Almost nine years after the game launched, GTA 5 arrives on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S this week. In fact, some parts of the world will be able to fire up next-gen GTA 5 and GTA Online for the first time later today. Some features and upgrades the game will include will remain a mystery until players actually get a chance to dive in. However, a note spotted on Rockstar's support page has given some of those players reason to believe they might not be able to dive in at all.
At least not with everything they have in-game right now. Players will be able to migrate their saves across to the Enhanced & Expanded version of GTA Online, but there are some caveats. Your save can only be migrated once, and if your account has been banned or suspended, migration will not be possible. That should be a given. However, you also won't be able to bring your GTA Online life with you to new consoles if you've been cheating.
“Illegitimate progress was detected on the GTA Online profile and will not be eligible for migration,” is Rockstar's exact wording. That has naturally got players planning on making the jump a little worried. Since no specifics are mentioned, Rockstar could be scanning for any cheat or exploit that has ever been used previously. If you have ever duplicated a car or cheated to inflate the size of your net worth in Los Santos, then you may be forced to start from scratch when firing up the upgrade.
If you are blocked from migrating your save to the new version of GTA 5 but you're not sure why, it's definitely worth your time to query it. Especially when it's unclear what exactly Rockstar will be on the lookout for. It's also a little frustrating that there's no way of knowing if your save will migrate until after you have picked up an E&E version of the game. On the bright side, GTA Online is free to all PS Plus subscribers for the next three months, so you can find out if the cheating you've been doing is deemed to be illegitimate by Rockstar without losing any money.
GTA's next-gen upgrade launches on March 15, and it promises to improve a lot about the game many of you have been playing for almost a decade. Not just visual enhancements but also denser traffic and NPC population and faster load times, something GTA 5 has been in dire need of for a very long time.