I have one (probably vain) hope for GTA 6, and it’s this:
I really hope Rockstar stops locking the game’s open-world activities behind campaign missions. Grand Theft Auto V took the wide-open world of San Andreas and locked a great many pieces of it off until a campaign mission could tutorialise them. Take a look at this exhaustive list of campaign unlocks for an example of what I’m talking about.
As you can see, there is a non-trivial amount of the GTA 5 experience locked behind campaign missions. Once the required mission is complete, the activity in question can be visited and enjoyed any time you like, but it is off-limits until then.
I always disliked this approach because, apart from anything else, it made the world feel like it wasn’t fully fleshed out. Los Santos had the veneer of a bustling city, but I couldn’t interact with great chunks of it. I can see that the paint shop exists! It’s right across the street! I, the player, know how the paint shop works — if I drive into it, my car will be spraypainted, and the cops will lose track of me. But because Michael hasn’t been through a paint shop before, and because he doesn’t know how it works, it is therefore off-limits to him. Once he finds his way to said paint shop as part of a mission, its services will be made available to him (along with Franklin and Trevor).
Some of these unlocks strain credulity. The boys can’t play golf or tennis until someone teaches them how to do it! I don’t believe for a moment that none of these grown men know how to grab a golf club and use it to whack a ball around. Especially Michael. Look at him. The man clearly moved to Los Santos to wear polo shirts and hit the links.
It wasn’t always like this! Older GTA games didn’t gatekeep their open-world elements in this way — if you found shops and activities while exploring, you were free to investigate them. The older games, like GTA 2 and 3 put a certain amount of trust in the player to simply figure things out for themselves.
I hope GTA 6 brings this back! I know it’s now AAA best practice to tutorialise every single thing. I know the baseline assumption is that the player is a dum-dum who has never picked up a controller before and must have their hand held. But c’mon. Let me do the thing. Let me interact with your world. Trigger the tutorial the first time I visit each activity, by all means, but don’t make me unlock it piecemeal through the campaign.
GTA 6 launches in 2025 on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S. Rockstar has not announced a PC version, but we expect there will be one down the line. You can watch the first trailer here.
Screenshot: Rockstar Games
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