How Rockstar Can AVOID Ruining GTA 6
Do you miss the old design ethos of GTA?
As an iconic and very well known veteran game studio with a very unique past, Rockstar are in a fascinating place.
Their legacy involves arcade one-offs turning into the biggest open-world crime franchise of all time. Of playing the industry's bad boys across the 2000s, funnelling GTA's profits into pet projects like doing a sequel to 1979's The Warriors in game form.
Hell, amongst all this, they released Rockstar's Table Tennis - something that did exactly what it said on the tin, simply because they needed to recoup funds after developing a whole new engine for GTA IV.
Point being, that they've always done things their way. GTA rose to prominence because it injected open-world Nintendo games like Mario 64 or Zelda: Ocarina of Time with entire mission sets, gameplay mechanic toolkits and a huge variety of traversal options.
GTA 3 was an overnight revolution, and as Rockstar would go on to shape the open-world genre, they'd also get so much bigger. In attracting more sizeable - and more casual - audiences than ever, their design ethos started to pivot.
Yes, you can still mess around and go on hour-long police chases where all hell breaks loose, but mission scope would be reigned in considerably.
Cont.