A former animator from Rockstar Games recently revealed some details about the development of Grand Theft Auto 5. Mike York decided to talk about the first-person mode.
The creator explained that even adding things to the game that seem like a "small thing" can result in many problems:
When working on GTA 5, we added first-person mode. And I remember that we added it at the very late stage of the project, when the game was almost finished. It seemed that adding this viewing mode to the game was a trifle, but when we did it, it spawned thousands, literally thousands of bugs [errors]
The problem was that the Grand Theft Auto franchise games were originally created for a third-person view, and now the developers needed to somehow put the camera in the hero's head. In addition, new animations were required for each weapon, interaction with the environment (previously, many things were not intended for close viewing):
The head moves very actively, and when this movement is displayed on the screen, it is very annoying and looks very, very, very bad
As a result, the authors of GTA 5 were able to cope with the task, giving gamers a new gaming experience.