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It looks like Rockstar have nailed a solid 2026 update to previous releases, everything looks great. But is that enough? It should be, but given the billions sp

It looks like Rockstar have nailed a solid 2026 update to previous releases, everything looks great. But is that enough? It should be, but given the billions spent on development I think there's an expectation of more. It also looks like they've kept the art and writing fresh for 2026. GTAV feels dated at this point, no criticism of course, and I was concerned that they would fail to modernise into a world that is quite different now than 13 years ago, but it seems they've likely succeeded at that. I'm looking forward to playing, eventually, when it comes out on desktop. But is this the game of a generation that justifies buying a console? I'm not sure.

mcphage 20d ago
> It should be, but given the billions spent on development I wonder how much GTA 7 will cost to make, and how long…
- ErneX 19d ago
  This is the last GTA before the AI revolution, I’ve been thinking about it since yesterday.
  - mcphage 17d ago
    Right now AI has trouble maintaining coherence over a few paragraphs of text. How long will it be before it is capable of maintaining coherence over something the size of a GTA game? And how much money will that cost?
Dig1t 20d ago
>I was concerned that they would fail to modernise into a world that is quite different now than 13 years ago What do you mean by this? In what way has the world changed that you thought they might fail to capture?
- danpalmer 20d ago
  I think it's mostly about the characters. GTAV was, in my opinion, much lighter-hearted than this is looking. Trevor was a hoot, Michael's marital problems were made light of, even Franklin as probably the most serious character still had plenty of quite direct comedy written around him. I'm not sure that would go down well in 2026. The redneck thing feels tired, the public narrative of wealth inequality would likely make Michael feel out of touch, and much of the audience would have identified with Franklin but he doesn't really have the struggles that today's Millennials and Gen-Z have. These two characters seem more realistic in that sense. Less direct comedy (although I still see that there's the iconic GTA parody in places), a couple who are probably going to be much more relatable even if they're criminals, and a standing in society that is more relatable. It's not that the comedy wouldn't land, the parody/satire is important and it looks like it's still there, it's more that I think V depended on some stereotypes that are long gone, or that society recognises differently now.
  - al_borland 20d ago
    I don’t play games to find people I relate to. I play games to become a character for a period of time in the game. Rich, poor, redneck… it doesn’t really matter. They can all be interesting and engaging characters to take on if the game is written well and fun to play. I think this a mistake a lot of modern game companies are making. They think people want to be represented, when what most people want is an escape. I want to do things in a game that I would never be able to do in real life. That’s half the fun. I also think the venn diagram of people offended by stereotypes and those who play GTA barely overlap. They may be completely separate circles. The people who will complain about the game were never going to buy it, so Rockstar shouldn’t care about what they have to say. Make the game for the customers, not the activists and critics.
    - danpalmer 20d ago
      I see your point, and maybe I'm over indexing on this or not describing it well. I don't see myself in either of these characters, but I do see them as representative of society, whereas I don't see the GTAV characters as representative of society. However, I think I did when I first played GTAV the year it came out. The last game I played was James Bond First Light – and that's for the escapism you describe, I got to "be" James Bond, great. But in the same way, the game and story felt relevant today, with aspects being believable in 2026, which is a stark comparison to how watching Thunderball recently made me feel – that was jarring and much harder to "escape" into because of how out of touch it was (obviously understandably so).
- satvikpendem 20d ago
  The gaming world, which is what I presume they meant, is much different today. The days of clunky gunplay and insta-failing a mission for going 10 feet out of the correct path are long gone and would be tiresome for most gamers.
