If reports are true and Grand Theft Auto 6 is, indeed, targeting a 2024 launch, 11 years will have passed between mainline releases. A lot has changed in the past decade, including the landscape of the open-world genre. Will Rockstar be able to keep up with the genre it popularized and helped define? And if so, what will it borrow from the zeitgeist? While we'll get a better look next month when the game's first trailer is set to be officially revealed, Rockstar's history gives us a solid indication of what the studio's next big game will play like.

GTA 5 never really went away thanks to frequent re-releases and regular updates to GTA Online, so it can be easy to forget how many paradigm-shifting sandbox games have launched since it was first released. Here’s a partial list: The Witcher 3, No Man’s Sky, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Outer Wilds, Death Stranding, Elden Ring, and Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.

Those games all changed the way players viewed the genre, but there were plenty of other games released since GTA 5 that have made more gradual improvements or tweaks to the formula. The Far Cry games have endlessly iterated on open-world action. Saints Row 4 stretched the open-world crime genre to its breaking point by giving its lead character superpowers and supersized stakes. Watch Dogs Legion wasn’t a groundbreaking game, but it took GTA’s multiple protagonists and ran with it until you had a whole city worth of operatives at your command. Spider-Man 2 made swapping between protagonists completely seamless. With changes both major and minor altering the landscape of the genre, where does Rockstar fit in?

Well, if Red Dead Redemption 2 is any indication, the studio has no interest in fitting in. That game — an all-time favorite of mine — is defiantly different from the PS4-era mainstream, doubling down on many of Rockstar’s mechanical tics for good and for bad. You can still fail missions by wandering outside the prescribed, but invisible, area the game wants you to stay in. It wants you to complete tasks a certain way and, if you don’t, too bad, start over. Every tiny thing — much of which you would never notice — is animated within an inch of its life. I can’t count the amount of times I’ve been forced to see the words “dynamic horse testicles” while reading about RDR2. The controls are still convoluted and situationally dependent. You still need to hammer the X button to run.

Red Dead Redemption 2 is a great game, but it didn’t feel like “2018.” Whereas its chief GOTY competitor God of War was following industry trends set by The Last of Us, Red Dead Redemption 2 was responding to mechanical decisions Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas made more than a decade earlier. Rockstar has historically been a studio that is primarily in conversation with itself, working infamously long crunch hours to put out games that surpass their previous games — not another studio’s.

As a result, I’m not expecting Grand Theft Auto 6 to look like a “2024” game, whatever that means. I previously wondered whether GTA 6 would follow in the same direction as Elden Ring and Tears of the Kingdom by including an expansive underground area for players to explore. But for Rockstar to do that they would have to pay attention to what FromSoftware and Nintendo are doing, and I don’t think they are. I don’t mean that individual Rockstar employees don’t play those games. I mean that the studio doesn’t act like any other games exist.

One of Red Dead Redemption 2's big innovations was the introduction of a "greet button," which allowed you to talk to any NPC you encountered in the world.

When Grand Theft Auto 6 releases, I fully expect it to look like a game from 2027 that plays like a game from 2007. It will make mechanical decisions that seem bizarre, but it will look better doing them than most games you’ve ever played. Its controls will annoy you, but exploring its world will compel you. Its story will be remarkably accomplished, and strangely juvenile. It will be a Rockstar game, and — good or bad — it won’t look like anything else released in 2024.

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