Bombshell news for GTA VI, your PlayStation Plus games for August, and some disappointing news for the Knights of the Old Republic remake. All this on today’s GameSpot News.
A report from Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier gives us the biggest info dump for Grand Theft Auto VI that we’ve ever gotten, both for details on what to expect in the game, as well as behind-the-scenes at Rockster on its development. Firstly, let’s talk about the contents of the game itself.
Bloomberg reports that the game will feature a Latina character, making this the first playable woman in a GTA campaign. This character will be a part of a pair of leads that are meant to be influenced by Bonnie and Clyde, the real life couple that went on a bank robbing spree with their gang during the Great Depression. No word on whether players will get to play as the other character in pairing.
The game has an internal codename, Project Americas, as it was initially meant to feature large swaths of the American continent. However, the scale of the game has been reduced over time, and will be set in the universe’s fictional depiction of Miami; Vice City. The report includes the details that the game will still be quite large, with more interior locations than previous GTA games, and that the developer will be adding additional cities and content over time.
But when can you play it? Some developers on the team told Bloomberg that it will be released sometime in publisher Take-Two’s fiscal 2024, which runs from April 2023 to March 2024. Although some interviewed believed that the game would not hit that window, and would release no sooner than 2024.
The game has been in development since 2014, which if it were to come out in 2024, would mean that development will take ten years, a time period in which Rockstar has gone through some dramatic changes. In 2018, hundreds of Rockstar employees spoke about about issues with crunch and toxicity at the developer, which has reportedly led to some massive cultural shifts at the company.
Employees informed Schreier that morale at Rockstar is at an all time high, thanks to changes in scheduling, converting contractors to full-time employees and the severance of several managers that workers underneath them deemed to be abusive and difficult to work with. This change in culture has guided the content of the game itself, aiming to not “punch down” on marginalized groups, and while previous entries have largely been a satirical look at the United States, several employees pointed out in the report that satirizing today’s United States is more difficult thanks to the US already being a parody of itself.
So if you’re disappointed in having to wait for GTA VI, don’t worry — we’re already living it.
