Story details for Grand Theft Auto 5‘s canceled story DLC have emerged, and it sounds like it would have leaned into the espionage genre with perhaps the last character anyone would have expected: Trevor. It has long been known that single-player story DLC for the game was in the works, much like GTA 4‘s The Lost and the Damned and The Ballad of Gay Tony, and Red Dead Redemption‘s Undead Nightmare before it, but with the monumental success of GTA Online, which launched a month after GTA 5 and made over $500 million in microtransactions alone by 2016, and development of the massively detailed Red Dead Redemption 2, Rockstar’s priorities changed, resulting in the DLC’s cancelation.
As part of a stream on Michael De Santa actor Ned Luke’s YouTube, Steven Ogg, who portrayed Trevor Philips revealed the plans for an Agent Trevor DLC, which would have seen Trevor working undercover with the FIB, and it sounds like a ridiculously fun storyline for the character that would have taken inspiration from Moonraker as part of its grand finale, seeing Trevor venture into space.
According to Ogg, performance capture had already begun for “James Bond Trevor“, in which he would have retained some of his character’s more chaotic characteristics while “doing his best to pretend to be like [a secret agent]” but “then it just disappeared and [Rockstar] never did it, they never followed up on it.”
As shared by dataminers back in 2019, Agent Trevor was one of three planned single-player DLCs for GTA 5. These all would have seemingly focused on another major genre, with an Undead Nightmare-esque zombie apocalypse, and a full-scale alien invasion wreaking havoc across Los Santos. Rockstar had plans to redesign 80 or 90 percent of the map to fit each specific theme, which makes sense considering the destruction that these world-ending events would have brought about, but also likely would have required a lot of work to pull off.
GTA Online did go on to have its own story chapters of its own involving some returning characters from GTA 5. These included The Contract, which saw the return of one of GTA 5‘s protagonists, Franklin, as he set up a “celebrity solutions agency” catering to the Vinewood elite and worked with Dr Dre, and The Last Dose, which saw Michael’s former therapist, Dr. Friedlander return as a drug lord, regardless of the choices players made regarding his fate in GTA 5. Content from the canceled story DLC was also adapted for some of GTA Online’s heists: Doomsday and Diamond Casino. The Doomsday heist in particular borrowed elements from Agent Trevor, as confirmed by a script highlighting the AI neural network Clifford as a featured character.
While there’s no denying that GTA Online was incredibly successful, it is still a far cry from the single-player story content many players were hoping for, in which they could play as Grand Theft Auto 5‘s trio of protagonists again and see the next chapter of their stories unfold. It’s a shame Rockstar opted to cancel the three planned DLCs, as while they likely would have been deemed non-canon like Red Dead Redemption‘s Undead Nightmare, they still sounded like extremely enjoyable storylines with their genre twists offering an experience different from that of the base game.
Source: Ned Luke/YouTube