The biggest gaming event of 2023 was the GTA 6 reveal trailer. I'm still thinking about it now. Rockstar has mastered the art of making the gaming world stop for a few minutes to experience something luxurious and mind-blowing. Their games encourage grandiose thoughts. I want this new version of the Vice City map to be the biggest ever, even though I'm currently tired of massive open world games.
I'm drawn to an open-world sandbox for the opportunity to capture that fleeting, ephemeral feeling of immersion. The GTA 6 trailer showed me the true essence of immersion. If you ask me, a crucial part of immersion is the game's power to remain in your consciousness even after you've lowered the controller and turned off the TV, blurring the barrier between fiction and reality.
I spent hours in GTA 5 as the incarnation of Trevor Philips, Michael De Santa and Franklin Clinton. You know, just wandering around Los Santos listening to radio stations, making money as a taxi driver, finding funny random encounters, or causing total chaos in a 5-star hotel. This level of immersion took me through my screen into the world and narrative of GTA 5 like an early premonition of Alan Wake 2. I've been trying to capture that fleeting feeling of immersion ever since, and only found it when I experienced The Witcher. 3. Cyberpunk 2077 and Red Dead Redemption 2. I'm sure you have your own touchstones for this!
Grand Theft Auto VI Trailer 1For me, believability is key to immersion, by which I mean the kind of believability you can find in games like The Witcher and Cyberpunk. They are fantasies and science fiction games, but I believe them because the worlds feel coherent when I am inside them. I suspect it is a mixture of many elements. The graphical fidelity, impeccable hair physics, and NPC diversity shown in the GTA 6 trailer illustrate Rockstar's power in pushing the current generation of consoles to create believable experiences. This team clearly creates games by looking closely at the real world and trying to capture its essence.
GTA 6 is the first opportunity for Rockstar to directly satirize the modern world – the strange place we find ourselves in more than a decade after the success of GTA 5. The trailer suggests that the team will take a deeper look at the strange aspects of a governed society through social networks, and will do so through a humorous lens. Vice City, as seen in the trailer, has the qualities it needs to feel like an authentic inhabited city, occupied by various types of people, various cultures, multiple types of vehicles and an entire animal ecosystem to discover. I hope the clip of an alligator walking into a store to buy something (I'm guessing it's dental floss) isn't just a scene. I hope it's emergent gameplay, because I was constantly robbing a store using an alligator. Who would not?
In terms of capturing the realistic texture of the world beyond the alligators? GTA 5 introduced us to Lester Crest, the criminally minded genius who lived with a physical disability that required both a cane and a wheelchair to get around. It's always wonderful to interact with a disabled character who doesn't identify with his limitations and finds herself useful because of his talents, even when his talents are clearly criminal. As a disabled person my life is not identified as 'the daily struggle'. I am much more than my limitations, but many people struggle to see beyond a disability or feel that a disability is 100 percent life-consuming. My Duchenne muscular dystrophy is only 25 percent Vivek, but my personality, dreams, hobbies, and aspirations are what truly define me as a person. Disabled narratives have the power to elevate stories, we have depth and nuance to allow new life to seep into stale narratives.
Lester Crest illustrates that Rockstar has experience creating realism for people with disabilities, so my biggest hope is that GTA 6 advances this by including more characters with different types of disabilities, either as supporting characters or as wandering NPCs. around the world. This level of disabled representation would be groundbreaking, prompting other open-world games like Cyberpunk 2, whatever form it takes, to include disabled people and provide character creation options for various prosthetics or perhaps a wheelchair. .
GTA 6 aims to create the next evolution of open world design, with the graphical fidelity to create a game with characters almost indistinguishable from reality due to advanced NPC diversity. The only aspect of the game that could highlight the disparity between reality would be the near elimination of disability; Lester Crest can't be the only disabled character in the world of GTA.
(While I'm here, along with disability representation, it would be ideal if Rockstar improved its accessibility support, especially by removing the archaic Mash-X-to-sprint button and adding options for certain actions like aiming or opening the wheel on your weapon. (I have faith that Rockstar will improve its accessibility thanks to its dedicated accessibility leader, Ben Bayliss.)
GTA 6 will be the biggest game launch in history, but the advancement it could bring to the representation of people with disabilities is actually a possibility for the first time in history. I'm here for it.
