Okay; GTA VI prediction time!

 The Florida man, cometh!

It is time. The time of predictions. Grand Theft Auto 6 is no longer the worst kept secret in the industry, it is fact that has been confirmed by Sam Houser with a release trailer coming later this year and a rumoured release window of December 2024. Sooner than I expected but also not soon enough to prevent groans of disappointment. Like all things in life, news of this leaked out before becoming public but even then I think a lot of people were taken aback by just how blaise this whole thing was. When the schedule was made apparent, the expectation was some sort of slick heavily rendered teaser trailer only touching on the name of Grand Theft Auto to build up everyone's excitement for the upcoming trailer, you know- Like Mass Effect 4 did. But instead we just got the CEO giving us a Twitlonger in what must be the single lowest effort way to tease a game ever.

My prediction. This is in response to the leaks from a while back. Without them there would be more mystery. We'd still be making bets about the setting we'd be visiting, whether Rockstar are still sticking to the multiple character angle, all things that would have made for teaser trailer bait in some sort of vague commercial filled with red herrings and subtly millisecond glances of palm trees or the franchises' first female protagonist since 2. At this point all of that would just be a total waste of money because everyone and their mother knows exactly what GTA VI is going to be in it's raw metrics. We know we're going to Vice City, we know there are two protagonists in a 'Bonnie and Clyde' style dynamic and we even know what they look like. Better to spend that money making the actual proper trailer more interesting, I suspect.

But that isn't the only predication I have up my hat, because you see I have an absolute wild one for when I think we're actually going to see this trailer. You see, rather bizarrely this announcement told us up front when we'd be seeing this trailer, which isn't really Rockstar's style at all. Crane you neck all the way back to Grand Theft Auto V and they leveraged every ounce of their reputation to keep the internet arrested. Rockstar threw up a livestream, slapped on a counter and made everyone wait. They could do that, it was their show and we all danced to their schedule. Now it's true the world is slightly different now and the Rockstar audience has expanded exponentially, I'm pretty darn sure they still have enough pull to do exactly that again and still end up as national news before the end of the day. The only reason I can think for why Rockstar don't care to play into the mystique anymore would be because they are no longer in control of their own schedule. Perhaps because for the first time in about twenty years, they're relinquishing control to someone else.

Call it a wide shot. Call it making connections where non exist. Call me an unhinged madman. But I think the nerd with the ear of all the world might have finally caught his white whale. Because think for a second- is there any other big gaming event happening in early December? Maybe an annual institution that has spent the past few years legitimising itself as one of the most widely viewed award ceremonies in the world? And is Geoff Keighley really a bad enough dude to secure the reveal of Grand Theft Auto 6 as the centrepiece of this year's Game Awards showcase? I think the man would be actually ripping chunks out of his hair if he wasn't. (Especially given how much air would be sucked out of the room if GTA 6 was revealed independently around the same time as the Awards- Sam Houser would be the worst kind of dick to pull out such inconsiderate scheduling.)

Next, I predict that even with the reveal trailer of GTA VI we will not be hearing anything about Grand Theft Auto Online 2, which is surely coming attached to the game when it launches. Now that might be something of an overly obvious prediction given that we've only been promised a trailer and not a gameplay overview, but what I'm really saying is that Rockstar have a tight enough grasp of their audience to understand the clear split between players of the game and junkies to the addiction. GTA single player games are masterfully constructed works of digital art slathered atop a perfect canvass- artesian delight. GTA online content is hastily slapped together junk tied together with monetisation strings and tedium inducing loops and knots. Sharing any marketing space between one and the other would only serve to diminish the presence of the core product.

Obviously there will be a Grand Theft Auto Online 2 and as far as that experience goes I'm actually quite interested to see what the team have cooking up. Okay, maybe interested in not the quite word- perhaps... morbidly curious. Because the makeup of what GTA Online was back when it launched in 2013 is nothing like what the game resembles today in design philosophies. It was conceived as an online hangout longue to blow each other up in, before it became a content generating Live Service wannabe. Red Dead Online was built to serve this style of play off-rip, but the team didn't have a plan to keep providing worthwhile content and that ecosystem shrivelled up and died. GTA Online 2 will have to balance itself between the natural casual playability of base GTA Online and the far more deliberate machinations of the addiction machine trying to sink it's hooks into the common man. Interesting stuff indeed!

Apart from that? Well, I guess it would be a safe enough bet to 'guess' the game is set in Vice City, but a bigger version of the landmass which contains parts of Florida too. We might even 'guess' that the gameplay will have a heavy reliance on stick-up jobs and robbery, to a less flashy degree than the big bank heisting jobs of Grand Theft Auto V. And I guess we might even throw a wild dart in the dark and assume that perhaps we'll have a male and female protagonist named Jason and Lucia; and that Lucia might carry around a bakery of some description forever on her person. But those are just strange and totally unfounded jumps at probability that have absolutely no grounding in fact whatsoever, and you should probably not spare a passing consideration to any single one of them. Garbage theories, is what they are!

It is surreal, deeply and utterly, to think we're looking at the first Grand Theft Auto announcement in ten years. The single biggest independent publisher in the world rising up once again to put a smack-down on industry discourse, is there any more bracing an announcement? It's like learning that The Pope is about to rock up on a live stream to announce a 'Pope 2'; it just doesn't get any bigger than that! And will the event live up to the hype? It depends. Personally, even though we now know to expect something- I think the real way to capture the world's heart is to 'surprise' announce the game during the 'one more thing' section of the game awards- but what do I know anyway, right? Whatever happens, it's just good to see the king getting ready for a speech after all this time. Feels like the first time in... something like 72 years, though I cannot possibly fathom why...