GTA 5 Was Supposed to Feature Climbing Mechanics, but They Were Removed

Rockstar Games seriously considered adding a mechanic to Grand Theft Auto 5 that would allow players to explore the city from above by climbing rooftops. Traces of it even remained in the game’s code, but unfortunately, the feature was removed.

Blogger Lucas7yoshi_RS discovered markers in the game files indicating where players could have climbed walls, pipes, lampposts, and other objects. The mechanic was called Handholds, and its functionality could be explored by opening the file handholds.xml, which survived in the game. For this same reason, some oddly positioned buildings and structures exist in GTA 5’s world, such as groups of lampposts that were used to test the feature.

It’s unclear why the developers decided not to implement it. However, dataminer also found other interesting details in the code: for example, some NPCs were programmed to react differently to different characters. While homeless NPCs might insult Michael and Franklin or ask them for change, with Trevor they prefer to just greet him.

Recently, Rockstar also released updated sales data for GTA 5.