GTA 6: 10 Specific Lessons It Must Learn From Recent Games
4. Decision Making Should Be Impactful
Decision making in the GTA franchise has always taken a bit of a back seat. GTAIV had you choose whether or not to work with Dimitri, whilst GTAV had you decide if you should kill off one of the three playable characters, but neither of these had huge impacts on the game. Both resulted in characters potentially being killed off, but happened right at the end of their campaigns.
Red Dead 2 certainly made player choices impactful, with the decisions Arthur made having a heavy influence on how the remainder of the story would play out. Now, nobody is going to want a morality system in a game like GTA, but that doesn’t mean story-impacting decisions shouldn’t be included.
Rockstar could look to improve on the loyalty systems of similar crime simulators such as Mafia 3, where the protagonist worked with multiple criminal organisations and their bosses. Here we could choose which mobs we deemed more useful, then dedicate more of our time and resources to these ones. This could result in missing out on benefits and even going to war with the gangs that we had neglected.
Game-changing player choices can substantially increase the game’s replay value as well, giving us even more reason to sink an unhealthy number of hours into GTAVI.