GTA 6: 10 Core Innovations It Needs To Stay Interesting

2. New Mission Types

The biggest gripe many have with the GTA series is their repetition of established mission types, the most egregious being the 'follow and wait' structure, where literally all you're doing is tailing a contact, before backing off because "You got too close!", only to be told "You're too far!". GTA V did tone the frequency of these missions down, and also brought about the 'Heist Missions' that we all now know and love. However whist there were seven playable 'heists' by name, only half of them revolved around actually planning and executing bank-heists, the rest being the stealing of equipment or money from other locations. Each mission did open with you deciding between a handful of binary choices that at least gave the illusion that a variety of different replayability options would present themselves when on-mission, sadly the reality was that there were only two ways to do each setpiece, and after you'd seen them, that was it. That's all added to a huge amount of missions in especially GTA V - due to it's expansive world - that just had to travelling across very large parts of the map, only to carry out an activity that lasted a couple of minutes, before driving all the way back again. You could argue the likes of these missions were included so that we were somewhat 'forced' to take in the genuinely jaw-dropping level of detail present throughout the city, although as this mission type was born in much smaller cityscapes, there must be more done to update it for these expansive worlds. V did also manage to fix the driving from the ice-rink mentality of GTA IV, yet too many missions still fall back on chasing a far-away enemy as a blip on the radar, only to be told that they "Got away". What if that is the case? What are the ramifications of this individual getting away, and what do we as the player now have to fight or otherwise contend with, now that there's a potentially 'live' NPC baying for our blood? By removing these mission-types that appear to still be in the game just for the sake of it, and instead introducing a living, breathing world that reacts to every choice and mistake you make, would truly be a next-generational leap forward for the franchise.