After nearly a decade,Grand Theft Auto Onlineremains a powerhouse in the online gaming space. This is in no small part thanks to the vibrant roleplaying scene in the game, which has brought renewed attention to Rockstar’s multiplayer experience in recent years.
Communities like NoPixel, Twitch RP, GTA World, and more contribute to that spotlight. They also accomplish amazing things with an aging game engine that was never designed with them in mind, stretching whatGTA Onlineis capable of far beyond its limitations. Game Rant sat down with the founder of these communities, Tiberione of New Day RP, to explore just what is possible in these modified servers, where the server has come from and where it can go, and what he hopes for Rockstar’s next cops-and-robbers title.The following interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Q: How did New Day RP get its start?
Prior to New Day RP, and still today, the same group of management owned a community called Wild West RP. So that’s aRed Dead, right? We started that back in 2019, and then fast-forward to 2021, we decided to branch intoGTAbecause that’s sort of where we’d all come from:GTAroleplayprior toRed Dead. Now, they are sister communities. They run alongside each other.
Q: So how did yourRed Deadcommunity get its start?
So, back in October 2019, they announced thePC release date forRed Dead 2. I had been in limbo between communities and thought it would be a good idea to start one. I had known some people from a priorGTAcommunity, and we got together, found a good name, and put ourselves out there.
We ended up being one of the first ones to launch in that space, but it was just a group of us that decided we really wanted to try it. Weloved the game,Red Dead Redemption 2, and we really wanted to try out what was kind of a new form of roleplay at the time becauseGTAroleplay had been around for a long time. There’s likeARMAroleplay before that. But they’re all sort of modern roleplay games, whereas there really wasn’t much for the wild west setting.
It was a unique opportunity to do something a little different in a different time period, and that’s why it sort of works well. When we decided to open up theGTAserver, we kind of offered both an 1899 experience and a 2023 experience, depending on what you’re looking for on any given day. We have a lot of cross users. We like people that play on both. But yeah, it was a unique opportunity to do something in a space that wasn’t built up at the time. And yeah, we wanted to take on the challenge.
Q: What made you choose the name New Day for your RP group?
I think we spent like two weeks just finding names. We decided we wanted to do the project, and we had started building it before we had a name for it. At the time, we were just calling it Wild West GTA. But we had decided we were going to open up a thread and pour names in, and we’d all kind of look at them and go ‘yea or nay.’ It seems that picking a name was the hardest part. Is this the name to use? Can you find a domain for it? What’s the meaning behind it? Is this too corny? Is it too close toWild West?
I think one day we just sort of were looking for domain names and typed in New Day RP. Yeah, it was available. We went, ‘okay, what can we do for a design and what we can do for a theme around that?’ And we just ended up liking it. I mean, it was like two weeks of trying to pick a name, so eventually, we just had to pick something. We really liked where that went with New Day, and we sort of branded around like this, you know, sunrise on a beach theming for our logo, and our website has a sunrise on it. It just kind of worked out in branding to be this new thing, like a fresh breath of air.
Q: What are some goals that you have for New Day?
We wanted to focus on a few things. The big thing that I think matters the most to our players is we wanted to focus on serious roleplay. Whereas if you go to some of the communities, depending on where you go, a lot of the FiveM landscape right now is more of a semi-serious roleplay, There’s the supernatural or people taking gigantic jumps in their character and it’s cool in its content, but it’s not necessarily an immersive experience if that’s what you’re looking for.
That was the people that we had geared toward getting into the community. We focused a lot on civilian RP and, you know, business RP. I mean, I think we have 300 businesses or something? People get on the server, and they sell items at a restaurant, they sell cars to people, they do graphic design, or whatever. I mean, there’s such a huge variety. We really focused on our civ content and the serious roleplay that comes with that, instead of solely just focusing onthe cop and criminal element, which is where a lot of roleplay servers invest a lot of their time. And we sort of wanted to do it the other way.
The other thing is, we wanted to make sure everybody was treated fairly. I mean, that’s the thing that is unfortunate in the FiveM community right now. There are a lot of people, a lot of servers that will sell you stuff. You can buy priority access to their community, or you can buy cars, skins, or whatever, and we didn’t really want to make it a business. People donate to the community to help us keep running, but we don’t provide anything for it. I think that was unique in the area that we’re in now. We wanted to focus on sort of fairness to everybody and hopefully capturing a lot of good roleplayers that may have been left behind in other communities because people who were really popular would get priority access or whatever.