  - danpalmer 20d ago
    Absolutely, I replayed some of GTAV is ~2018 it already felt a bit clunky in that respect. I think some of this is technological, but much of it is style. There are likely limitations that forced some of those issues back in 2013, but I think it's more down to game design practices. It doesn't take a lot of tech to give you another 10 feet of leeway and trigger a sound bite with a snarky comment from another character.
    - d3Xt3r 20d ago
      Wait till you replay the earlier games. I bought the definitive edition trilogy in a sale, only just started playing thru them. Decided to skip GTA III completely after seeing the reviews and lack of unofficial patches. Vice City feels much more playable after adding a bunch of patches, but unfortunately it doesn't fix the clunkyness and difficulty of the missions. I'm only like 7 or 8 missions in and feel like quitting, having to retry several missions multiple times. Especially that RC helicopter mission, I've no idea how I even managed to complete that (took like 6 retries). But I'll somehow try and chug thru it. Hopefully San Andreas is lot better (and given the number of mods available for it, it feels like it would be).
      - danieldisu 20d ago
        The RC Helicopter mission was already frustrating back when the game came out, I vividly remember that mission
  - bigstrat2003 20d ago
    > The days of clunky gunplay and insta-failing a mission for going 10 feet out of the correct path are long gone and would be tiresome for most gamers. Let's not kid ourselves that either of those things is going to be any different in GTA 6.
scrollop 20d ago
It will likely be 1-2 years after release for the PC version to become available, judging from previous iterations.
- danpalmer 20d ago
  I know that's the likely timeline. My hope is that because consoles today look a lot more like PCs than they did in 2013 (or earlier during development), that it might be sooner, plus from leaks we know that development appears to mostly be happening on PC (I mean for real builds not just engine tools and cross-compiling). But I realise that's just hope. It's probably also about business priorities and PC is just not a huge market.
feverzsj 20d ago
It runs 30fps maximum on consoles.
K3UL 20d ago
Just from the video you can gather that there's much more than just a visual upgrade. The fact that you can apparently just rob random stores, that there seems to be specific ways to open cars (so different cars, different difficulties?), the variety of activities, and the pnjs that seem to remember you, etc. I was afraid it would not live up to the hype, but now I think it just might
- ButlerianJihad 20d ago
  [flagged]
Zylokloto 20d ago
For sure its enough. We haven't had a GTA game for a decade. There was some interview with the Skyrim people who didn't want to do the next skyrim because of the success of Skyrim. Lets be honest, just make another Skyrim a little bit better here, a little bit better there, new stores done. A game is better than no game especially after that much time
tuesdaynight 20d ago
Where people got this billions cost from? I doubt that they spent that much in GTA VI. RDR2 gave the base for GTA VI (engine and things like that), so I just find really odd they would spend 2 billions on the rest
- Paratoner 19d ago
  They've themselves said they've at least doubled in size since RDR2 for this game, with a studio, for example, SOLELY dedicated to random crowd NPCs systems(!) With the average Sony game with a fraction of this game's features costing upwards of 400mill, don't be so sure this behemoth didn't hit the 1.5 to 2 bill mark. Paying a growing number of devs, testers, plus insane amounts of marketing push for over a decade adds up more than you may think.
- ErneX 19d ago
  Other less complex recent AAA games cost 300-500 million, this game is easily between 1 and 2 billion, specially if you include marketing. And just GTA Online is making 10 million USD every week. The game screams money just looking at the sheer density of the city/map and the level of detail. There’s simply nothing quite like this, as usual with Rockstar.
maxglute 19d ago
As someone who finds Rockstar gameplay mid, deep down want GTA6 fail and Rockstar turn into engine company like unreal. I know big part of the formula is $$$ but there's so much neat stuff in Rockstar games that AAA hasn't gotten close to in 10 years and I sense won't.

