How Rockstar Can AVOID Ruining GTA 6

Play Red Dead Redemption 2 and you'll see this "new mentality" in full force. "Steal X stagecoach and leave it exactly here", "Kill X target with THIS weapon", "Infiltrate X place from THIS entry point".

Any deviation, and it's game over.

The result both here and in GTA 5 is something that feels polished to a mirror sheen, but you're following mission prompts almost the entire time. Gunfights break out exactly where they're supposed to, you drive from A to B and back again, watching a cutscene in between.

In short... it can feel spectacularly boring, especially compared to the wider mission goals and experimentation that used to frontload the older titles.

In GTA 3, Vice City and San Andreas, you were given a target with no clear way to take them out. Maybe a handler produced a pistol, but buying a sniper rifle and eliminating your target from across the map worked just as well.

A character going to make a getaway in a car? Get there ahead of time, plant a bomb and watch them explode instead. Even the various street races you could partake in could be "gamed" by placing vehicles on the track, then gaining the upper hand as the A.I. plowed into them.

Granted, it's entirely possible all these things were happy accidents, as Rockstar were literally sculpting the genre. These outcomes could've come more from the games only registering the death of a targets rather than scanning for specific methods, but point being: It worked.

We all fell in love with this version of GTA, and for me it's what makes the older titles more fun to go back to.

Cont.