Morgan Park
I renewed my Netflix subscription so I could dutifully report that, yep, GTA 6 looks cool as heck. But about those missions…
The big gameplay reveal for GTA 6 has come and gone, and I’m surprised by how mixed I am on it.
In some ways, I’m more excited than ever play it. Vice City gives an amazing first impression—I’m already convinced it’ll be the special sort of open world that you just want to exist in. Rockstar is packing it full of little activities and human touches that might make GTA 6 a borderline life sim: eating, drinking, sleeping, recreation, hanging out with buds, skydiving, dirt bike racing, and store robbing (I didn’t say the activities were all aspirational). I’m seeing a lot of stuff I want to do.
That stuff looks so good it’s almost overwhelming, but the bits in between all that—those fragments of story missions—were less impressive. I was hoping 13 years would change the shape of GTA’s authored action, but Rockstar is still very much working with the same tools.
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In the first mission we see Jason and Lucia doing a drug deal for Boobie Ike, and I bet you can guess what happens: The pair exchange some uneasy words with the buyer, then the deal goes wrong when the cops show up. Our heroes shoot their way out of the building.
A mission shown off later in the video takes place further in the story: Jason and Lucia are more established, taking on a job as security detail for some corpo bigwig. There’s some walking, some talking, a speech about a company’s new US headquarters, then the party is interrupted by professional killers with guns. The pair shoot their way out of the building.
This isn’t just a trend throughout this gameplay reveal. Rockstar missions have had this pattern since the early GTA days: meet a weird new character, talk and drive with them for a while, then shoot 18 people, mission over. It’s as if Rockstar believes every story beat has to check off the same bullet points. The format wore especially thin in Red Dead 2’s overly long story, so much that I’ve struggled to replay the whole thing despite loving everything else about it.
My hope is that the majority of GTA 6 can buck this trend, and that today’s reveal prioritized action for the sake of spectacle. I want to see quieter moments—missions centered around choices, mysteries, or just having fun. I know it’s GTA, but wouldn’t the explosions of action be more thrilling if they weren’t always expected?
We’ve got a lot of GTA 6 reading for you today, including a live blog that catalogued details from the reveal as they happened.
