Imagine if GTA 6 turned out not to be a good game – Reader’s Feature-GameCentral-Entertainment – Metro

Is GTA 6 guaranteed to be good? (pic: Rockstar Games)

A reader takes a more pessimistic view of GTA 6 and wonders what the reaction will be if the long-awaited game is a disappointment.

I see we had a few more rumours about Grand Theft Auto 6 this week, showing a massive ramp up in staff at Rockstar, which shows they must be getting into top gear with the game now. I imagine we’ll get the first tease about it in about a year or so and then the hype will go into overdrive and we won’t hear about anything else for ages. But… what if it doesn’t turn out how people expect?

I think many fans are underestimating what a difference Dan Houser leaving Rockstar Games is going to make. He was not just the co-founder of the company but the lead writer of all their games. He set the tone and wrote the words we all loved so much and when he left he took a lot of people with him.

Because Rockstar make so few games it’s impossible to tell what they’ll be like without him (his last game was Red Dead Redemption 2) and the answer could very well be not as good. Especially as Dan was already saying before he left that he thought recent events had taken real life beyond satire, so if he can’t do it I worry about what his understudies are going to come up with.

There’s also the question of how exactly they improve the GTA experience, given how open world games have evolved since GTA 5 came out. No doubt the graphics will be better and the open world bigger but where can they really go with the gameplay? If we look at GTA Online, they’ve been updating that for years and yet everything has just been increasingly weird and unrealistic novelties.

They add new areas now and again, like the casino island, but in terms of things to do they seem to have run out of new ideas and just resorted to adding sci-fi vehicles and weird genre mash-ups like that Micro Machines clone from a few years ago.

Hopefully they’re saving all the really cool ideas for the sequel, but I don’t know, you’d think in all this time GTA Online would’ve come up with some great new ideas that you can’t wait to see in a new single-player game, but I can’t think of anything like that, unless you count flying motorbikes.

I’m not trying to be pessimistic, just realistic. Because when this game starts getting close to release fans are going to go crazy and it’s going to be impossible to get any real perspective on it. I hope it’s good, but I also hope it isn’t given a free pass just because of the long wait.

That’s all speculation of course but in a way, we have the answer already. What if GTA 6 doesn’t turn out that great? People will buy it anyway, pretend it’s good, and only admit it’s not much later. That’s exactly what happened with GTA 4 which, if you look at it objectively is not a good video game at all. The combat’s bad, the driving’s worse, and while the story is good the missions are horribly repetitive.

Whether GTA 6 will make any of those some mistakes nobody can say but, years before it comes out, it’s already critic-proof. You could argue that Rockstar has earned that level of trust but I’m going to try and be just as sceptical about it as I would be with any game that hasn’t proven itself. We’ll see just how long my resolve lasts.

By reader Dougie

The reader’s feature does not necessary represent the views of GameCentral or Metro.

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