What happens to every other open world after GTA 6 lands?EN

rdr2 makes half of what shipped last year look stiff and that thing is nearly ten years old at this point

nearly ten years old

please dont do this to me. i took a week off work for that game and im not emotionally ready for that sentence

and thats the whole weight sat on 6 really. the thing everyone is measuring it against is rockstars own last game

brilliant how were all sat here answering this like weve had it installed since march

my cousins mate is at rockstar and he says yes 🫡

theyve been at this since 3 though. every one of them reset what everybody else was aiming for, 3, san andreas, 4, 5, and the rest of the industry spent the next five years playing catch up each time

the honest answer is that loads of open worlds since 2018 still dont reach rdr2, and the gap isnt in the graphics. its that you can walk up to more or less anyone in that game and get a real reaction out of them. nobody else has gone anywhere near building that.

doesnt make the rest worse to play though. i still load up open worlds from before rdr2 and have a great time with them. and no one is genuinely sat there expecting ubisoft or whoever to match rockstar on detail. what they expect is that the NEXT rockstar game does. thats the only comparison anyone ever actually makes

4 came out in 2008 and still makes newer open worlds look stiff when you go back to it. barely a question in my head

the only things close enough to hold up beside it are mafia and watch dogs, and im not claiming theyre in the same league. sleeping dogs still moves like a 3d era gta and i mean that as a compliment

watch dogs is the nearest miss and its still not close. everything else people bring up is either not a modern city or a completely different game underneath the map

the gap isnt talent, its money and years. chasing incidental detail at that scale is an excellent way to shut a studio down. an animation team burning months on how a bloke lifts a bottle off a bar only adds up if youre shifting copies by the hundred million.

so most of them will keep picking a stylised look instead and honestly thats the correct call. the distance grows every time rockstar ships, not because everyone else got worse

it drags everyone forward though, thats the upside. kcd2 got properly close to rdr2 on immersion and that turned up six years after it. so on that maths were looking at gta 6 tier open worlds around 2031, by which point nobody will remember what the fuss was about

theres people going round saying its so far ahead itll take other studios ten years to get near it. no clue where that figure came from originally but after rdr2 im not betting against it

that ten year line has been circulating for months and nobody can ever point at where it started. its just a number that sounds good in a headline. the rdr2 distance is real enough on its own, you dont need to bolt an invented stat onto it

counterpoint, every rockstar game is dated the day it arrives. its the same mission structure theyve run since 3 and if anything its more on rails now than it used to be