After over a year's worth of delays, petitions, and begging; Grand Theft Auto 5 finally arrived on PCs earlier this year. Despite the long wait, fans were happy to dive into Los Santos with more powerful machines and get to working modding the multiple Game of the Year award winner. Anyone who has ever used mods on a AAA game before should know that the hobby is always a bit of a risk and it sounds like Grand Theft Auto 5 users may be logging in to find some broken mods after the game's latest update.

Although Rockstar limits the capability of mods more than some other PC games, the community has still managed to develop some legendary aesthetic and gameplay changes ranging from grappling hooks to gravity guns. Unfortunately, the team at Rockstar doesn't have the capacity (or incentive) to test new patches against the many different modded versions of Grand Theft Auto 5. The latest patch unintentionally hits a few mods pretty hard and the creators may need to head back to drawing board to get them up and running again.

The recent patch was released to address recurring issues impacting the game's framerates. The problems started with the release of the Ill-Gotten Gains DLC and Rockstar has been working on a fix for the last weeks. The new patch addresses those issues, but Rockstar warns that certain mods will suffer some collateral damage...

"Our primary focus is on protecting GTA Online against modifications that could give players an unfair advantage, disrupt gameplay, or cause grieving (sic). However, as a reminder, mods are still unauthorized and as such, Title Updates may cause Story Mode mods to behave in unexpected ways because they are not supported or tested, and players run them at their own risk."

We haven't read any specific reports about which mods are broken after the patch, but we expect the community will put together a list before long. Although the patch will inevitably cause problems for some players, resolving the issue with the main game should definitely remain Rockstar's priority. The modding community is important to the PC scene, but it definitely only represents a small fraction of the gamers who are playing GTA5.

As the popularity of modding continues to grow, AAA developers will need to start developing new strategies to test patches in modded environments. It would be impossible to QA check against all of the hundreds of mods for popular games like GTA5, but at least ensuring that changes work well with the most popular mods seems like a good way to keep the community happy and growing. The paid mods in Skyrim attempted to add some quality control to the modding community, but that initiative crashed and burned. For now, developers are back to the drawing board.

Are you upset that some mods are no longer working or do you think these kind of problems come along with the modding territory? Let us know in the comments.

Grand Theft Auto 5 is available now for PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Xbox 360, Xbox One and PC.

Source: Rockstar