Rockstar has a jaw-droppingly great track record, and I can understand giving them the benefit of the doubt and having super high expectations. They're one of the few entities that has earned that respect.

However with some of the trends in the gaming industry, as well as the heavier focus on multiplayer and transactions that nickel-and-dime customers, I'd personally temper my expectations about any future titles to avoid disappointment.

In general, pre-ordering isn’t a great idea. Money is worth more now than in the future, and the quality and price of the game does not change significantly between the last day to preorder and the first day reviews drop.

You’re absolutely right, I’m done preordering games. I didn’t do it much anyway, but nowadays it’s just not worth it. The most recent and egregious example that comes to my mind was the latest Battlefield. My goodness was that a turd, and lots of people felt rightfully burned after preordering that game and essentially getting a totally unfinished product.

This is what happens when game companies basically set their revenue targets based on preorders, and games as a product are non-refundable.

It's very easy to imagine a bean counter saying "we hit our preorder target, let's cut back our development budget now, release it, and we've already basically maximized our profits on this.

The state of the game industry at large is pretty gross as a result of a lot of the money incentives not lining up around building great games.

The problem is TakeTwo is a shit house on fire just like Ubisoft, EA, and Activision so it feels like the entrenched leadership at Rockstar has been beating back the TakeTwo culture but it's always a losing battle so when does it finally break. (See Blizzard and Bioware)

The basic decision to make the heists a focal point of the game - drawing on the reaction to "Three Leaf Clover" from GTA IV - was a good one, yet it did make the overall experience feel shorter. A series of three short stories as opposed to one long arc.

Whereas in GTA IV, by the time you confront Dimitri on the island, I felt as if something was really accomplished and it was about revenge for what had taken place, over many years, not the just the handful of slights by a person whom the main characters got screwed by.

It's all about financial incentives and this far down the pipeline it ain't happening. GTA Online is a multibillion dollar business, GTA V Singleplayer not so much.

Games that followed these incentives to the end of the line joined the hegemonial blob though, becoming indistinct and uninteresting in the long run. Jack of all Trades, Master of None, but people will buy masters only in the longrun. And take for example minecraft, which proofed that the whole market is willing to dissappear for years on end to into a simulation were the player can tell its own singleplayer story, uninterested in any content any company has to sell.

One more longterm succesfull open-source sim of that kind without online shop and half the industry is forever gone.

Minecraft can be used as digital Legos, making it just as much of a toy as a game.

I think you're overestimating what's necessary for online to be successful. GTA V is almost 10 years old and still raking in cash from online. The focus does not need to be on online play for it to be successful, they have billions of dollars in evidence that confirms that.

I would say that GTAV is focused on online play. A lot of the content is only accessible that way, ESPECIALLY the content added after launch. If you look through the list of new missions/locations/vehicles added to the game[1], they're almost exclusively only in GTAO

[1]: For example here: https://www.gtaboom.com/gta-online-update-dlc-history/

I have to admit that I got GTA V for free. But still even if I had paid the full price I would have been entirely happy with the single player story line.

I will likely buy next GTA on launch if it launches at same time on PC as consoles.

I wonder if they will be able to maintain a bad boy story line in a world where you are supposed to not offend anyone. I think they will be successful if they do, but I fear they won't and gta6 will be insipid.

You're very free to offend anyone in the real world. "The world" is bigger than the environment curated by big tech from SV and US-media.

Treat yourself to some GTA V radio shows (you'll find them on youtube), Rockstar plays the cultural meta game better than other company, they do legit art playing with the dominant political stereotypes. Rockstar are not in the market of appealing to cowards, their entire brand identity revolves around the exact opposite.

GTA V came out in 2013. "The world" has changed considerably.

I can only assume you would be surprised by the contents of the aforementioned radio shows (and lots of the scripted conversations in game), because they dealt with this exact topic in 2013 - in depth and par excellence. GTAs audience explicitly wants an over the top explicit, non-politically correct product.

In the last game, a main character (Trevor) was introduced by stomping an npcs brain into the ground before finding rests of it on his shoe. There is nothing pc about GTA, it takes place in a cynic take on reality that doesn’t respect the common sentimental denominator of marketing departments in the real world.

>In the last game, a main character (Trevor) was introduced by stomping an npcs brain into the ground before finding rests of it on his shoe.

I disagree, and I think this section from paul graham (http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html) captures the dynamic perfectly.

>Of course, we're not just looking for things we can't say. We're looking for things we can't say that are true, or at least have enough chance of being true that the question should remain open. But many of the things people get in trouble for saying probably do make it over this second, lower threshold. No one gets in trouble for saying that 2 + 2 is 5, or that people in Pittsburgh are ten feet tall. Such obviously false statements might be treated as jokes, or at worst as evidence of insanity, but they are not likely to make anyone mad. The statements that make people mad are the ones they worry might be believed. I suspect the statements that make people maddest are those they worry might be true.

In the context of GTA, I think themes like drugs, violence, and sex is probably safe, but culture war topics like reproductive rights, race (eg. CRT or affirmative action), LGBT rights, or immigration are not.

> culture war topics like reproductive rights, race (eg. CRT or affirmative action), LGBT rights, or immigration are not.

those are exactly the topics GTA has previously touched on/which I recommended to check out the radio shows for, the anecdote wrt Trevor was probably misleading.

I'm fairly certain the person you're replying to is prognosticating about the potential sanitization of the next game. I don't think the content of the older games really impacts that.

I think the person you are replying to is pointing out that the content of the older games, for the most part, aged very well and is more relevant than ever. And this wasn't a coincidence, because if you were paying attention 20+ years ago, you saw the future we were building. Rockstar's writers were paying attention. I expect the content of gta6 to be more prescient than ever.

Correction: your world changed considerably as existing problems became more visible.

Think people forget Rockstar's culture is British in origin, not American

I think that’s more of a right wing meme than reality. Plenty of TV shows and movies revel in “bad boy” storylines. I think what’s changed is that people expect some actual depth in explaining the motivations of “bad” characters, but I don’t think Rockstar has ever really struggled with that, their last few offerings have had relatively well rounded narratives.

If you actually want to know the answer to your question, go play rdr2.

But suffice it to say, there's a difference between being a rebel and being an asshole. No one likes an anti hero who's insecure and goes around kicking people while they're down, they like conflicted characters who know what it's like to be rejected by society and who stands up for others in the same boat.

It is yet to be seen how the writing will be affected. Let's just see whether or not civilians become a protected class and if prostitution is still a thing. We wont know until the game releases so my recommendation is to not preorder. Worst case, we will always have GTA5.