GTA 6: 10 Specific Lessons It Must Learn From Recent Games

If Rockstar do take on board our suggestion to include more decision making in GTAVI, these decisions could also have a direct impact on the player character’s reputation. Here we would experience both the rewards and consequences of our interactions with the world.

They did a pretty good job at delivering such a system in Red Dead 2, where townsfolk, gangs and the law would recognise you and remember how you behaved the last time you paid a visit to the area.

GTA could expand on this model, resulting in some areas having an increased likelihood of you being attacked or arrested, and others where you’re more protected or considered untouchable by the police, depending on which sides you’ve chosen, which hands you’ve shaken, which backs you’ve stabbed, and so on.

Reputations and factions have been popular across multiple genres of recent games. Mafia 3, The Outer Worlds and Greedfall all had systems in place where you could side with one group whilst villainising another, or even attempt to play all sides as some kind of pseudo-diplomat. Whatever decisions you made, you garnered a suitable reputation as a result.

Introducing an intuitive feature like this to their single-player campaign could also help Rockstar reduce their reputation for Shark Cards and unbalanced servers. Just saying.