Zosoforum

Yeah, yeah, whatever.

GTA6. Whether you loathe it or hate it, it's a thing. I think it is the epitome of everything wrong with gaming currently and honestly I doubt people here will disagree. If you will, please say so.

But I think the discussion will be about why it is...quite wrong.

>I think it is the epitome of everything wrong with gaming currently


Why?

I have to say I'm biased cause I've always been a big GTA fan, especially the older ones, and it is true that this game has been awaited for 13 years now, so the hype around it is completely understandable.
I'm not gonna pretend like I don't understand what people dislike about it, the modern obsession with photorealism is completely toxic and anti-art, it just leads to bloated file sizes and doesn't necessarily serve the artistic direction. The fact they're not gonna release the game in physical format is scandalous and anti-consumer. And the fact they're paywalling content that should be in the base game behind a 100€ special edition is really bad.

However I think the people that repeat over and over this sentiment that the game NEEDS to fail because it's somehow the culmination of all the worst problems of the industry very strange. In terms of abusive monetization it's really not that bad of an offender compared to stuff like gacha games, all of the things it does other games do worse. For decades the biggest problem of the industry was people like ubisoft and treyarch coming out with a new COD/assassin's creed every year to the point where it was getting really overdone. But it never changed because companies are so risk-averse that they'd rather pump out basically the same game year after year with shallow open world maps that resemble each other.
Is GTA 6, a game that has been awaited for a decade, really guilty of this?

People say that GTA 6 NEEDS to fail so that it'll teach companies a lesson. First off to state the obvious: There is no universe in which GTA 6 doesn't sell a morbillion copies. The game is not gonna fail, it's fucking gta. Second off, I don't know if people really think through what lessons game devs will learn from an eventual GTA failure. One of the big reasons why gaming is so stale is cause the economy sucks which, as I stated before, makes companies risk-averse, so it's easier to rest on easy selling points for normies like "the map is bigger" or "the graphics are better". GTA 6 is definitely guilty of this, but it's also a game with significant investment and a long development time. If it fails, it'll just reinforce the risk-averse nature of the gaming market. I don't see a scenario in which this is a positive.

Additionally I think that people that think of themselves as high-brow types look down on GTA because they see it as low-brow slop on the same level as COD or fifa. I'd disagree with that characterization cause I've always thought GTA was more high-brow and avant-garde in terms of artistic direction that people give it credit for. That being said the average guy who plays GTA doesn't care about this because they're the same kind of normie gun and ball gamer that just buys their yearly COD and fifa.
Essentially, GTA 6 hate is an extension of anti-normie sentiment which is very common in our internet circles.

We'll only know for sure when the game actually comes out, so this is entirely provisional and could be very wrong:

I feel like the problem with GTA6 isn't that it'll be even a bad game. It'll likely be a competent game.

I just don't know if it'd be a good Grand Theft Auto; which matters.

I think that's a fair assessment given that it's the first GTA game without the houser brothers or lazlow an all the other people that were there from the start. My biggest fear is that they lean too much into the life sim elements with stuff like fuel levels and so on.

The life sim aspects are welcome additions. Especially if fuel levels, wanted level variables, etc. actually effect the gameplay in a substantial way.

My concern is that VI is going to suffer from the same thing Red Ded Redemption 2 did. Where the sheer volume of story, gameplay, and open-world activities tries to mask the fact that this is a lowest common denominator product with gameplay to match.

RDR2 had an enormous amount of resources put into it. The end result was a game where you drive ride to a place. Shoot some people within the bounds of a setpiece. Then make choices which were ultimately inconsequential. There's one of these player choices where it feels like Rockstar scrubbed the possibility of an alternate ending. Maybe because there was ~20 more hours of gameplay after the fact, and they were terrified of someone missing out on it. Very funny considering how successful NieR: Automata with its dozens of different endings was prior to RDR2's release.

But Automata sold 10 million copies while RDR2 sold 87 million. GTA VI is undoubtedly expected to sell more than both combined. That expectation is going to dictate what kind of game it can be.

One of the reasons I'm sceptical about GTA6 is that out of the three key people behind the previous games - Leslie Benzies, Dan Houser and Sam Houser - only Sam is working on this one; and furthermore, Sam is known to view GTA's direction as a more of a multiplayer-focused game (which we can see in GTA Online), unlike Dan Houser who placed greater emphasis on the singleplayer story.

>>9
For sure, Lazlow is gone too, so the artistic and story direction is gonna be quite different. What I’m worried is that the online mode is gonna be even more full of microtransactions than GTA V’s online.