I feel like I need to say this quietly in case anyone hears me.
November 19th is coming. The biggest entertainment launch in history, apparently. Analysts are talking about fifty million copies in week one, Rockstar have been building this thing for over a decade, and I am sat here feeling absolutely nothing about it. Not cynicism, not contrarianism, just a genuine slightly baffled absence of excitement. I keep waiting for it to arrive and it doesn’t. Every trailer drops and I watch it and think yeah, looks good, and then close the tab and forget about it completely.
Not cynicism. Not contrarianism. Just a genuine, slightly baffled absence of excitement. I keep waiting for it to arrive and it doesn’t. Every trailer drops and I watch it and think yeah, looks good, and then close the tab and forget about it. Something is wrong with me, probably. But I also think there are some very specific reasons this has happened and I want to try and work them out.
The open world thing is a big one. I am genuinely, properly tired of enormous open worlds filled with activities and side missions and collectibles until the whole thing stops feeling like a world and starts feeling like a job. GTA 5 had that problem in places. Red Dead Redemption 2 had it badly in places, and RDR2 is one of my favourite games ever made. GTA 6 is reportedly even bigger, the map supposedly enormous, and rather than exciting me that information makes me slightly exhausted. I do not want to spend four hours doing busy work to unlock the next story mission. I want to play the story. And the story is probably going to be brilliant, which is the maddening part, because Rockstar at their best are genuinely exceptional storytellers and everything about Lucia and Jason looks interesting. I believe in the story. I just do not fully believe that the story is what GTA 6 is actually for.
GTA Online made over a billion pounds. RDR2 Online, which nobody really talks about anymore, still has a dedicated player base years later. Take-Two’s entire long term business model is built around live service revenue and ongoing multiplayer engagement, and the story mode of GTA 6 is the on-ramp, the thing that gets you into the world and attached to the characters before handing you off to GTA Online where the real money gets made. The single player campaign is not the product. It is the advertisement for the product. And knowing that going in makes it very hard to engage with the story on its own terms, because somewhere in the back of my head I keep thinking about which bits were designed to funnel you towards the multiplayer and which bits were actually made because they serve the story.
Then there is the disc situation. Rockstar confirmed in June that the physical edition of GTA 6 contains no disc. You buy the box, open it, and there is a piece of paper with a download code on it. That is literally it. Eighty pounds for a slip of paper in a cardboard box you will immediately throw away. The actual disc version might come in December, might come in 2027, nobody seems entirely sure and Rockstar have not officially explained the decision. The going theory is it reduces the risk of leaks before launch, which is understandable given the hack they suffered a few years ago, but it also saves money on manufacturing and makes it significantly harder to resell or lend the game to a mate. Whatever the reasoning, if I am spending eighty pounds on a physical copy of something I want an actual physical copy of it, not a redemption code dressed up in a box.
The eighty pounds for the standard edition, by the way. The Ultimate Edition is a hundred. No disc included in either. During a cost of living crisis. Genuinely.
The biggest problem though, the one I keep coming back to, is that GTA 6 is going to hoover up all the oxygen in the room for months. Onimusha comes out in September. Control Resonant comes out in September. Silent Hill Townfall comes out in September. Blood of Dawnwalker is in September. Wolverine is in September. These are all brilliant, interesting, creative games that deserve attention and conversation and people actually playing them, and they are all going to get completely steamrolled because GTA 6 is November 19th and that is the only thing the mainstream gaming press is going to talk about from about October onwards. The interesting stuff, the weird stuff, the stuff I actually want to play, will just quietly get buried.
I want GTA 6 to be good. I genuinely do, and I want Rockstar to have made something that justifies over a decade of development. Maybe I will come around, maybe the first proper story trailer will flip a switch and I will suddenly care. Maybe I will be stood outside a shop at midnight in November holding a box with a piece of paper in it.
But right now it’s just a quiet, slightly guilty nothing.