With how disappointing the latest sequels of famous franchises had been during this first half of the 2020s (except resident evil, yay) I expect GTA to fall a bit short as well…
Like, it’s going to be a good game but it won’t blew anyone away. Also probably is going to be the buggiest GTA at launch. That’s the trend in big games now.
It’s arguably the most anticipated game of all time so the expectations are enormous and you can see in this very thread that people are already voicing nagativity and assuming the worst despite it hasn’t even released yet or the devs given any reason to doubt them (GTA5 was great, RDR2 was absolutely epic).
So it will likely not live up to the hype, but I for one will ignore other people’s butthurt, book at least 2 weeks of PTO at work and enjoy the game.
the devs given any reason to doubt them
I agree that it’s super early for much speculation, but Dan Houser and a few other key players left Rockstar after RDR2. He and Michael Unsworth (who I think also left the studio with Dan) were two-thirds of the GTA 5 and RDR2 writing team. Without their involvement, I fear a scenario where the core single-player narrative has less gravitas, around which much of the detail and realism of the gameplay and game world has previously resolved, and the company leans more into the success of its GTA Online style gameplay.
I’m sure they can still be wildly successful with that formula, but it will be a huge disappointment for me personally.
I think they both still worked on gta 6 though. It’ll probably take until red dead 3 or gta 7 before we really see the impact of them leaving.
That’d be great if it was true but there have been rumors that development largely reset when they left. Guess we’ll have to wait until they release credits to know for sure.
I kind of imagine it will be the same thing every rockstar game has become. Some pretty ok story with every mission just devolving into a shooting gallery.
GTA games always were a series of glorified fetch quests.
Do people really expect it to be anything other than just more GTA? The bar doesn’t seem to be set that high.
The problem is what the “just more GTA” is.
If you are going by titles, GTA 6 is expected to have a reasonably deep single player storyline filled with cultural references. This is what everyone is hoping for.
If you are going by developer output, GTA 6 is expected to be a mainly online Skinner Box with a shiny new engine to replace the decade old current engine. This is not what people are hoping for.
If you are going by titles, GTA 6 is expected to have a reasonably deep single player storyline filled with cultural references.
The more recent trailer just seemed like them recreating events that happened in real life, and less being a mockery to create commentary on events of real life.
IMO this is the distinguishing difference I noticed from trailers of previous titles and this current one. Of course it was literally only a minute and 15 seconds of trailer, but it does just seem a little odd to me. Of course, when I wrote a small essay the only comments were “bro piss off it’s GTA” and “it’s GTA you’re reading too much into it.”
Most just don’t care. And many more have not played the earlier titles which were a little more brazen in their commentary due to the world these characters are living in – CJ as the experience of living in a poorer urban area surrounded by a wider richer city, where you have the dichotomy of what is happening in the story alongside the events on the radio (mostly the hosts reactions), or Niko as an immigrant in New York which brings a different perspective but keeps that thematic class separation while having some pretty decent social commentary.
GTA5 just doesn’t hit those marks IMO. Yes, there’s active class divide what with Trevor and Michael, but the storyline and the events of all 3 characters definitely have some emotional moments, IMO it just doesn’t hit the same points. Part of this I think is due to each of these characters almost acting as a sort of archetype, not necessarily of character but of game play. Michael is very much set for success, so you can easily progress. Franklin isn’t, and thus has to work for his status. And Trevor is the maniac who just blows shit up.
In terms of social commentary, there isn’t much that the game actually tries to say, IMO as a byproduct of their overemphasis of the heavily conservative and hyper-capitalist radio, which further is failed by Trevor and Michael being the most average Americans who are part of the problem. And while I like Franklin and his story, it’s ultimately just another story of someone in a bad spot trying to do better, and falling victim to how hard it is to get out. Which, yeah, that’s a decent and very real message, but it’s undermined by it all working out for him and owning a business – don’t worry y’all, crime pays as long as it’s with the right friends!
So, for me to see the trailer of GTA6 just literally recreating the events that happened in the real world, I sort of feel like the creative insanity where GTA allows us to see whacky shit that could never actually exist is highly diminished as a result of that. Again, it was under 2 minutes of footage and of course there’s plenty more.
I also personally think RDR2 is not fun and the hype around it is pretty much entirely manufactured as “it’s so good because it’s R* and the ultimate realism!”. Well, that “realism” made for shit gameplay for horses and boring fetch quests. It’s a beautiful game, it’s got a great story, it is not a good game because of that. That’s not to say it is terrible through and through and never has fun moments, I just personally was more frustrated with the game than I was enthralled with it for a majority of my time playing it. Shooting is nice though.
I must also say, I’ve never been a particularly die-hard fan of GTA or R*. I grew up playing their games at friends houses, so they’re really nostalgic to me. RDR and RD1 were great for their time, Revolver still holds up pretty well today through emulation. Slow for sure, but it holds up. GTAIV was my first real experience at open-world sandbox games, and while I enjoyed my time with it, it definitely is not my sort of game for long-term enjoyment. I can only play the story so many times and then get bored just driving around like a maniac. The best part of IV’s replayability is the physics, which seemed to have been drastically scaled back for GTA 5.
And I haven’t even gotten into what GTA:O has done, so I don’t have high expectations. I think your assumption of the developer output perspective is likely very apt. GTA5 came out in 2013, 11 years ago. It will likely be on 4 generations of consoles, unless they choose to only sell GTA6 for the PS6 and Xbox1920.
There is no way that their focus is on a long term single player experience. There’s just no way.
“just GTA” usually meant setting a standard in the sand box - open world genre. Rockstar are the best at doing that.
I doubt it, but when does anything live up to the hype?
I reckon it’ll be a decent game, but the multiplayer will likely be worse than GTA 5 as they try more things to get our money and fewer things to entertain us.
RDR2 surpassed it’s hype actually. Look it up the comments in the trailers.
My theory is that this game has been built up for so long that the entire company is riding on this, yet there is no way that this game can ever hit the needed expectations to make it worth it in the eyes of investors. So I think GTA 6 is going to sink the company because they out capitalismed themselves.
Which is why they’ve been dragging their feet on releasing it.
What I’ve heard is that Rockstar’s games have amazing trailers with less-amazing gameplay. I think it’s quite likely that it’ll be the same this time.
I don’t know much about GTA, but I have a hard time imagining GTA6 being anything less than a gigantic success. It doesn’t need to be a massive improvement over GTA5, it just needs to be a noticeable upgrade. The only way I can see it failing is if they get too greedy with their live service model, but even then it’s still probably going to sell like 40 million copies in its first year.
Just because there’s a low bar for guaranteed success, doesn’t mean it will actually be good. There’s a lot of hope and expectations to live up to, and a lot of corporate greed opportunities to resist.
They don’t have a great track record for work/life balance of their employees, but they’ve been pretty consistent about quality. I just hope they took this criticism from a while back to heart. Like Ubisoft, they’ve found a pattern that works, and they keep making games in that cookie-cutter pattern. They’re really going to have to re-invent their gameplay loop if they want to “blow people away”.
I’m not hyping myself up for it so i won’t get disappointed
Its not going to have the amount of features GTA5 has. But I asume the engine will be more powerful for them to add more impressive stuff down the line.
5 improved on 4 by not making you drive through a toll booth twice during every mission for the first section of the game and then making you take Roman to the pub, but that was a pretty low bar.