For close to eight years, Grand Theft Auto 5‘s Mile High Club has remained unfinished. The skyscraper’s skeletal structure looms over the Pillbox South Station of Los Santos Transit, and it’ll likely stay that way for a while longer. While GTA Online has seen the Diamond Casino open its doors and Cayo Perico become a far-off destination for robbers, GTA 5’s offline offering has mostly remained untouched. It’s a scenario that begs the attention of modders.
One group of players have banded together to complete the Mile High Club’s construction, and it’s clear they have big ideas. The project’s lead architect, Kalit, tells me that it all started as a small side project meant to help them grow familiar with modelling environments for videogames. Close to a year later, though, and a completed version of the Mile High Club is now a slice of something much larger.
Rags and Riches is a piece of fan-made DLC that fleshes out the Mile High Club and Facade Theatre’s interiors and exteriors. The mod also features story missions that whisk you away to new locations that the team has stitched together. You can tackle those missions as Michael, Trevor, Franklin, or a version of yourself if you want a GTA Online-like experience. Plenty is being kept under wraps right now, though we know that new weapons and vehicles are also in the works. It’s currently available on Patreon, but a free version will be free when the mod is done.
Rags and Riches will also have an online component. Kalit tells us that the team is working on a FiveM version that’ll allow people to use Rags and Riches in their GTA RP sessions. The team hoped to have this ready for the end of February, though it will take a while longer.
Putting Rags and Riches together hasn’t been without its challenges, then. The team behind the mod boasts plenty of spirit and ambition, but placing buildings and characters you’ve created alongside Rockstar’s work is a tall order for anyone.
“The hardest part was trying to make this whole block area fit with the rest of the vanilla map,” Kalit explains. “The quality has to match the surrounding elements, and it should look and feel like something Rockstar would do.
“We had to redo a lot of stuff to make sure our work didn’t feel out of place on the map, so it’s not just modelling and texturing the models and the work is done. Some elements still do feel out of place, and that’s something we still have to put work into.”
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There’s no exact release date on this one, but, If you’d like to follow the mod’s progress, you can find a steady stream of updates and screenshots in The Ambitioneer’s Discord. You can also support the team on Patreon if you’d like to try Rags and Riches early.
