(Coming 2025! Hah!)
Well, I've watched the "Extended Look" trailer and so I know a bit more about Grand Theft Auto 6 than I did 20 minutes ago. I'd managed to avoid seeing any of the "Leek" stuff, but the extended look gives us a lot more of an idea of what the game is going to look like when it ends up in our sweaty mitts come November. So let's have a lookie. Spoilers (for the trailer) ahead, obviously...
Cloying, grubby, claustrophobic
That's how it felt when it opened, as Lucia and Jason are sent on an errand to pick up drugs for some unseen crime lord. They pull up in a car, and enter a seedy looking apartment block where the drugs are being made.
One weird thing I picked up on was that NPCs looked like they were playing statues - standing stock still until you approached them or interacted with them, but it might just have been my eyes playing tricks on me.
When I say boom boom boom, you say bam bam bam.
I'm surprised by how fluid the gunplay looked, but it looks like it's adopted the same mix of auto-targeting and manual targeting that GTA V had. No bad thing, because going back and playing older GTA titles (where you're literally firing all over the place until the game decides to lock on) was really jarring recently, so this gunplay and cover model works for me. Interestingly you get the first look at how your character interacts with things, and it's fairly subtle and unobtrusive, which is nice. Frame rates look pretty solid but gotta be 30FPS (which is fine, as it makes the game feel a bit more cinematic). No V sync issues, thank fuck.
Just look at us now, we're driving!
The soundtrack is great. Depeche mode? Fuck yes! PREFAB SPROUT? Hell yes! Cliff Richard? OK, we'll allow it. When you see the characters driving for the first time you get a feeling that the cars are heavier than in GTA V, not quite so tail-happy. Gone is the stylised look and feel, replaced by an overall art style that's a lot more Red Dead Redemption 2 (ie realistic and gritty) rather than the quite colourful and cartoonish stuff we've seen in previous GTA games. The proof of the vehicle handling will be taking control for the first time though, but at least cameras-around-corners stuff looks like it's been sorted from older games.
Grand Thicc Auto
The art team obviously likes big butts (and they do not lie). Which is absolutely fine by me. I don't think I saw a single woman in the trailer that wasn't packing plenty of junk in the trunk. And I'm not just talking about potential kidnap victims being shoved unceremoniously in the back of cars. Yeah, me likey!
Planes, Trains and Automobiles
Or more accurately - Cars, Bikes and Parachutes. We got to see a bit more of an aerial view of the city as Lucia leaped off a building, but we also saw her blasting around a dirt bike track, and of course we saw other motorbikes and stuff. Sadly no footage in the trailer of the characters flying choppers or planes but from the "Leek" we've seen confirmation that they can do that at some point.
Vice City is a Nice City
We got a few tiny little bits of trademark GTA humour, but there wasn't an awful lot of it. It feels like the game is a lot more serious in tone, but there are still the terrible "Dad joke" puns for place names and stuff, which is good to see. Overall, Vice City isn't the neon glow-coloured spectacle we all remember with rose-tinted specs from GTA Vice City, but it still looks damned impressive, if absolutely grubby and filthy. I still can't help thinking that I'd have loved GTA VI to have been set in the 80s but I can see why they've gone contemporary with it.
Auto Erotica
The cars look great, from the little convertible BMW 3 Series clone (complete with automatic roof) to some of the heavier gas guzzlers you'd find all over America (in fact on a recent visit there I was a bit disappointed NOT to see that many of them, but I guess it depends which bit of America you visit - New York was just filled with hybrid imports with the odd massive Jeep or Tesla kicking around). Seems to be a huge selection of cars, and less of that "Everything around you looks like what you're driving" stuff that you see in the older games.
Overall
It looks very impressive, immersive, realistic and it remains to be seen whether we can bring ourselves to love and care about the characters as much as we did with previous GTA games (I will definitely miss the interplay between Trevor, Michael and Franklin). But yeah, I'd have to be insane not to come out of seeing that with a purchase in mind. It's going to be huge, and it's also going to set a very high bar for other developers to follow.
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