Highlights

  • Grand Theft Auto 6 brings players back to Vice City with two protagonists in a modern-day setting ripe for social commentary.
  • Previous GTA entries were praised, but online heists took too long to be included, impacting the game's success.
  • Rockstar Games must deliver GTA 6 as a complete product with timely updates to maintain its stellar reputation.

Grand Theft Auto 6 is surely one of the most anticipated games among casual gamers and hardcore fans despite only receiving one teaser trailer thus far. The legacy of the Rockstar Games series carries immense weight and, for the most part, Grand Theft Auto has carried that reputation well, rarely faltering with its stellar quality. Alongside Red Dead Redemption, it's the company's main focus and has been for years, so the sixth entry has a lot to live up to.

What fans do know about Grand Theft Auto 6 feels largely positive. It's returning to the neon-soaked streets of Vice City, will feature two protagonists, and adopts a modern-day angle that is ripe for fascinating social commentary. However, Grand Theft Auto is more than just a by-the-numbers open-world series, with an online portion and dedicated heists doing well to add to Grand Theft Auto 5's replay value. Frankly, the latter took too long to finally be included in the 2013 release, and Grand Theft Auto 6 can't do the same or it runs the risk of affecting the series' glowing reverence.

GTA 6 Weapon Wheel
Related
The Case For and Against GTA 6 Abandoning the Weapon Wheel

There's a chance that GTA 6 will abandon the weapon-swapping system of its predecessors, which would have both benefits and drawbacks.

GTA 5 was an Incomplete Product at Launch And Even Sometime After

gta 5 heists

Grand Theft Auto 5 was released on September 17, 2013, and was immediately flooded with critical praise and sky-high commercial sales. Exploring Los Santos and engaging in all kinds of mischief could easily take dozens of hours, and the story told in the game's main missions was good enough to push players forward and motivate them to explore every angle. Still, the reason why Grand Theft Auto 5 has enjoyed such prolonged success is because of its online portion, which launched a while later on October 1 of the same year.

Heists took even longer, eventually being included in GTA Online in March 2015, 18 months after its launch. Thankfully, enough players were still invested in the game's ecosystem that it was merely an annoyance rather than something that caused any kind of irreparable damage to the product.

Grand Theft Auto 6 comes 12 years after its predecessor and will launch in a very different gaming landscape. Rockstar has maintained its place atop the AAA mountain, but with that lofty reputation comes ever-growing expectations, with one being that Grand Theft Auto 6 is a complete product out of the gate, and is added to with new content that is purely supplemental instead of essential.

Grand Theft Auto 6 Has to Come Out Swinging

Now that Rockstar Games has had distance from Red Dead Redemption 2 and is gearing up for the launch of GTA 6, it's not unreasonable to expect that all major components will be available at launch. Heists are large, ambitious add-ons, but Grand Theft Auto 5 laid the foundations that its successor has to build upon in a timely fashion if it wants to maintain its good reputation.

The leak for Grand Theft Auto 6 had an early effect on the game but its first trailer seems to have cut all that worry away. Grand Theft Auto 6 will likely be a huge game, but adding heists in time for launch would be the best course of action to ensure it's all-encompassing with highly desirable features.