It’s just a different philosophy from what we’ve seen in other communities because we all came fromGTAoriginally, and we took everything that we didn’t like about it and said, ‘Okay, we’re just going to do it differently because we’ve been in the environment for so long.’ You know, seeing what worked and what didn’t. It gave us a good opportunity to have a fresh start with what we thought was the better way to go about it.
Q: You mentioned FiveM. What is that?
FiveM is just amodification forGTA 5, where you can install the client and join custom servers that have custom assets; all sorts of different things that you can’t do with just joining aGTA OnlineServer. On our server, we have tons of custom scripts like banking, cell phones, jobs, or crime mechanics, whatever it may be. Custom interiors, custom buildings, stuff like that. You can’t get that on aGTA Onlineserver, so it’s just a way for you to connect to a private server in the long and short of it.
Q: What makesGTA Onlinea great game for roleplaying?
Originally, I came fromARMAa long time ago.ARMAandGTA, both have that you could create a player model, you can drive a vehicle, and there are places you can go to, but you don’t really have an ambient environment inARMA.GTAis very much a city environment. There are, we call them locals, NPCs in the game that drive around the city and provide life. Even though you can’t necessarily roleplay back and forth with them because they’re not going to say anything back to you, they provide the sort of ambient environment that makes it feel more alive, more like a real city.
I mean,GTAjust provides a ton of customizationin terms of what you can do. If it can be done in a script, then we can make it happen. A lot of our time is spent making new jobs or making new mechanics, and the platform beingGTAprovides a lot of the built-in stuff that we need to make that happen. It’s just fantastic. It’s the only game out there that’s as supportive of the mod community as they are. We have FiveM, which is great, and the best in terms of how it runs and what’s available. There’s nothing really likeGTA 5.
Q: What are some of the challengesGTA Onlinepresents as a medium for roleplay?
It’s certainly starting to show its age a little bit. We try to keep new content flowing in through our own development and the development that we have provided by the wider FiveM community, butGTA 5is quite old. It’s coming up on 10 years old this October, and it’s a little out of date that way, even though they’ve done stuff to spruce it up.
Other than that, it’s just a lot of learning how to work with the environment and learning what the limitations are. Every environment that you’re going to work in is going to have different limitations in terms of how many interiors you can load, how many textures you can put on a client, or whatever the case may be. But you know, from running a server environment, you just have to understand that it’s a really awesome platform that you can do a ton with, but you can’t do everything that you want with it just because some stuff isn’t supported. This game wasn’t built with roleplay in mind.
Rockstar obviously doesn’t build the game for roleplay, and they want people to playGTA Onlineso they don’t officially support these sorts of mod clients. But, given the fact that it’s not built for roleplay, I think that we’ve managed to tap into what exists pretty well, to sort of create the world that we want to create.
Q: Though the game is not designed with role-playing in mind, do you feel like Rockstar supports the roleplaying community that it’s developed?
I think that, if Rockstar wanted to, they could put their foot down and shut it down. I mean, I’m sure that Take-Two, if they wanted to, could code in ways to disable the FiveM client or make it so that it’s impossible to use. But, they have gone with more of a passive approach. They don’t support it, but they don’t necessarily stop you from doing it.
They have released policies in recent monthsin regard to what you can sell for real money. For example, you can’t sell in-game assets, and you can’t add like a real brand into your server. Like I can’t add a Mercedes-branded car into my server, because then it’s on theGTAframework. So they put out a framework that says well, we don’t really support the mod community, but we know that a lot of people do it. I mean, there are probably 200,000 people on FiveM right now. That’s more than double the Steam count for average players. I think Rockstar allows them to do it because it’s good for exposure toGTA. People still see the game for what it is, that it’s being played 10 years after release, people might watch it on a stream, and go playGTA Online. And so they haven’t stopped us.
I appreciate that because this community is a big thing for a lot of us. Certainly the roleplay environment as a whole. I’m glad they don’t do anything to stop us, and they’ve started to put out a framework that says, ‘well, we don’t necessarily support what you’re doing. But if we’re going to do it, here are some guidelines.’
Q: You’ve talked about howGTA Onlineis showing its age, what are your hopes forGTA 6, with its inevitable online mode?
To be honest with you, I really hope they put some more effort into doing single-player DLC from a personal standpoint.
