To this day, GTA 4 remains the one game in the series where Rockstar went beyond the sneering pastiche, parodies, and stereotypes of whichever American city a given title was emulating, and tried doing something more. It didn’t just make fun of all the excesses of American society – it picked the American Dream apart through the viewpoint of a bewildered and stoic immigrant, Nico Bellic, who arrived in Liberty City and wondered where the hell this dream was.
From its dour and dirty colour palette to its choice-driven but ultimately tragic narrative, Grand Theft Auto 4 was the one time when Rockstar really ‘got real’ with the series, before returning to a more superficial story and cast of characters in GTA V that felt like a roll-call of protagonists styled after those in the GTA III Trilogy. Where GTA 4 felt like a bold new narrative direction (that you could argue was explored in the Red Dead Redemption series), GTA V felt like a logical endpoint for a certain style of storytelling – that comical, snooty, obnoxious style that almost unerringly typified the series ever since the very first game. Frankly, it got a little tiring, squeezing every last drop of laughter out of an ageing formula.
That’s why with GTA 6, I’d like to see Rockstar build on what they started in GTA 4 – to keep that scathing humour, sure, but use to actually say about the world in which it takes place. After all, America has become so polarised and absurd in the years since GTA 4 (and GTA 5, for that matter), that there’s untold material to use without that much need to exaggerate it. The world is a much weirder place than it was 10-12 years ago, and it’d be far more fascinating for Rockstar to cast a microscope over it rather than just mock it.
Simply throw a couple of deadpan characters who, despite being criminals, are smarter than – and in some ways detached from – the madness around them, and you’re away. Go the route of the Niko Bellics and Arthur Morgans, rather than the Trevor Whoevers and the Michael De Santas.
The good news is that what little we learned about GTA 6 from that comprehensive leak suggests that the game may be going for a slightly more downbeat tone than its hyperactive and hyperreal predecessor. It’s all just breadcrumbs of course, but they lead to some interesting places.
We know that the game will be set in a fictionalised Florida, which by extension means that Vice City (the GTA world equivalent of Miami) will be the urban centrepiece around which the game revolves. The fact that it’s set in the modern day rather than the highly romanticised 1980s is already a promising sign, and means that the game will be casting its satirical gaze on present-day affairs rather than historical ones (or simply being a great big love letter to 80s cinema and pop culture, like the original Vice City was).
There’s inevitably a lot of spit-and-polish yet to be added to a game that’s not expected to launch until at least 2024, but the aesthetic of the leaked footage also speaks to a more downbeat tone for GTA 6. It may not be exhibiting the grey grittiness of Liberty City, but nor does it have that vibrant sheen of GTA V. This is Florida after all, which is its own weird beast, and in the footage we see damaged roads, the outer walls of roadside cafes stained with exhaust discharge, and a couple of pretty rough-looking protagonists. Granted, there will be more glamorous areas in the game world that we’re yet to see, but colour palette can tell you a lot about the tone a game is going for, and the realistic, dirty look of this very early build of GTA 6 hints at something a little more grounded than the last outing.
Speaking of protagonists, the couple at the heart of the game (described as a kind of Bonnie and Clyde, according to some leaks, and called Jason and Lucia in the major leak) looks set to offer something a little bit different to GTA V’s rather empty throwback anti-heroes. Like GTA 4’s Nico, these two characters offer a chance to interact with the game world through a new perspective – particularly Lucia, a Latin-American woman who’ll be Rockstar’s first ever female protagonist. Jason’s also an intriguing one too. At a glance, his stained clothing and bedraggled appearance could frame him as yet-another ‘trailer trash psycho’ in the mold of Trevor, but I hope out hope that Rockstar uses this character to touch on the problems of poor, white America instead of just presenting it through hillbilly stereotypes.
For those that think a more grounded open-world crime sime just isn’t ‘The Rockstar way’ and that GTA 4 was aberrant in the series, I’d say that Rockstar already has a proven track record of great storytelling that intertwines larger-than-life personalities, satire, and ultra-violence into a compelling narrative. GTA 4, after all, pretty much paved the way for the Red Dead Redemption series, setting a more reflective tone and giving the player meaningful ways to shape their pathos-filled stories.
The legacy of GTA 4 is right there in Rockstar’s most recent game, it’s just a question of whether they’ll be brave enough to implement that tone in a series that’s so often shied away from truly substantial storytelling.
