GTA 6 Leaked... really...

This sucks...

Well screw me. I did not expect to wake up yesterday and learn that the single biggest leak in video game history had occurred just hours before I opened my eyes. I reach back and try to compare this with leaks in the past and all I can think of for comparison is Fallout 4, for which a whole number of small bit clips leaked, but this is something else entirely. Grand Theft Auto is a monolith, and a secretive one, to the point where even when we're told that GTA 6 is in active development, we all fully expected to wait several more years before getting so much as a trailer. Now we've have so much more literally shoved atop of us to the detriment of every fan out there. I say detriment because the size of this leak is huge. Apocalyptically big. I'm talking 90+ videos of in-engine footage alongside, allegedly, the source code. Whenever we get a sizeable leak there's an immediate question about whether or not this is going to effect the development process. Let me tell your right now; this leak already had destroyed GTA 6's. The hacker in question might be trying to make a deal with Rockstar to return his ill gotten gains, but the damage is done- development will be set back by months if we're increadibly lucky. If that Source Code gets sold off like he's threatening; that's going to be years.

So I guess this means we can officially kiss Grand Theft Auto Six goodbye as it's probably not coming until the tailend of this generation all because some hacker thought they'd make a quick buck off the team's hard work. Thank you for nothing, unnamed hacker man. Of course this leak is going to be devastating to the Rockstar team and all that, but if you've been around here long enough you'll likely have picked up on the fact that I'm pretty terminally apathetic. I recognise that I should feel bad for them, and compel myself to act like I do, but my real frustration is with how this is going to effect me. I genuinely imagined playing GTA 6 sometime before 2025, now that's looking like a pipe dream and I am fuming. But you want to know what makes me even more pissed; the fact that the leaks have confirmed this game is everything I hoped it wouldn't be.

Yo; spoilers ahead: dip from this entire blog if you don't want to know anything about Grand Theft Auto 6. So first off I, insanely, need to preface this by saying I'm not looking at the quality of the graphics and bemoaning their ruggedness, because this is clearly early test footage. I was actually fairly surprised about how many decent looking textures the game had before remembering that a lot of them were recycled placeholders from GTA V and that Rockstar is a big enough company where they can be texturing and system building simultaneously. (Hence why the protagonists have faces.) I shouldn't need to say that, but apparently there's some utter geniuses there out on the Internet who are upset about the graphical fidelity of a snippet of leaked test footage. Which is just... I don't even know if professional help can stitch your brain back together if you're that far gone...

So what are my issues? Namely that those leaks from a few months back (the 'rumours' I discussed) were all entirely accurate. And yes, that does mean that some of my disgruntlement is informed by the fact that I rather vehemently denounced and 'debunked' those rumours with what I assumed to be very sound logic at the time. I may have even thrown out a "I'll eat my shoes!" which is going to be quite a feat because my boots are steel-capped. (Yet still surprisingly comfy.) But the other half of my ire comes from the fact I didn't want any of these leaks to be true, because they pointed to probably the most boring sounding direction a new Grand Theft Auto could possibly have gone in! Actually, no the most boring direction would have been if this was set in Liberty City again. At least they didn't do that. That might have killed me off.

Miami. It's set in bloody Miami. Whereas the original Vice City worked so well because Miami was the cocaine capital of America during that 80's time period, I struggle to see what purpose that city's return serves aside from fan service; for those fans who don't quite understand the significance of a Grand Theft Auto setting. Every game is set exactly where it needs to be to exemplify the many satirical stances that game intends to take on the social climate of time period they're riffing. The Gangster-rap dominance of the 1990's bought GTA to their own version of LA, San Andreas, the financial crisis fed on by Wall Street bought GTA back to Liberty City for GTA IV, and the silicon-dream Hollywood glitz of LA bought GTA to Los Santos for GTA V. What are they exploring this time? The bizarre reputation of the deep south alongside the increasingly volatile politicisation of everything in America? Fine targets, if they are, but why do they need to be Miami specific? Honestly; I just wanted to see somewhere wholly new from GTA.

Oh, and the stick-up Bonnie and Clyde couple? They're canon too. Somehow, after two straight games focused on protagonists who specialise in stealing stuff, Rockstar decided that third time is the charm with this new game. Haven't we tired this theme out already? To be fair, these seem to be the single lowest stakes protagonists out of the Van Der Linde Gang and the Townley Terrors (That's what I'm calling the GTA V crew; I think it's got a ring to it.) So we are evolving; only backwards. Oh and the couple protags? Been there, done that. I wonder if the game is going to pit the two of them against each other so that they have to fight to the death at the end? (A Way Out/Splinter Cell: Conviction Co-oP) Or maybe they'll just be emotionally split due to a moral clash that has the two of them at odds until they're forced to come together in order to worm their way out from under the boot of some overarching villain. (Literally the Michael/Trevor dynamic from GTA V!) All of these concepts just seemed to pedestrian, and I expected so much more out of Rockstar. Maybe I expected too much, that's fair. But damn if this set-up fails to get me excited on paper; the marketing team are going to have to put together one blinder of a trailer to turn me around. (If we ever get a trailer after those leaks.)

Rockstar have reacted in typical fashion to bring down the leaks, but either by bad providence or design, the leak itself happened on a Sunday when nobody was working, meaning the leaks had an entire day to spread around the Internet. At this point people are going to be picking through and analysing these leaks no matter what Rockstar want to do about it from a legal standpoint unless they intend to access Arsenal Gear to rewrite the internet's flow of data; they're screwed. And I understand how pissed this is all probably making them. No one wants to show off their unfinished work. Although on the otherhand, personally I find it really interesting to see a huge production mega game like this in such an early stage of production and testing just because we can get a glimpse of the process which these types of big budget games go through. Whenever you get a development documentary you always see the games when they're looking polished with already finished textures plastered over late-test animations, but this is raw; so much so that there's loads of placeholder assets such as Trevor Phillip voice lines over some NPCs (Upon further inspection; I think that's actually the VO of the new male protagonist. He sounds a lot like Trevor when he gets angry).  It's a glimpse into the design process we wouldn't have gotten otherwise.

Still, I would have preferred to actually see the game itself pop up in front of me so I can play the damn thing, but this is going to fly in the face of that and screw it up for everyone; so thanks very much mister hacker man. or hacker boy, if the alleged facts about this case hold up any merits. The worst part about this whole thing? We didn't even learn anything that revolutionary about the game. I mean, we know the main character's names now, and where the game is going to be set, but we don't know what Rockstar is going to bring to the table to revolutionise this entry, where the story is going to go, or how this is going to push forward the open world genre. We have a few stolen clips of video that are nowhere near worth the extra 12 months they're going to put onto development, so all-in-all; what a crappy gift to wake up to. It must be Christmas in Britain all over again.