It is not hyperbole to say that GTA 6 is the most anticipated videogame of all time. That'll happen when one of the most acclaimed game developers of all time takes 13 years to finally put out a new game in one of the most popular series of all time.
That's a hell of a lot of pressure for the army of developers at Rockstar. In a conversation with our friends at Edge for the magazine's big inside look at GTA 6, Rockstar North head of development Aaron Garbut spoke about meeting the series' absurd standards.
"We can't just trot out something that's what people might expect, or that was the easy thing to do," he says. "We've not compromised on the scale, the detail, the interactivity, the story, the open world."
Despite the studio's famously secretive posture, Garbut says the team is very much aware of the galactic expectations, and deployed an illustrative metaphor to communicate how he thinks they've managed to meet them.
"I feel like we've built a pyramid on Everest."
While my mind instantly goes to an eventual GTA 6 mod that'll let me ride a giant pyramid down the biggest mountain in Leonida (will fake Florida have mountains?), I have little reason to doubt Garbut's claims here. Impressions, leaks, and Rockstar's own communications suggest that GTA 6 is doubling down on the systemic details that elevated Red Dead Redemption 2 from 'GTA with horses' to a crime-forward life sim.
That game's missions were Rockstar's familiar brand of organized crime, but the things you spent time doing between them were quite new for a mainstream game: Eating, drinking, grooming yourself, camping, browsing, and making small talk with locals. These actions often had some gameplay ramifications, but it was common to perform because it felt like the human thing to do.
Grand Theft Auto has experimented with these little human exercises for a long time—eating healthy in San Andreas, going on dates in GTA 4—but Rockstar's aims for GTA 6 sound like we'll be making little choices like this constantly. Maybe they'll end up being overboard for some, but I for one can't wait to set out on a mission and realize I need to stop for gas.
There's still no announced PC release date for GTA 6. Rumor has it that it won't be a long wait, but we'll believe it when we see it. Rockstar usually puts at least seven months between console and PC versions, and it took a year-and-a-half for GTA 5 to come to PC.
