A new rumor has let out new details about the next entry in the Grand Theft Auto series. According to an alleged industry insider, Grand Theft Auto VI is in the planning stages, and the developers have settled on a location: We could be returning to Vice City. Unfortunately, the bad news is that, if this tipster is right, we won’t be returning there until roughly 2025.
The leaker in question is Tom Henderson, who revealed the details he’d gotten in a recent YouTube video — and also takes the words out of my mouth when he tells viewers to take the info with a grain of salt. Henderson says he’s heard that the game will be in a modern setting, to better fit in with GTA Online and that the game will be at least partly set in Vice City. There have previously been rumors that the next GTA game would be set in the 80s, or possibly in Brazil (maybe someone at Rockstar binged Narcos and spitballed that concept), but Henderson says he’s heard that’s not the case.
As for the timeline, Henderson says Rockstar might have originally aimed for a 2023 release window (that was his original prediction, anyway), but have pushed the release window back out of concern for potential crunch. While Rockstar employees have previously stated that there wasn’t a crunch culture during Red Dead 2’s development, that doesn’t appear to have been a universal experience, and there have been allegations about that in the past.
Assuming this timeline is accurate, it might indicate Rockstar didn’t work on the game from the launch of Grand Theft Auto V, as it would mean that the game had been in development for over a decade. That’s not unlikely but it’s an unusually long development time even for a major AAA release. Considering that Rockstar has, in the interim since GTA V launched, worked on Red Dead Redemption 2, Grand Theft Auto Online, and Red Dead Online, it might have been that the company only began working on the new game relatively recently.
Source: Tom Henderson/YouTube