mcphage 20d ago

> It should be, but given the billions spent on development I wonder how much GTA 7 will cost to make, and how long…

ErneX 19d ago
This is the last GTA before the AI revolution, I’ve been thinking about it since yesterday.
- mcphage 17d ago
  Right now AI has trouble maintaining coherence over a few paragraphs of text. How long will it be before it is capable of maintaining coherence over something the size of a GTA game? And how much money will that cost?

Dig1t 20d ago

>I was concerned that they would fail to modernise into a world that is quite different now than 13 years ago What do you mean by this? In what way has the world changed that you thought they might fail to capture?

danpalmer 20d ago
I think it's mostly about the characters. GTAV was, in my opinion, much lighter-hearted than this is looking. Trevor was a hoot, Michael's marital problems were made light of, even Franklin as probably the most serious character still had plenty of quite direct comedy written around him. I'm not sure that would go down well in 2026. The redneck thing feels tired, the public narrative of wealth inequality would likely make Michael feel out of touch, and much of the audience would have identified with Franklin but he doesn't really have the struggles that today's Millennials and Gen-Z have. These two characters seem more realistic in that sense. Less direct comedy (although I still see that there's the iconic GTA parody in places), a couple who are probably going to be much more relatable even if they're criminals, and a standing in society that is more relatable. It's not that the comedy wouldn't land, the parody/satire is important and it looks like it's still there, it's more that I think V depended on some stereotypes that are long gone, or that society recognises differently now.
- al_borland 20d ago
  I don’t play games to find people I relate to. I play games to become a character for a period of time in the game. Rich, poor, redneck… it doesn’t really matter. They can all be interesting and engaging characters to take on if the game is written well and fun to play. I think this a mistake a lot of modern game companies are making. They think people want to be represented, when what most people want is an escape. I want to do things in a game that I would never be able to do in real life. That’s half the fun. I also think the venn diagram of people offended by stereotypes and those who play GTA barely overlap. They may be completely separate circles. The people who will complain about the game were never going to buy it, so Rockstar shouldn’t care about what they have to say. Make the game for the customers, not the activists and critics.
  - danpalmer 20d ago
    I see your point, and maybe I'm over indexing on this or not describing it well. I don't see myself in either of these characters, but I do see them as representative of society, whereas I don't see the GTAV characters as representative of society. However, I think I did when I first played GTAV the year it came out. The last game I played was James Bond First Light – and that's for the escapism you describe, I got to "be" James Bond, great. But in the same way, the game and story felt relevant today, with aspects being believable in 2026, which is a stark comparison to how watching Thunderball recently made me feel – that was jarring and much harder to "escape" into because of how out of touch it was (obviously understandably so).
satvikpendem 20d ago
The gaming world, which is what I presume they meant, is much different today. The days of clunky gunplay and insta-failing a mission for going 10 feet out of the correct path are long gone and would be tiresome for most gamers.
- danpalmer 20d ago
  Absolutely, I replayed some of GTAV is ~2018 it already felt a bit clunky in that respect. I think some of this is technological, but much of it is style. There are likely limitations that forced some of those issues back in 2013, but I think it's more down to game design practices. It doesn't take a lot of tech to give you another 10 feet of leeway and trigger a sound bite with a snarky comment from another character.
  - d3Xt3r 20d ago
    Wait till you replay the earlier games. I bought the definitive edition trilogy in a sale, only just started playing thru them. Decided to skip GTA III completely after seeing the reviews and lack of unofficial patches. Vice City feels much more playable after adding a bunch of patches, but unfortunately it doesn't fix the clunkyness and difficulty of the missions. I'm only like 7 or 8 missions in and feel like quitting, having to retry several missions multiple times. Especially that RC helicopter mission, I've no idea how I even managed to complete that (took like 6 retries). But I'll somehow try and chug thru it. Hopefully San Andreas is lot better (and given the number of mods available for it, it feels like it would be).
    - danieldisu 20d ago
      The RC Helicopter mission was already frustrating back when the game came out, I vividly remember that mission
- bigstrat2003 20d ago
  > The days of clunky gunplay and insta-failing a mission for going 10 feet out of the correct path are long gone and would be tiresome for most gamers. Let's not kid ourselves that either of those things is going to be any different in GTA 6.

scrollop 20d ago

It will likely be 1-2 years after release for the PC version to become available, judging from previous iterations.

danpalmer 20d ago
I know that's the likely timeline. My hope is that because consoles today look a lot more like PCs than they did in 2013 (or earlier during development), that it might be sooner, plus from leaks we know that development appears to mostly be happening on PC (I mean for real builds not just engine tools and cross-compiling). But I realise that's just hope. It's probably also about business priorities and PC is just not a huge market.

feverzsj 20d ago

It runs 30fps maximum on consoles.

K3UL 20d ago

Just from the video you can gather that there's much more than just a visual upgrade. The fact that you can apparently just rob random stores, that there seems to be specific ways to open cars (so different cars, different difficulties?), the variety of activities, and the pnjs that seem to remember you, etc. I was afraid it would not live up to the hype, but now I think it just might

ButlerianJihad 20d ago
[flagged]

Zylokloto 20d ago

For sure its enough. We haven't had a GTA game for a decade. There was some interview with the Skyrim people who didn't want to do the next skyrim because of the success of Skyrim. Lets be honest, just make another Skyrim a little bit better here, a little bit better there, new stores done. A game is better than no game especially after that much time

tuesdaynight 20d ago

Where people got this billions cost from? I doubt that they spent that much in GTA VI. RDR2 gave the base for GTA VI (engine and things like that), so I just find really odd they would spend 2 billions on the rest

Paratoner 19d ago
They've themselves said they've at least doubled in size since RDR2 for this game, with a studio, for example, SOLELY dedicated to random crowd NPCs systems(!) With the average Sony game with a fraction of this game's features costing upwards of 400mill, don't be so sure this behemoth didn't hit the 1.5 to 2 bill mark. Paying a growing number of devs, testers, plus insane amounts of marketing push for over a decade adds up more than you may think.
ErneX 19d ago
Other less complex recent AAA games cost 300-500 million, this game is easily between 1 and 2 billion, specially if you include marketing. And just GTA Online is making 10 million USD every week. The game screams money just looking at the sheer density of the city/map and the level of detail. There’s simply nothing quite like this, as usual with Rockstar.

maxglute 19d ago

As someone who finds Rockstar gameplay mid, deep down want GTA6 fail and Rockstar turn into engine company like unreal. I know big part of the formula is $$$ but there's so much neat stuff in Rockstar games that AAA hasn't gotten close to in 10 years and I sense won't.