But in terms of what we’re looking for inGTA 6online? Natively,GTA Onlineonly supports up to 32 players. The way FiveM gets more than 32 players is they do some stuff with the network code in the back end. It’s not great. It works, but there are a lot of caveats to that. Sometimes people don’t look right, there is certain data that doesn’t transfer to every client in the area, and so you might not see people correctly or see what they’re doing correctly. We run into a lot of those issues because we have 400 players on at our peak hours. Even though the game is only designed for 32, they’ve managed to make it so you can add a lot more. I hope thatGTA 6 Onlinenatively will support some more, which will be good for us.
I hope that they don’t go intoGTA 6with a hostile-to-the-modded-environment mindset. I understand the business value—you don’t want people to go play modded servers, because they’re not playingGTA Online. They’re not buying shark cards, they’re not providing revenue for the company, even though they’re playing their game. But I hope that they see the value in the exposure that the roleplay communities bring and aren’t hostile towards that in the way that they develop the game.
I’m really excited aboutGTA 6. I’ve seen some of the clips that people posted on Twitter from a leak a little while ago, and I’m really excited about some of the technology that they’ve put into it. Especially with what they did withRed Dead Redemption 2, that game, functionally, is in many, many, many aspects better thanGTA. I mean, it makes sense. It’s six years older. But I think that carrying forward those improvements into theGTAenvironment will be fantastic. I hope that we get to see it in the next couple of years.
I know there’s been a lot of rumor mills swirling about it, but I’m really hopeful for whatGTA 6is going to be. I think, from what I understand, they’re going back to Vice City? AndVice Citywas one of my favoriteGTAgames. I know a lot of people feel similarly, so I’m excited that we get to go back to that, to that location and a new generation game.
Q:Vice Cityis well-loved.
Yeah, it was such a fantastic game. And, from a roleplay perspective, there are so many opportunities with what we can do.
GTA 5is showing its age. The roleplay has been in the city of Los Santos, orthe state of San Andreas, for six or seven years now since roleplaying really took off inGTA. You can only roleplay in the same environment for so long before it gets stale. We do as much as we can to freshen that up. We add interiors, we make edits to the map where we can, but still the same city. I know the city by heart at this point.
I think that providing a new environment, a new map that people don’t know, in a new state with a different sort of vibe to it will provide a good opportunity for really fresh roleplay, and we’ll find that when we go toGTA 6, the quality of roleplay will go up significantly because everything will be new to people. It won’t be the same stuff that they’ve done for years. I think that there’s a really good opportunity in the RP aspect of people being exposed to this new environment and getting to come up with new roleplay stories that are kind of in tune with that.
Q: Speaking of the kinds of roleplay opportunities inGTA, how do you help spur interaction and character narratives with one another through gameplay?
There are a lot of ways that we can sort of pull levers, let’s say, to encourage people to do different things in roleplay. Whether that’s doing events we run as a staff team, which we do here and there, or it’s putting in new locations or new mechanics that provide a different sort ofroleplay environment. We do updates over time.
We have probably 15 to 20 developers, in terms of interiors, clothing, assets, and scripting in total, that are all volunteers. We do work with other development groups that work with us on the side. If you add in a new heist, for example, it’s a new environment, it’s new mechanics, they need new items, it just freshens things up a little bit. You can direct how you hope the roleplay will go by determining how they’re going to do that, what items they need, how they’re going to make the C4 charge to put on the vault, or whatever the case may be.
The other thing is, we have a lot of people: thousands in any given two-month time span, 400 active in our peak hours. We provide a lot of support for our business communities, so if people want a custom item—it could be a food recipe that’s unique to their business, it could be a plushy that they can hold like a teddy bear—we work with them to put them into the game, so they could run their business. They could sell things to people. Go around, do advertising, and create roleplay through these items that they have imported for them, which creates whole secondary markets in the in-game economy. It’s really interesting to see what adding those kinds of things will bring to the community.
There’s a lot that we do to sort of pull levers and encourage people to roleplay at the end of the day, but we are not hovering over people and expecting them to do whatever. We just work where we can to facilitate the quality of roleplay and encourage that.
Q: You’ve mentioned the business community. What is the in-character, in-game culture like?
We have something like 300 businesses when I checked last? That’s active businesses, which is a lot. It really depends on what you’re looking for. In-game, we have a directory of businesses you can look at on a map. It’s Google Maps, and most of that has pins where the businesses are, and if they’re online, there’s a phone directory. You can give them a call, say, ‘Hey, I’m coming there.’ 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, and recording labels for people that make in-character music which then we play over the in-character radio, which is another business. There are 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, we’ll get you some items. Maybe we’ll get you a location in-game.’ Just giving them that opportunity without having to pay real money for it or whatever.
