If you’ve spent as little as SECONDS in any part of the internet that talks about gaming, you’ll have heard people speculating about Grand Theft Auto 6 (GTA 6). When are we getting GTA 6? Where is GTA 6 going to be set? Will we get a PC port at launch? As well as MANY other questions, today we’re going to be discussing some of the things that we’re looking forward to that have previously been in the GTA series and how they will be improved moving into the next generation.
There have been many big updates to the last release, including the huge Casino Heist. But the first thing I want to talk about is the mini-games that you find dotted about the world in GTA games, they feature everything from bowling, to golf in the newest games and everything in between.
You can find yourself chilling in an arcade one minute and in the next minute, you could be hitting the casino, rocking the tabletop games, or running the slots. The quality of the mini-games, from how they work and look to their integration in the world has got better and better with every release, so you could put money on the fact that they’re only going to get more realistic this generation too.
You could say it’s kind of a given at this point, gaming theoretically improves continuously year on year, as people get more talented with their coding, artists become more creative, etc. But it isn’t just in video games that this growth can be seen. Online casinos like in GTA have also come a long way in quality, variety, and availability. You may be wondering why I mention this, but SOME online casinos and sportsbooks have recently, due to covid, adopted digital horse and dog racing. Where you bet on AI (Artificial Intelligence) controller animals.
Now that is interesting moving into the new game because potentially, we could see this sort of technology used to give players another way to potentially earn (or lose if lady luck isn’t blessing them) money in-game via online casino apps OR they could even use the technology to set up a proper horse or dog track in-game, where you go and stand by the sides of the track, slip in hand cheering on your pick. At this point, it seems to me that the best way to improve the GTA series is to add in more things that are readily accessible in real life.
The addition of heists to GTA Online was a very interesting and entertaining change of pace for the community. Source: Rockstar Games
While we’re on the subject of gambling and casinos, it’s a great point to pivot into the next thing they added, heists, including a pretty sizable casino heist. This started with your usual story mode missions where you’d heist a store or a casino or a government building looking for information. I don’t know guys, the GTA story gets more and more wild as we progress in the series. Anyway, after this, and with the rapid growth of the online portion of the game, heists were added to GTA Online, so it would be interesting to see how they could potentially expand on this feature in future versions of the game. The casino heist, while a gamble in and of itself, is insanely fun and highly rewarding if your squad can pull it off.
The next thing I’d like to talk about is the story. The story mode is always wacky, crazy, and zany. Many words ultimately mean the same thing. It tends to feature ample violence, plenty of memorable content through its humor, and, at least in my opinion, hilarious use of “adult” themes. The only thing I would say about the writing in GTA stories in the past, outside of the content that became memes, such as Big Smokes fast food order and the “Yee yee ass haircut” roast from Lamar, there genuinely isn’t a lot that sticks with me. For me, I’d love it if they could focus a little more of their efforts on the writing.
It’s all well and good having a game that looks beautiful with incredibly diverse worlds to explore, full to the brim with content to enjoy. But, unless your entire aim in the game is to mess about online, becoming the king of your own empire, or trolling people until they rage quit. It’s all for naught if your story is bad or boring. Rockstar has the ability to write good stories, look at Red Dead Redemption as an example. So there really isn’t an excuse for the story to not stick with players long after the game has “run its course” as it were.
So what else can we expect from GTA 6? Well, everybody and their grandmothers know that GTA Online was the real money maker here. Now, GTA 5 launched on PS3 & Xbox 360, yes it’s that old. They made a lot of money on launch and then made even more when they released the game again on PS4 and Xbox One AND THEN AGAIN on PC. But, the biggest influx of cash that came from GTA 5 was from microtransactions in GTA Online.
I think it’s honestly a no-brainer that the new version of GTA Online will be a HEAVY point of focus for the team at Rockstar, there is absolutely no way they neglect this cash cow. The question is, how do they improve the recipe? GTA 4 online was just a fun playground with some mini-games but not a whole lot of content, but once they realized what they had they RAN with it in GTA 5. For me, more community game modes would be awesome, an alternate story for online that can be played in co-op is high up on my wishlist.
The graphical capability of gaming systems has seriously come a long way since the 90s. Source: Sportskeeda
The last thing that we can absolutely expect for the new installment would be phenomenal graphics. The level of detail in GTA games has gone from strength to strength over the years, we have come a LONG way from the old school top-down graphics of GTA 1, when you look at the insane attention to detail that goes into all of the uhhh, definitely original cars in the game now it’s genuinely fantastic and I just see the graphics improving even more so, given the power of the current generation consoles and the newest generation of GPU’s. I’m excited to see where we end up with this!
That’s going to do it for this one. As much as I’m really excited for GTA 6, as a PC player who always has to wait for the game to be ported, I’m not jumping on any hype trains for a long time and since I don’t really see the need to buy a PS5 anymore given Playstation exclusives are now making their way to PC, God of War and Horizon, for example, it’s safe to say PC is where I’ll be staying. Here’s hoping we get the PC version at the same time as the console players! How about you guys, what is your platform of choice? Let’s get a discussion going, but keep it civil eh? Take care folks!
