The Liberty City Preservation Project is already on the verge of collapse after only a few weeks of public attention.
The mod team World Travel has been working on the Liberty City Preservation Project for a good seven years. This mod was supposed to make the entire game world of GTA 4 playable in GTA 5, along with graphical improvements. In mid-December 2024, the project went public with a trailer, but a short time later Rockstar Games put an end to it. The following YouTube video shows what Liberty City would have looked like in GTA 5:
“Great to visit, even better to leave”
On the official Discord server of World Travel, user nkjellman announced on the evening of January 15, 2025:
Due to the unexpected attention our project has received and after consulting with Rockstar Games, we have decided to discontinue the Liberty City Preservation Project. We appreciate all the support the project has received and look forward to pursuing our passion for modding the GTA series.
In another post, however, nkjellman clarified that Rockstar Games and publisher Take-Two Interactive have not taken any legal action against the modding team. Both sides had agreed to a settlement and there was “no bad blood” between the parties.
He also warned against downloading the mod, as it can only come from unofficial sources and thus contain malware.
Not the first end of a Liberty City mod: In 2017, there was already an attempt to integrate the map from GTA 4 as a mod in GTA 5, and this also failed because of Rockstar Games.
Although the modders at the time claimed to have followed all guidelines, the project was banned by Rockstar in the year of its planned release.
So far, 2025 is not a good year for ambitious community projects. Just a few days ago, Steam put a Counter-Strike mod on hold that fans had been working on for a good eight years. Instead of an agreement, however, the Classic Offensive team only received an automated message without any explanation as to why their mod may not be published.
