In preparation I finally finished GTAV. I bought it on sale in like 2022 and only finished about 1/3 of the main story. I picked it up again and replayed it. It was very whelming and there's enough stuff that frustrates me about the game to not treat it like this great cultural artifact. I then started playing GTAO for the first time ever, and realized how much shit was cut from single-player to support this crime MMORPG. But I saw a vision of what R* wanted: a highly popular live service game that overshadows a single player-experience. It's not even about fun because it's mostly grinding the typical "drive here, shoot this, deliver this" gameplay but with the added aspect of people who spent $3000 real money on the game so they could grief people as a hobby. But the proof-of-concept for what GTA VI's online could be is there and it's kind of frightening.

In fact, the devs said that the game is way more freeform than previous entries. I expect the single-player experience for VI to play a lot like GTAO. And that's why this game really needs to fail (but it won't). It's just setting up another dreary entry in the history of gaming that ends with some kind of live betting cyber-torture VR experience developed by slaves in Saudi Arabia for grotesque "middle class" pod people in the US. If VI were to fumble the bag then we could at least have a long interim of bespoke indie nostalgia slop that's annoying to talk about but at least not the torment nexus of gaming. The pod people thing is unavoidable though, I'm afraid.

Just purely talking from personal taste: It's going to be serviceable "drive here, shoot this, deliver this" gaming with lots of detail nobody cares about except youtubers who make their living pointing out how ice cubes melt in the background. As someone who has lived in Miami, this is the first thing I've seen that kind of feels like the real thing (except for all the wrong geography). Nothing I saw in the leaks really made it feel like south Florida, it could have been Los Santos again. And it's obvious we're getting 2013-2017 cultural references as the main course. That's the problem with them deciding every entry needs to be modern. IV felt like 2002. V felt more like 2008. With as fast as everything is now, this will not feel like a game set in 2026.

I will treat it like V. I will wait another 5-10 years before I buy it on deep discount and then complain about it online.