There’s no way we could do anything even remotely like that without the sort of support that we have from not only the business community themselves, but the people who work behind the scenes to run the cogs like the hamsters in the wheel, making sure that everybody can get what they needed and keeping that running smoothly. It’s fascinating how many different aspects there are in the business community.
Q: You mentioned heists, though, so there is still an element of the cops-and-robbers type gameplay?
Yeah, absolutely. It wouldn’t beGTARP without it or evenGTAreally. We do have quite a few criminal mechanics. You can grow, manufacture, and deal drugs. You could rob a convenience store, you could rob a vault at a security company, or you could rob a jewelry store. I mean, there are so many different facets to what you can do: everything from major crimes like big heists to petty crimes like smuggling incounterfeit Gucci clothes in a boxyou get from the port. It really depends on what you want to do as a criminal and what makes sense for your character.
On the cops side of that, we have three law enforcement departments: Los Santos Police Department, Blaine County, and the troopers. We also have a Marshal Service. so they all kind of work together to investigate not only the petty crimes where you have uniformed beat cops that are showing up to a store robbery, but more of the longer term like arsonists or serial killers who are leaving behind scenes and notes to describe what an officer might come across, a crumb trail on how to put together a story and investigation.
That culminates in a very active justice system, a Department of Justice, and courts. We have lawyers, prosecution and defense, and we have a courtroom we use quite often. If you get charged with a crime and plead not guilty, especially if it’s a big case, it goes to trial, and they introduce the evidence. It’s a really, really cool experience. Especially if you’ve never got to participate in it before, it’s really interesting, and it’s a lot of fun to participate in.
Q: What are community interactions like out-of-character?
The goal with roleplay is always what happens in character will stay in character. But if you’ve been in the roleplay environment, for any amount of time, you’ll know that’s not always the case. We just do our best to resolve those issues as they come up. There’s a lot of being the mediator between people when that kind of stuff happens, but for the most part, the interactions are great and we get a lot of positive feedback. We have an RP appreciation channel where people can go in there after they’ve done the roleplay session, tag people that just roleplayed with, talk about the interaction that they had, and give them kudos and stuff like that. I mean, that gets used tons and tons every day, which is fantastic.
I think that a little positive feedback goes a long way. You can assume somebody had a good time, but you never really know until they say something. It’s a great way for people to spread some good news in this world where it’s not always positive out-of-character. But I think that those are the channels really bring out the best in people.
Q: It sounds like you have a massive operation. What’s it like with so many strong personalities involved in your RP?
Yes, it can be difficult at times, but I’m really thankful. We have about 40 or 50 people that are part of our staff; administration, development, whatever team. In that group of people, we have people from all walks of life, all different cultures, and different countries around the planet; people who play civilians, people who play cops, and people who play criminals. And so, yes, it’s a lot to deal with different personalities, but you find that you have people who specialize in things that they’re really, really good at. They end up handling a lot of those things, and because we have that diversity in our staff team, we can really deal with things as they come up in the community.
It can certainly be hard at times. At the end of the day, when you have hundreds to thousands of people, everybody has an opinion. Not everybody’s going to agree, you just have to figure out what’s the best way forward, what’s a balanced approach to moving forward, listen to what people give you in feedback, and then sort of plot a course from there. And that’s what we attempt to do to the best of our ability. If we make this change, what’s going to happen? How will the community perceive it? How are they going to use it? What are our opportunities for rural play if we do this? What are our concerns? If we put this in? So it’s almost like SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis.
You want to think about it for a second and think about the fact that we have different facets of players in the community, how will they interact with it, and who’s benefiting. We want to make sure that we’re taking as balanced of an approach as we can, while respecting what our principles are, in terms of providing fair and serious roleplay.
Q: Are there any major events or plans for the community coming up?
A vast majority of our events are run by the community. We have this calendar of events, so community members can go and submit things there. They come up on a phone in-game, and you can see how much is going on. Not all these are big events, and not all these are huge things that are going on there. Maybe it’s a party. But you know, this is a great tool for our community to look and say, ‘Hey, I’m hopping in the game tonight, what’s going on? What can I go to?’ It’s a fantastic tool to get our community involved in things.
