I feel like I’ve been one of the few who never saw the appeal of R*. I enjoyed Max Payne (even 3), but much outside of that I never felt that their games were very special. Don’t get me wrong, they made some major advancements in gaming in terms of size of open world games, and still do have fairly decent feelings of living worldliness… somewhat. However I’d also attribute GTA to contributing to the same problem that Activision, Ubisoft and EA all fall into of pushing the same genre with iterations of the same content - surely there’s a middle ground between pumping out loose stories in an open world and taking 8 years to polish a game who’s marketing is the antithesis to everything that GTA was actually fun for.

Any semblance of hopes for R* for me personally died with RDR2. It’s just not a good game. It’s a great cinematic story, but the gameplay is downright terrible and it gets a passed “for realism”. Realism in a game engine where riding a motorcycle off a curb can launch you hundreds of feet through the air. It’s memed to death but it’s not inaccurate - posting your horse is the most unnecessarily difficult aspect consistently present through the whole game. Not the tuberculosis. Not hunting animals. Not remembering to take your weapons from your horse each time you mount and dismount.

Supposedly in 2022 they fired a bunch of people cultivating a toxic work environment but I’m still unsure about how effective that can be without excessive outside change. I know people aren’t a fan of MS buying activision/blizz but I can only see it as a good thing if it actually cleans house. Realistically we haven’t seen corporations make these changes unless they fail and are bought out. Blizzard was bought into one of the most toxic environments and has been floundering with bad leadership decisions since. Activision is finally dying and we’re on the brink of seeing an exodus of breastmilk thieves but it’s interpreted as a bad thing because it’s one step closer to consolidated oligarchy. Personally, I think through all of Microsofts different departments their follies are much more corporate and much less vindictive. On the other hand it’s still worrying to think that they could be stupid enough to try and just sweep evil old Bobby Kotick under the rug. However I think there’s enough incentive with social media to let MS denigrate everything that Activision stood for and just clean house.

Anyway, where I’m going with all this is that I’m fully with you lol. R* has had a few chances to turn things around with the gaming community but the support for RDO has been disappointing. The continued investment in GTAO is both impressive and disappointing - like hey, it’s cool they my friend can still play on his Xbox 360. It’s also disappointing that they’ve done very little with anything innovative, but hey at least they actually did implement that sped up loading time fix from that one player. But I don’t have much hope for GTA6 or any other R* development to be anything but what we’re already familiar with. I mean hell, even Bethesda has tried taking some swings with games like Deathloop, and they are like THE pinnacle of pushing the same genre with iterations of content.

It’s just frustrating, these companies get so big that anything that isn’t certainly going to make money isn’t even on the table. What happened to Bully? Midnight Club? Their last original title before those was freaking L.A. Noir and well, we they absolutely butchered the re-releases of that game. (If you don’t know, basically the original version is Coax/Force/Lie and it was subsequently changed twice to things that didn’t make sense for most contexts of the game. Currently there are Truth/Doubt/Lie and Good Cop/Bad Cop/Lie) R* has a lot of potential but it’s been seemingly squandered.

On the other hand, maybe that ~$7.7 billion the game has made will fund the most impressive and expansive game yet. On the other other hand, RDR2 was estimated to only cost around $540 million and it was certainly something that can be seen, so maybe that will just continue to be good enough. Probably.

Sorry for the length, I’m just really tired of multi-billion dollar companies penny pinching.