I first started playing on this server in 2008 and stopped playing RolePlay entirely around mid-2013, so apologies in advance if I’m bringing up anything too familiar. Today I suddenly remembered LS-RP and checked online to see whether the project still exists, since the last thing I heard was that it had been revived on the GTA V engine. Now I’m surprised to see the server has actually taken a step back and returned to GTA SA.
I understand the possible reasons for that choice: the difficulty of competing with well-established projects on the newer scene (and their conflicting interpretations of what RolePlay even is, which ultimately drew new players away from LS-RP), the smaller and more compact map that suits a reduced player base, and the advantage of being the only project still running on the SA engine. Even so, the decision still feels off to me. Maybe I’m wrong, or maybe I’m repeating something the LS-RP admins dissected years ago, but if the staff are still investing time into something this ambitious, why not merge both ideas? By that I mean using the V engine with the SA map and then improving the map where needed: upgrading or replacing textures, smoothing out blocky geometry, fixing sharp street edges that would conflict with V’s physics. That would only be the starting point to bring the map to a playable state, but the potential for what the original Los Santos could become on the V engine is hard to overstate. It could reignite ambition among the old remaining peeps and attract new players through the project’s visible results.
I know this post might come off as an attempt at lecturing the powers that be (yet another rant from a typical “ideas guy” who doesn’t grasp the scale of what he's proposing), but does it really sound this far-fetched? I’ve already seen the original SA map converted into V. Sure, it lacks interiors, proper object lighting, and contains static, buggy objects, but those are fixable issues (whether that work would be harder or easier on the V engine today, with modern tools and the dynamics of today's internet, I’m not entirely certain)
Regardless of anything, in my opinion, setting aside the fact that LS-RP emerged near the end of the MMORPG era - when those games still made as much sense as they did, because social media didn’t exist in their current form - I believe the scale of the LS map is the fundamental reason why RP worked at all.