We do try to facilitate staff events. Like, for example, we did a big event called mutiny. It was this group of sort of blackhat hackers that, for the wrong reasons, basically drained the money out of the economy and people’s bank accounts. That was our justification for wiping people’s character information, all their money and their assets and stuff like that, because when we updated to our new framework, we had to wipe everything. We wanted to give a roleplay reason for doing so. In the months, two weeks leading up to the wipe, we started doing these in-character events where this group called Mutiny would come in, and from that, a lot of people spurred their own roleplay. That’s what we want to encourage. It’s good for us to host events and to do things that individual people might not necessarily be able to do, but it’s also really good for the community to take that and run in their own direction or just put on events because they want to. There’s never a dull moment.
Q: What’s a personal favorite RP story from your server?
I don’t know if I can narrow it down to one thing. I mean, I personally have been, I’ve been involved in a lot of really great roleplay over the time that I’ve been here. I’ve been everything from the chief of police to a judge to thegovernor of San Andreasat one point.
Q: Well, congratulations on your election.
Thank you.
Yeah, we have an elected form of government where people will go in-game and vote, and whoever they vote for ends up being the elected governor. We have state representatives. There are a lot of things that I’m probably missing because there’s just so much that goes on in such a big community, but that’s another thing that’s actually quite unique to our servers. We have an elected government that writes laws and passes laws and appoints judges and goes to events and does, you know, the governor of the state. As governor, I’m going to go to this business opening or whatever.
It’s a bureaucracy on a roleplay level, which probably doesn’t interest everybody. But when you get into talking to these people, it’s not the red tape that you would expect from the real-life government. I mean, I think we have enough of that in real life. It’s just a unique thing about the community. There have been so many times when I’ve been like, ‘wow, I’m really impressed with what people have come up with.’ That’s a huge benefit for me being able to play here. I mean, while I own the community, I also get to play in it.
Q: It’s amazing that you have an elected government.
Yeah, it’s really cool. I mean, we have political shenanigans. We started it in Wild West. Prior to that community, I loved the idea but thought it was never really going to work in aGTAenvironment. We did it inRed Dead’s Wild West, and it worked to my surprise, but to my pleasant surprise. I’m quite happy with that, so we brought it toGTA. Every four months, we have an election. Actually, I think we’re going into one next month, so people will register and it can be anybody in the community. They just register and they go campaign. We put in campaign buses for them, they can design a livery with their face on the side of it.
You know, 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. But this way, you can go to your elected representative and go like, ‘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. And that’s a really interesting process.
Q: Do you use your real expertise in any way in-character?
I work in aviation. I’m an aviation geek. I love it. I actually wrote our aviation law. We also have our version of the FAA in this community called the San Andreas Flight Authority. I ended up writing a lot of the regulations for them because I love aviation. That’s what I do in real life. And I am an avid role player, I have always loved it. I’ve been doing it for probably eight years now. I finally took the leap to own a community and that was a good thing, I think.
Q: What’s your character’s name?
My roleplay name is James Paxton. That’s what everybody knows me as in the community.
Q: What else would you like to share about New Day?
Honestly, I feel like I’ve rambled a lot here, and I’ve probably ended up covering a lot of it. I’d just say, overall, if you’re looking for whatever you’re looking for, as long as you’re looking for in a serious roleplay environment, you’re able to probably find it here. There are so many different facets of what you can do. I mean, like I said, you could be in elected government, you can be a lawyer, you can be a judge, you can be a cop, you can be a criminal, you can be a business owner, you can be just a civilian, you could do package delivery, or you could be a doctor.
We have a really advanced medical system here. I think we have probably one of the best in the world in terms of roleplay community medical systems. I can go into an ER and see a doctor and roleplay what my illness is, and they’ll do tests on me and they’ll do surgery if that’s what I need. If you get injured, you go to the hospital, and it really depends on what your comfort level is. If you provide them with a lot, they’ll give you a lot back. If you don’t know what you’re doing, just do the basics and they’re okay with that, too. But if you’re looking for something like that, they will absolutely provide it to you. Some of the best roleplayers I know are in the medical community.
Whatever you’re looking for is what you can find. That’s what I love about not just this community, right, but RP servers in general. 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 or 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.
It’s not real life. It’s fun. It’s not meant to be, you know, hyper-realistic. There is an element to having fun with it, as long as you’re taking it seriously. That’s all we ask. There’s so much that you can experience that you’d never be able to realize in the real world. I love roleplay for that reason.
[END]
Those interested in joining New Day can apply to be whitelistedon the group’s websiteduring application windows, the next of which is expected in April.
Grand Theft Auto Onlineis available now for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
