No online play for GTA San Andreas

Rockstar North's Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas will not feature any online play when it launches on PlayStation 2 later this year, according to Rockstar creative director Dan Houser, who claims that it would be "impossible" to implement GTA online.

Speaking in an interview with Dutch games magazine Power Unlimited, Houser categorically stated that "San Andreas will not be online," going on to explain that "we would have to sacrifice too much for it."

"We have a lot of script writers working on GTA, and they use so many scenarios to build the story - it's impossible to do that in an online game, that problem has not been solved," he explained.

The lack of an online mode in the PS2 version almost certainly also rules out the possibility of online play in the Xbox and PC versions which will probably appear at some point in 2005 (although Rockstar has not as yet confirmed the existence of anything other than the PS2 SKU).

However, Houser would not rule out the possibility of the GTA franchise moving online at some point in the future - and admitted that the company has already looked into the possibilities presented by online play.

"We are thinking about it," he confessed, "but it's simply better to do the things we want to see in GTA in a single-player game. I'm not saying that online games aren't fun, but I do believe that online games are not yet ready for the immersive gameplay that GTA has to offer."