Grand Theft Auto 6 has been delayed again. Six months later than its May 2026 date and a full year on from its original late 2025 window, we can now expect GTA 6 on 19th November, 2026. And amongst all the many not-that-interesting things it means for other companies’ revised expectations, release dates, quarterly earnings and sales targets, there is one interesting thought I’ve seen doing the rounds. What if GTA 6, coming at least 13 years after GTA 5, has taken so long to make that it’s actually been left behind by the genre this series helped to define? What if it’s so late, it’s just plain outdated?
On the surface at least, there’s good reason to believe it will be. GTA 5 was in some ways already behind the times, its tale of masculine listlessness and false American dreams, that arrived in 2013, really a reaction to the financial crisis of 2008. The things you do in that game had hardly evolved since GTA 4 – in fact really they’d hardly evolved since GTA 3. You drive from A to B and watch cutscenes of assorted mobsters, weirdos, livers-on-the-fringe, then you chase another vehicle and/or do some shooting. Those tasks existed within a massive-for-the-time open world, which had some optional side activities and a wonderfully systemic twist that turned it into a playground. GTA 5 was far more an expansion than an evolution: you can do more things, but they still all exist within the same basic structure. The shape of the game is the same, only enlarged. I remember a defining point of awe at the time of GTA 5’s launch being the fact you could, if you liked, just go and play some tennis.
In that sense then, GTA 6 doesn’t have a hope. There were two years between GTA: San Andreas and GTA 4. Five years between GTA 4 and GTA 5. And now 13 years as a minimum to GTA 6. The odds of it landing any successful cultural satire are stacked against it – culture these days if anything seems to be accelerating, not only changing over time but changing faster as that time goes by, juiced up by the refracting, self-referring impact of social media and increasingly digitised life – while the shape of open world design has, surely, dramatically moved forward since development on GTA 6 started in earnest.
Well, maybe not. In fact let me rephrase that: definitely not. On the design front at least (narratively there’s more of a point to be made here, but let’s come back to that) I’d argue open world games have been if anything defined by their extraordinary stagnation. The industry GTA 6 is launching into is dramatically changed from the one Rockstar last entered, certainly, even with Red Dead Redemption 2. It’s just the main thing that’s changed about it is how much slower it’s managed to evolve.
In fact GTA 5, and the GTAs before it, built much of what’s considered ‘modern’ in open world design today, namely systemic – or lightly systemic – open world design, of the kind cited most frequently in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. Before Zelda had you freezing boulders and winding up a club like Happy Gilmore’s driver, GTA had you piling up sports cars at a gas station on Sunset Boulevard and pulling the pin on a grenade. Tracing lineage in video games is never as simple as going from Game A to Game B, of course. But as much as lines can be drawn, the vast majority of big-budget open world games have been – and continue to be – a continuation of themes established with the same few that influenced them. Namely The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim, The Witcher 3 and, well, GTA.
There are additions to the formula, of course. But the things that have been added have hardly been revolutionary. In the past few years there’s been an uptick in breathtakingly simple environmental puzzles, for instance, often resolved before you can match two pictures (a fairly simple task for a two-year-old) by a babbling sidekick or self-narrating protagonist. We’ve seen a lot more painted ledges, too. We had that period with a lot of menus where you had to navigate with a circular cursor that made you click and hold to do something that should require you to just click. We’ve got lots of three-branch skill trees, gear scores, and other assorted light RPG systems, which were all here long before 2013. A flurry of hand-gliders, a surge of climbable towers, many grappling hooks. The hyper-detailed HUD, too, remains a force to be reckoned with (apart from rare cases such as Ghost of Yōtei and Tsushima, which admirably removed it almost entirely. But then did add in ‘guiding wind’, which is really just the GTA sat-nav of feudal Japan.)
Before anyone – justifiably – protests a lack of generosity here, we have of course had some bigger twists. Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, of course, and the school of restraint – or hands-off design, or exploratory minimalism, however it feels best to put it – that married them with the Souls formula in Elden Ring and also sprouted outwards into smaller games, like the glorious Sable. You could also point at No Man’s Sky and Sea of Thieves as two more, plus Dragon’s Dogma 2. There’s been a marked arrival of open-area games that are defined by the trust and freedom they afford you as a player. The space they grant for – as buzzwordy as they are – a player’s expression and creativity. The systems they set up for you like a pile of coloured blocks, to clunkily revisit that two-year-old’s-toys analogy, before promptly stepping aside.
