69 points by piotrgrabowski14 days ago | 78 comments
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It looks like Rockstar have nailed a solid 2026 update to previous releases, everything looks great. But is that enough? It should be, but given the billions spent on development I think there's an expectation of more.
It also looks like they've kept the art and writing fresh for 2026. GTAV feels dated at this point, no criticism of course, and I was concerned that they would fail to modernise into a world that is quite different now than 13 years ago, but it seems they've likely succeeded at that.
I'm looking forward to playing, eventually, when it comes out on desktop. But is this the game of a generation that justifies buying a console? I'm not sure.
It looks great. I'm conventionally a critic of the pursuit of realism in games, particularly with faces, because of the uncanny valley, but the faces look great. They're not uncanny.
GTA VI is the biggest single entertainment property of all time and we've waited a dog's age for it to drop. It appears the level of polish and attention to detail throughout is unprecedented.
After GTA V the franchise was feeling played out for me. I thought I had decided I wasn't going to buy a console just so I can experience GTA VI, but my mind it seems is changing. It looks banger. It looks like it really does have the power to elevate the whole industry.
TBH life taught me to wait until after release so that we know if it's actually good or the hype wasn't worth it. For all the good work done in GTA V it just sucks IMO. You can see the 180° flip between GTA SA "do whatever you want to pass the mission" and TBoGT "you get a checkmark if you do the mission exactly as designed".
Either way, I don't care about the console release, I'm waiting for the PC release. And I'm also waiting for Witcher 4. If GTA VI is good, then I guess it'll will be worth it to buy a new PC just to be able to play these games on high settings 4k, despite the anus-watering prices.
Old guy here. Perhaps escape (escapism) is something I look for in games. To that end, the GTA series just leaves me scratching my head. What a bleak world they deliver.
When I was 13, these games were delightfully naughty and super exciting. But with age comes empathy, and it just doesn’t feel good anymore to rob and kill randos in a virtual world. I see enough of that shit on the news.
Same reason I probably can’t rewatch Clockwork Orange despite loving it as a teen. Crime, murder, and rape aren’t just abstract concepts anymore.
(Thankfully, there are plenty of games that don’t wallow in darkness. And don’t take 1000 hours to beat!)
Funny, I had the opposite arc with Rockstar stuff. GTA's violence always felt cartoonish to me, pedestrians ragdoll and bounce off cars with that Looney Tunes physics. RDR2's honor system is what actually got me, made me hesitate before drawing on someone since the game remembers and NPCs react differently for weeks.
Yeah, I get what you're saying. I really like their city reconstructions, and they add a lot to do, but I could certainly do without the yet-again-rising-through-the-criminal-ranks storyline.
So the first and perhaps only experience I had with GTA was in 1999. A friend in the goth-industrial-club scene was having a birthday party, and invites me out to her apartment in Phoenix. There are plenty of people at the party, late into the night. We sample rare bottles of lambic ale and enjoy the goth vibes. I linger for far too long. I suppose some of us crash out and sleep late into the next morning.
So there is a kid playing GTA on our hostess's Playstation. He's a stranger to me, and quite a bit younger. I was about 27 years old already. It might've been GTA I or the sequel; I don't know: I didn't play it anyway. But I am kind of thrilled to see it in action and curious to know how the gameplay goes, so I am sitting next to him and watching, and meanwhile our hostess is in the kitchen, or cleaning up, or whatever. And the kid plays half-heartedly, until he perceives us to be alone together, and he turns around on the sofa and kisses me on the mouth for no particular reason.
Obviously I am repulsed, and that is an unwelcome sort of gesture, and so I figure out how to trap him outside on the balcony, and I lock the door behind him. Then I seek out our hostess, and I tell her what had happened. And she cracks up laughing; it is so funny to her (it's funny to me, 27 years later for sure.) And she says I can exit gracefully, and she will take care of this guy after I'm gone.
So that is my story about Grand Theft Auto. Parents, don't let your kids play GTA because they may try some shit on their friends or party guests without consent. Try Stardew Valley instead.
I'm a bit skeptic of the game because it's pushing higher prices in the industry while being totally unjustified.
But I'm not surprised at all? Like, all of these things the game does were/are entirely possible within the FiveM scripting API. Take a look at GTA RP servers like NoPixel, they've been pushing the limits so hard on a 13 year old game.
And the same API exists for Red Dead 2, which has a visual upgrade over the engine used for GTA V.
I don't know, I guess I'm expecting something to be wrong since it's very frequent and common nowadays for AAA games to ship broken and incomplete.
If there's a game that can push higher prices, it's GTA VI. I'm not a fan of the last game, but I never expected a game to be one of the most anticipated entertainment products ever
GTA used to be colorful, fun, funny, and cinematic.
GTA VI seems to be missing that entirely. The whole world seems far too bleak and close to life (in a bad way).
This isn’t the GTA I used to know and love.
Sad to say this will be the first GTA game I’ll miss out on (I’ve played all of them, even GTA London 1969, GTA Advance, and Chinatown Wars).
I don’t know who’s running the show at these big game companies, but they sure know how to ruin games that used to be fun. Assassins Creed, Halo, and now GTA.
There's a decent body of nostalgia research (Sedikides and colleagues have done a lot of this) showing people tend to remember the tone of things they loved as brighter than it actually was. GTA III and San Andreas had plenty of grim, mean-spirited content. Might be memory editing more than generational taste.
Same argument every console gen. Crysis in 2007, "wait for hardware." GTAIV ran like trash on PS3/360 too, still sold 25M. Pretty graphics always eat frames, always has, always will.
You know, I would also love to see 60fps, but let's wait till the premiere, and then - just show me the list of games with that level of details and rich world running 60fps on machines like xbox or ps5.
The second one is pretty much directly a Die Hard parody – new building, party, execs off doing drugs, dead guy in the lift. I'm looking forward to that one, I wouldn't be surprised if there's a lot more in there.
Most combat missions are bad guys crashing somewhere. It can be hired killers at a party, cops at a failed robbery, rival gang in a setup or a home invasion. It's just how games and action movies work. And it shows off shooting mechanics without revealing too much about the story.
There's the one at the end - I'm guessing the other is the police raid on the drug lab at the beginning? Personally I wouldn't have put them in the same bucket.
Everyone's fixated on how real the faces look, but that's never been what makes GTA fun. It's the systemic chaos, physics, and world reactivity. Prerendered trailers always look stunning; it's the janky emergent gameplay hours in that actually decides if this is good.
It also looks like they've kept the art and writing fresh for 2026. GTAV feels dated at this point, no criticism of course, and I was concerned that they would fail to modernise into a world that is quite different now than 13 years ago, but it seems they've likely succeeded at that.
I'm looking forward to playing, eventually, when it comes out on desktop. But is this the game of a generation that justifies buying a console? I'm not sure.