Now don't get me wrong, yes I know it's Rockstar, yes they are probably still going to make millions because GTA has such an established fanbase and they will buy a literal turd with a rockstar logo on it given the opportunity, this is all true.
However even if the story mode is half-decent and I've got this feeling it's going to be fairly lackluster given the angle that they're going with and it seems despite being a 'crime' game they're shying more and more away from controversy these days and have definitely been infested with the woke.
Here's where it's going to get funny though, GTA Online. Oh boy is that going to be a clusterfuck. The brain drain is very real at game studios and it looks like they're having more and more problems holding onto talent. Any programmer with half a brain isn't going to want anything to do with these arseholes. Found a youtube video that does a perfect job encapsulating all the problems with online which as with most modern games is just a vehicle for micro-transactions so they make sure it's always more convenient to whip out your bank card and sign over your details. It's remarkable how Rockstar Games have managed to make a crime game that's boring.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IypemNHafM
I have barely even ranted about how bad this game is going to be from a technical networking perspective yet either since we're seeing how GTA V even to this day is constantly falling over due to the number of players. Even if people still buy the game, they're going to get pissed off at the state of it. I have to wonder as well how much of the back end of GTA VI they've really messed with and if it's just another clone of the same code as GTA V.
I'm convinced that rockstar is afraid of GTA now, because a miss of that magnitude will destroy them, so they have to put their best efforts into it, or they'll die off.
My only reasoning behind it is the mad money GTA V makes them. If they have to handle that one and VI at the same time, they're going to buckle every day, instead of just every so often when it's busy on the weekends. I personally haven't played GTA V since checks Steam November of 2018.
Also one of the issues is how much they've had to pour into it in order to sustain it.
Sure it made them mad money, but I'm sure those servers are not cheap.
The other big reason why I know they're all in on GTA:VI is the list of games they've released since GTA:V's release date back in 2013, 11 years ago.
Between the 97 release year of Grand Theft Auto, up to 2008, 11 years, there was several rockstar dev houses making a ton of games, and not just the GTA games. Here they are, to the best of my memory, skipping the titles only published by Rockstar, otherwise this list would look even more embarrassingly long, comparatively.
Between GTA:V's release and now, 11 years just like the previous list, there are the following games:
Yeah, you mentioned servers too and that's a problem that has been bubbling under the surface. The insistence of all these big studios to have always online DRM and not allow for community based hosting options is going to bite them in the arse hard. I thought it might be interesting to go a bit more into the technical aspects of why these studios are eventually going to sink.
I understand there's such a thing as cost and everything in terms of the scale of a business but imagine being any kind of business and going "Yeah, oooo $50 million, that's a complete bust for us". Of course doesn't stop them from firing all of their staff and running off with it.
I know it's not exactly underrated, but I'm always happy to see these games mentioned because they were my jam back in the day. I'm not the kind of person who enjoys grinding in games but somehow I could play those campaign races over and over to the point I have the other racers' dialogue burned into my memory. Lately people in Japan have been uploading clips from an arcade game with a similar name (Midnight Coast) and I don't know if it's related but I want to get into that one.
I really liked the midnight club series. Specifically 2 and LA because they, unlike most other companies, kept adding great things each time, while refining what made the previous one so good. That started to get rare to find in games when a lot of them felt like more of the same around that time. It didn't matter if the other guy's game wasn't even in the genre, if they did something cool, and the game was popular, it had to be in every other game.
To stay relatively on topic, you'll notice that a ton of the elements in Midnight Club: LA got absorbed into GTA:V The ability to slow down time became Franklin's driving special move. The transitional map move thing that would begin races became the loading screen for GTA:V when you switched characters or began playing the game.
And while Rdr2 gameplay, graphics, and mechanics are fucking amazing, the writing dept was clearly contaminated with woke activists that really ruined the game for me