 Grand Theft Auto V was envisioned to improve the core mechanics of the Grand Theft Auto series by giving the player three lead protagonists to switch between . The team 's main motivation for including three protagonists was for Grand Theft Auto V to innovate game storytelling and to prevent the series from feeling stale by not evolving the core structure of the gameplay . Houser said , " We didn 't want to do the same thing over again " . The concept of having three interconnected protagonists was devised during the development of San Andreas , but the team felt they did not have the technical capabilities to realise it . Garbut explained , " It didn 't work from a tech point of view because the three characters need three times as much memory , three types of animation , and so on " . After the release of Grand Theft Auto IV , the team developed episodic content packages , The Lost and Damned and The Ballad of Gay Tony ( both 2009 ) , each of which introduced a new protagonist . The three interwoven stories had a positive critical reception and confirmed the team 's confidence that building Grand Theft Auto V around this model was an innovative decision . 
