.jpg?q=50&fit=crop&w=1140&h=&dpr=1.5)
Rockstar has developed many quality, groundbreaking games over the years, but Arthur Morgan's existential journey through the last days of the Old West is on a whole other level. It's amazing a blockbuster video game like Red Dead Redemption 2 even exists. It's melancholy, understated, and languidly paced, happy to just let you simmer in its world without rushing you off to the next objective. The story is mature and delicately written, with flawed, interesting characters who feel like people, not caricatures. The atmosphere and world-building is transporting in a way few games can match, making me feel like I'm there when I play it. All these traits are what make Red Dead Redemption 2, in my eyes, a masterpiece—and as unlikely as it sounds, I'd love to see Rockstar make a new Grand Theft Auto game in the same spirit.
Grand Theft Auto is everything Red Dead Redemption 2 isn't. It's loud, crass, and brash, with bright colours, outlandish characters, lavishly choreographed action set-pieces, and heaps of puerile humour. I'm fine with that—I've loved every GTA to date, and if the next game follows that trend, I'll probably love that too. But there's a part of me that wants the series to take a leaf from Arthur Morgan's tattered journal and grow up. Even if it's just a one-off, I find the idea of a GTA with the same sombre, introspective tone as RDR2 incredibly exciting. A gritty, serious crime story with a low-key, textured Michael Mann aesthetic, where violence isn't played for fun or entertainment, but is sudden and shocking—like the sharp bursts of brutality you get in a Takeshi Kitano yakuza movie. I want a GTA that makes crime feel as nasty and rotten as it really is.
Typically, GTA games barrel along at a breakneck pace. Grand Theft Auto 5 is a non-stop parade of wild, dramatic missions, with daring bank heists and death-defying James Bond stunts. But in a realistic GTA, Rockstar could tell a more focused story, with a tighter, smaller group of people—maybe a crew of petty thieves—that you get to know over time, similar to how Arthur interacts with Dutch and the rest of the gang. I like the idea of the missions being more subdued: no highway chases or leaping out of planes, but jobs that are grounded in reality, and feel tense, dangerous, and wrong as a result. Reflecting Arthur's struggles with his personal demons, it'd be interesting to play as a character who doesn't enjoy this life, but feels like there's no other way to live. That would reframe the usual GTA rags to riches story in a fresh way.
-1.jpg?q=50&fit=crop&w=825&dpr=1.5)
One of the things I love most about Red Dead Redemption 2 is the sense of isolation it creates. Arthur belongs to a large gang that is basically his family, but he's very much a man who exists inside his own head—and enjoys those long, lonely treks across the plains and prairies. This is something I'd love to see GTA experiment with. The idea of being alone, despite living in the middle of a bustling metropolis, has always been fascinating to me. I'm thinking of Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver: someone who struggles to connect with their surroundings or the people around them. That would be a type of GTA protagonist we've never seen before, and would make the setting, whatever city it happens to be, feel uniquely menacing and oppressive.
Imagine returning to Vice City in the modern day, but instead of the garish, neon-splattered version of the city we explored back in 2006, it's a faded, broken place, suffering the hangover of its coke-fuelled '80s excess. This kind of Grand Theft Auto game could still retain the series' trademark satire—but it could present it in a more nihilistic, cynical way. I've tried to resist mentioning The Wire, but it should basically be like The Wire: a show that deals with some very heavy themes, and shines a spotlight on the corruption deeply rooted in politics and policing—but that is also incredibly funny. I'm not saying an open world crime game is the right platform for this kind of storytelling, but I think Rockstar could, maybe, make a GTA that has something more to say than jus🅠t 𓆉mocking Americans for loving cheeseburgers and reality shows.
This completely speculative game has spiralled out of control, but you get the idea. As much as I enjoy Grand Theft Auto in its current form, Rockstar taking a more measured approach to its flagship series—even if there's very little chance it will happen—is a compelling thing to think about. I also know it would love to make a game like this. It loves cult cinema and the idea of telling mature stories, and I'm sure pretty much everyone there would jump at the chance to make a more intelligent open world game that riffs on Mann, Kitano, Scorsese, and other filmmakers with a knack for showing the dark side of a city.
