Beginning in 1997, Grand Theft Auto has been a platform for Rockstar to expound its version of satire. The cast of the original GTA is a nihilistic rogue's gallery of corrupt cops and seedy politicians. The poster that comes in the game's box says it was co-developed by 'The Hand of Satan,' marking the first of many middle fingers that Rockstar has raised to good taste. But in Grand Theft Auto 4, and protagonist Niko Bellic, Rockstar becomes more sympathetic, more humanist.
Rockstar's caricature of American and western culture becomes more vivid and keenly felt because we see it through the eyes of Niko, who – even if they are a little twisted, and rooted in trauma – has a personal code of ethics and virtues. It's not a game about how everything and everyone is terrible. There is good in the world of GTA 4, but it's being compressed and suffocated by the bad. That's a compelling story. That feels more honest and well observed.
Grand Theft Auto 5 (I'm talking purely about the single-player story stuff here) has two enormous problems. Firstly, it's the script. For 40 or so hours, all Michael, Franklin, and Trevor do is yell at one another and argue. That's what they do when they first meet. That's what they do on every mission. That's what they do towards the game's end. Steven Ogg gives one of the most spirited performances in recent gaming history, but Rockstar squanders it by having him (and Ned Luke, and Shawn Fonteno) repeat the same scene 20 times over.
In GTA 5, everyone just hates each other, and everyone's horrible, and nothing means anything. Michael's wife is cheating on him. His therapist is only interested in getting paid, and then selling Michael's story to Vinewood. Franklin fights with his aunt. Trevor's mom hates him. It's all just one big plague pit, and nobody has any complexity. Besides being a horribly simplistic type of satire, this renders Grand Theft Auto 5 dramatically inert.
Red Dead Redemption, which Rockstar released three years earlier, and Max Payne 3, from 2012, both have characters with ambition and drive, who want to do something or become something. Grand Theft Auto 5 has just one point to make – everything and everybody sucks – and it makes it repeatedly, from the opening cutscene to the last mission.
I can understand why that might feel kind of negligible, or, on the contrary, like it's actually the point of the game. Mechanically and experientially, GTA 5 – like San Andreas – is based on abandon, and doing what you want without worrying about consequences. With that in mind, it makes sense that the world be characterized as a place where nothing matters. It's a playground. If you want to shoot all those people over there and then blow up their cars, that's totally fine, because they're horrible and so is your character.
But that's the second big problem with GTA 5: the combat system is designed in such a way that it makes it impossible to cut loose. Guns are weak. Enemies are smart. You die easily. If GTA 5's writing is meant to permit you to indulge in all of its sandbox vices, the mechanics pull you back – they force you to think responsibly. And so Grand Theft Auto 5 doesn't have the nuance or the narrative substance of GTA 4, but also doesn't have the sandbox game recreation of GTA 3 and Vice City. Even if I accept GTA 5 on its – you're not meant to care, it's supposed to be cynical and nihilistic, that's the point – it still doesn't work.
But GTA 5 was 12 years ago, and between then and now, Rockstar has made the remarkable Red Dead Redemption 2. Considering that these games are co-created by hundreds of people, it seems strange to credit 'Rockstar' as a single, authorial entity, to try to chart the development of the studio's style and voice, and its preoccupations, in the way that you might with a career novelist or a musician. But between GTA 5 and Red Dead Redemption 2, it feels like Rockstar, so much as it can be characterized as an individual, went through some kind of precipitous emotional growth spurt.
You take a scene from GTA 5 and a scene from RDR 2, and it's hard to believe that any of the same people were involved. It's not just the dialogue and the drama. It's how it plays. Grand Theft Auto 5 feels stiff and like it's hemming you in. Red Dead Redemption 2 is so expressive. The magic of this game is that, even though you can 'go anywhere' and 'do anything,' the characterization of Arthur Morgan is so convincing and rock solid that you want to behave, as a player, like you think Arthur would behave. And so with everything you do, you're exploring your agency and discovering the allowances that the game offers you in of interaction while also building the character, and building the story. It's freeform, but it's never empty.
That's what gives me hope for GTA 6. From what we know so far, the entire game is rooted in the relationship between Jason and Lucia. The characters in Grand Theft Auto 5 act like they don't care about anything and nothing matters to them, and because of that, a lot of the missions feel directionless or meaningless.
On the contrary, one of the things that makes RDR 2 work so well is that Arthur loves and wants to protect the rest of the van der Linde gang. When he does something dreadful, it feels like it's driven by something moral, or some greater, more noble intent. And that gives everything more meaning and weight. The same is true of Niko Bellic – GTA 4 loses this thread the longer it goes on, but at least in the opening few hours, it feels like Niko is trying to make a better life for himself and for Roman, and that gives him depth, and also gives depth to what you're doing, as him.
If Jason and Lucia have this love and mutual dependency, I'd like to believe that everything you can do in GTA 6 somehow leads back to that. Open-world games where you can just 'do anything,' regardless of context or whether it's consistent with the premise and the characters, quickly get boring, and feel kind of bad for the soul – junk gaming. The relationship between Jason and Lucia could, hopefully, give GTA 6 a center, something with gravity that pulls the rest of the game towards it and keeps it close. It gives me reason to believe that GTA 6 won't be driven by the same meaninglessness as Grand Theft Auto 5.
More broadly, I'd like to think that the Rockstar of 2025 is more the Red Dead Redemption 2 Rockstar than the GTA 5 Rockstar. Complicating this, both Grand Theft Auto 4 and the original Red Dead felt like they represented the emergence of what I would subjectively call a 'better' Rockstar – and then it made GTA 5. There's the possibility that Grand Theft Auto has become the series where Rockstar goes to debase itself. But I hope not.