how to take GTA IV's accent heavy protagonist out of Liberty City, and place him right over the mid-life crisis Michael in sunny Los Santos, and shared his work with the rest of the Se7enSins community.
Maybe now we'll finally see who would win in an all out brawl, Niko or Trevor. Now that would make for an interesting scrap. Then again, Niko worked with The Losts' Johnny, and we all know how that turned out...
Any who, Raymnd says this particular mod is a "'disk2/common'-only mod (should work on both JTAG-consoles and Burned ISO). no other files were changed." I don't know exactly what that means, but maybe some of you out there can make heads or tails of it.
Describing his methods, Raymnd wrote, "Basically, what i did was; clone the 'player-models' package, remove Michael and tell the game to load the cloned file from a different location. Next i cloned the Niko files from the online package, renamed the files and told the game to load the new Niko package after the cloned 'player-models' package. One disadvantage is the way the cloned files are loaded from disk to memory, they were in the content folder on hdd1 before; meaning it will use a 100mb more there."
It's a mod for the game's campaign mode only, and is purely aesthetic. Anytime Niko opens his mouth, you'll still hear Michael's voice pouring out.
For anyone looking to replicate Raymnd's feat, keep in mind that you'll need the collector's edition in order to do so, as that's the only version of the game that lets players pick Niko as a genetic influence.
If this is possible on a console, I'd be eager to see what Raymnd and others are capable of once Rockstar releases a PC version for Grand Theft Auto V. The company hasn't said anything on the matter, but it seems likely enough that a version is on the way.