I haven’t played anything in the series in probably over a decade and am well aware I’m asking a userbase who prob isn’t easily hyped by these things but even outside of that I hear the hype always talked about in third person (“it’ll sell so well”, “hype is enormous”) rather than first person (“I can’t wait to get it”, “I’m so excited!”)
I’m not claiming it’s all manufactured hype or predicting a flop here, just wondering if the wait becoming a meme has kicked off an undue expectation so I guess the question is do you know anybody who is or are willing to admit to a genuine excitement?
Yes, I’m very excited. Every time I’ve played one of the main, numbered entries in the series, I absolutely loved the experience.
Each one brought something new and unique to gaming, and from what I’ve seen, this one promises to deliver in a big way.
Are you singling out VC and SA? o.0
Only in that those games were not the big leap forward in tech the main numbered games always are.
VC and SA were the same engine as III.
VI is a whole new engine and game systems.
Interesting. It gave me pause, because I kinda saw GTA IV as a step back from what I wanted/expected from the series. It’s very gray and realistic. Gone are the random weapon pickups and powerups, kill frenzies and rampages (actually those were removed in SA but you know what I mean). Obviously the graphics were a huge step up. The way you could fly through the windshield and the drunk physics were top notch, and I ended up enjoying the story and the gameplay. It’s not a bad game, or a bad GTA by any means. Still, I’d would sooner replay VC or SA than IV.
I liked how GTA V brought back some of the stuff. It’s not as arcadey as the old 3D games, but it’s more colourful, both in design and the characters. And the mechanic of switching between 3 protagonists works remarkably well and makes it stand out.
I like this take on the series as those jumps really have been easy to see even from an outside perspective
What would you consider some of the next “jumps” announced thus far or do you mean that more in a “faith in the developer” sorta way?
From what I’ve read / watched, Rage 8, the engine used for Red Dead Redemption 2, was basically a prototype for doing GTA6, which is on the Rage 9 engine.
These large open world games want you to think there is a large, city scale sim running, but before RDR2, this was all just smoke and mirrors at best.
One key thing Rockstar has been working for GTA6 is separating the various simulations from each other, so that local car and player physics, general traffic, pedestrian pathing, etc, are all fully isolated, and in fact will run on different cores of the processor.
The end result is that you can have large world scale simulations of traffic and pedestrians running all the time, without wasting any graphical or physics processing power on them. That’s why the world of RDR2 feels like it’s happening whether your character is there to experience it or not. Unlike most open world games where you can just tell “I’m the main character and the world is just a local bubble projected around me”.
Even in GTAV, which is basically the best of the old way, you can still see vehicles spawn in and out of existence. Cops just appear on the map because you have a wanted level, things feel like west world, where the animatronics only start their scripts when you walk in the bar.
GTA6 is supposed to do away with all of that. Cars, people, animals, the weather, will persist even when you aren’t there to look at them. Events will just be going on in the world. Pedestrians will report your description and car to the police, which will then dispatch local cops to chase you. These various systems able to interact with each other is going to provide far deeper emergent game play across the board.
Far more than higher poly count / more pixels / bigger map, having these core game systems isolated from each other and able to run continuously, will change what a video game world is and can feel like.
When you asked if people were really excited about the game, this for me is at the heart of the hype.