The rumor that Rockstar is at work developing another Grand Theft Auto game got a lot of people excited on Sunday. The franchise is, after all, a boundary breaking playground that lets adults live out their crime-y fantasies in the safety of a console game, but its most recent iterations haven’t been perfect. Whether that has to do with anything relating to Rockstar or if it’s the simple evolution of gamers who have been spoiled rotten by the freedoms offered by the GTA games and those that have followed is another question. One that we’re not answering right now. Instead, the Uproxx staff is going to… well, pretty much act like spoiled gamers while rattling off our wishlist for GTA 6. So, read our musings and then let us know what you want out of the next Grand Theft Auto.
Let’s start with a kid-friendly mode, a switch you can flip to disable the guns and violent missions. Simply put, there’s just so much stuff to do in the game, and I keep hearing about parents taking their kids on a virtual tour where they race submarines, go shopping, parachute off buildings, and so on. Why not enable that?
On a more basic level, a better mission structure. One of the central frustrations of GTA is that it’s a huge, open world that’s a lot of fun to explore, but the missions are often heavily scripted: You have to do THIS thing at THIS time or ELSE. Just give us a main objective, secondary objectives, and a few suggestions and let us loose on the game. – Dan Seitz
Looking at another open world game for inspiration, Fallout 4 lets you build all sorts of stuff, but most of it just isn’t very fun. Building dirty hovels filled with old mattresses gets tired pretty quick. But what if a game gave you all the building tools of Fallout 4, without the bummer “everything in this world must be broken and crappy” restrictions?
Set GTA 6 in a fictional version of Las Vegas and let players build their own glittering casino empire out of the bare desert. Forget the boring food and shelter stuff from Fallout, let players focus on nothing but the cool stuff. You decide where to put the roller coasters, blackjack, and clubs.
It’s also time to stop cheating with NPCs. Sure, some of the characters you meet have personalities and missions for you, but most of the people walking around the streets are just empty shells. Brainless AIs that mill around in circles and do nothing but get in your way when you’re trying to run somewhere.
Every character in GTA 6 should have a basic role, and routine. You should be able to follow an NPC and get a sense of their patterns and basic personality. It would add a whole new dimension to the usual GTA shenanigans if the people you were running over with your hummer actually felt alive. – Nate Birch
Whenever Rockstar finishes GTA 6 in 15 to 20 years, there’d better be one addition to the game that none of its predecessors have totally had — complete interactivity. In other words, the ability for players to interact or interfere with anything present on the map. Not just nonplayable characters, vehicles and fences, but minor set decorations and programmed bits whose repetition doesn’t allow for much wiggle room. – Andrew Husband
Zombies. I know it’s been done, but I want to see a mode where all the NPCs suddenly develop the taste for human flesh, slowly ambling through the streets of whatever of imitation cityscape Rockstar has chosen to develop for the game. The game’s open world map (Which, can we make the buildings accessible so we can seek out trouble in apartment buildings and wherever else we see fit? We’re in grand wish-list mode here, so why not?) and penchant for violence would make for an epic undead adventure. Especially if we were able to team up with other players to fight back the walkers.
Let’s make this legendary scene from Resident Evil 2 a reality, Rockstar. – Jason Tabrys