Ahead of the GTA 5 PC update, Rockstar is quietly working on Bully

As the new version of Grand Theft Auto 5 heads to PC, and we await GTA 6, Rockstar is seemingly overhauling its overlooked classic, Bully.

In the pantheon of ‘games we would all like but we might never get,’ Bully 2 is up there now with Half-Life 3, Sleeping Dogs 2, and a new Titanfall. Originally released back in 2006, Bully takes the fundamental GTA formula and ages it down. Instead of a hardened career criminal, you’re tearaway schoolboy Jimmy Hopkins. Rather than robbing banks, you’re dropping cherry bombs in the faculty toilet. Funny, feisty, and with a great soundtrack by Shawn Lee, with Rockstar now focused on Grand Theft Auto 6, Bully’s return seems less likely than ever. But it hasn’t been forgotten completely. An updated version of GTA 5 is coming to PC, and it seems Rockstar may be preparing something Bully related at the same time.

The Grand Theft Auto 6 release date is drawing closer and Rockstar, naturally, has its hands full. The new open-world game takes us back to Vice City, and seemingly brings to a close the sweeping narrative that began all those years ago with GTA 4. But Grand Theft Auto 5 is still getting some love. As we reported previously, Rockstar says that features that were previously exclusive to the current-gen-console versions of GTA 5 will be coming soon to PC. These include improved visuals and ray tracing, new cars – and, possibly, GTA+, Rockstar’s own subscription service which gives you a range of benefits in Grand Theft Auto 5, and also includes access to the studio’s back catalogue.

LA Noire, Red Dead Redemption, GTA Definitive Edition, and the Liberty City Stories and Chinatown Wars spinoffs are all included with a GTA+ subscription. So is Bully. With that in mind, it seems Rockstar is making some overhauls to the PC version of its scholastic sandbox game.

As spotted by stalwart Rockstar sleuth ‘TezFunz2,’ over on SteamDB, the Scholarship Edition of Bully has just been updated with a new developmental branch called ‘qabeta.’ It’s protected by a password, but there is a new build ID, suggesting, perhaps, that a fresh version of Bully is being shared with testers.

Potentially, Rockstar could be ironing out bugs, flaws, or other imperfections in Bully before launching GTA+ for PC – before it goes live for a new batch of subscribers, Rockstar wants the PC edition of Bully to be in the best shape possible.

We’ll see what happens when that new version of GTA 5 arrives. In the meantime, check out some of the other best crime games, or maybe the best upcoming PC games on their way to you.

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