Grand Theft Auto V official trailer brings the drama

There's just something about a railgun in a video aimed at open-sandbox gameplay that gets the juices flowing in the morning. Today the folks at Rockstar Games have released "The Official Trailer" for Grand Theft Auto V – aka GTA 5. This trailer includes insight on each of the three storyline paths of the main characters of the game: Michael, Franklin, and Trevor.

This game is set to be released on multiple platforms at once later this year and follows up on one of the most well-known gaming franchises in recent history. Once the Grand Theft Auto universe expanded with an open play arena back with Grand Theft Auto III. This game was preceded by the top-down title Grand Theft Auto 2 and succeeded by the just-as-successful GTA IV: Vice City. With the release of Grand Theft Auto 5, things are about to get complicated.

Here you'll find the characters in turmoil, sliding in with a smooth film-quality soundtrack and starting in on the evil they'll have to accomplish by the time the first chapter begins. You'll find a new glimpse of the Submarine – affirming once again that you'll be going underwater in this game. You'll see a railgun – affirming your ability to destroy massive amounts of property, enemies, and innocent citizens at great speed.

You'll also see a minutes-worth of cinematic video interspersed with glimpses of how this game will be taking on the likes of Saints Row. That game was released in several iterations over the past couple of years with gameplay extremely similar to that of GTA, including elements like diving off of buildings – like you'll be able to here in GTA 5. We'll see soon how the two compare.

This game will be released on September 17th for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 and eventually for the PC – then we'll see how it fares on Xbox One and PlayStation 4 soon after.