But is that what we think of when we think of the modern open world? Is that what’s being made, en masse, by what remains of the triple-A old guard? I’d argue it’s more a branch of it. A healthy one, no doubt, but one sprouting off in a certain direction away from the main stem, offering only the occasional, brilliant flower.
Attribution
So no. Instead, the defining trait of the open-world game in the past twelve years has been, if anything, their stout resistance to any real revolution. In fact in many ways it’s the lack of lessons taken from games like Breath of the Wild that makes them what they are. Hence that brief wave of gliders, for instance, or the climb-anything approach of Horizon Forbidden West – a nice touch, but one that sits within the absolute anti-Breath of the Wild, a game entirely built on the developer actively teaching, guiding, explaining, being visible at all times – but nothing beyond Elden Ring going truly systemic, or truly hands-off.
A bigger question, undoubtedly, is GTA Online. It’s another trend-setter: a digital third space, communal after-school hangout zone, a metaverse (no, really) and a home for user-generated content, two markers of the future that our great thought-leaders have yet to move beyond. After a rare biffing-it with RDR2’s battle royale mode, that followed the trends of the day rather than setting them (albeit from within an otherwise genuinely interesting, if more niche, online life sim of its own), this is the big dilemma for Rockstar. It’s also where an awful lot of the money needs to come from, setting aside the presumably vast sales of the base game. But GTA Online now is if anything its own game, set aside from the numbered entries – and it had the rare fortune of getting to the future early. People still just want to hang out together online. Rockstar could simply make a bigger, fancier, more elaborate version of GTA Online – a sequel, basically – and I suspect it would do perfectly well.
As for the narrative side, it’s clear there’s a greater risk of being behind the curve if Rockstar has opted to treat its signature lampooning as something that must be hyper-specific – as in, if GTA 6 features obvious avatars for real people, real products, companies or events. (Or, for that matter, if for some reason it hasn’t shed the older GTA games’ habit of occasionally punching down). But it needn’t be that way either. The magic of satire is that it tends to be pretty universal. Autocrats, economic systems, con-artists, self-appointed messiahs will always be timely. As will the big ideas – the American Dream, the corruptible ideal, hope and despair. And very human struggles we’ve seen Rockstar approach, to varying success, in almost every GTA game since the turn of the millennium, and indeed most recently in Red Dead Redemption 2. The real causes of the way the world is today have always been there, after all, since long before the first Grand Theft Auto.
One prevailing thought through all this is that these games are put on pedestals without justification, that they have never been revolutionary, at least since GTA 3’s first true take on the still ‘modern’ open world. The reality is that’s kind of secondary. They’re on a pedestal because of how well they sell. You make this much money in a medium like video games, you become this incomprehensibly big – 220m units sold big – and you start to create your own force of gravity. Executives at publicly-traded companies start getting questions about whether you’re doing what GTA’s doing, and if not, why not. And then it cascades: game directors and producers start getting asked those questions. Then quest designers and narrative designers, and the rest. A large chunk of the games industry will simply make GTA again, whatever GTA 6 is, because GTA makes an unbelievable amount of money.
And that, in a way, is its own answer to the question of how up-to-date a new Grand Theft Auto game might feel, as far forward as late 2026. So much of modern video games can be traced back to Grand Theft Auto, and so many future games will fall into its gravitational pull, that GTA 6 is almost by definition never going to be outdated in comparison. It needn’t be a design revolution, nor whatever follows GTA Online. It can just be more of the same, executed to an even higher standard of attentiveness, human observation, impossible detail. It will set trends by virtue of success; by virtue of the nature of open-world games and this series’ pre-existing, unwavering influence; by virtue of video games’ increasingly ‘mature’ status as a medium, that leads it to iterate and tinker rather than revolutionise. And by virtue of the rest of the industry’s financial requirement to play it safe. Whatever kind of world GTA 6 turns out to be, the mainstream gaming world is only ever going to follow its lead.