Is Vice City really that boring? (pic: Rockstar Games)
A reader hopes that rumours of GTA 6 being set in Vice City are not true and argues that it should be set in a brand new location.
It’s probably two or three years before Grand Theft Auto 6 is going to be out and if it wasn’t for the leaks we’d know exactly nothing about it. Even those leaks, despite some fool going to jail for them, didn’t say much and the only real details are that the leads are a man and a woman and that the game’s set in Vice City. I have a big problem with one of those two things.
GTA: Vice City is many people’s favourite entry, at least before GTA 5, but I would argue that’s based on two main things: nostalgia and the soundtrack. The 80s soundtrack is godly and literally worth playing the game for, just driving around listening to Phil Collins and Jan Hammer was amazing at the time, especially as open world games were still new then and the idea you could go anywhere and do anything whenever you wanted felt really special.
But even at the time I always felt that Vice City was a much less interesting city than Liberty City and anything in San Andreas. I don’t know if that’s because of what the real Miami is like, since I’ve never been there, but it’s a lot flatter and more obviously built on a grid-based block system. Most American cities are but here it feels so artificial and boring. Maybe that’s what Miami is like, but it doesn’t make for a good video game and I really hope they don’t bring it back for GTA 6.
By the sound of it, GTA 6 is going to be based much more on the real Miami, with the first rumours not even using the name Vice City, but I don’t know how much difference that’s going to make. The problem is that Rockstar know the Vice City name is popular, but I’m worried they haven’t thought through what that means in practical terms.
There have been a lot, lot more open world games since 2002 and people have a lot of expectations and demands. Every obvious idea has been done multiple times by this point and just driving around a city no longer has quite the excitement it used to, as anyone’s that played Saints Row will be able to tell you.
I just don’t see how a generic looking American city, with flat geography and not many memorable landmarks is going to fly today. The only thing I think most people know Miami for is the beaches and you can obviously make that a big part of it all, but it’s pretty hard to drive on a beach so that doesn’t really help when it comes to GTA’s bread and butter gameplay.
Now, obviously I’m talking about Rockstar, one of the most successful developers in history, and I’m a know-nothing nobody, so if you’re reading this and thinking I don’t know what I’m talking about then perhaps you’re right. But I do know that the original Vice City wasn’t that great and that the idea of going back doesn’t hold any interest to me in terms of the setting.
Think of it this way, if they announced it was set in the modern day and not the 80s how much would that affect your interest? Quite a bit I would imagine and for good reasons. Have Vice City be one of the locations if you want but my hope is that GTA 6 will be primarily set somewhere completely new and a place that’s built for gameplay, not just copying scenes from Miami Vice.
By reader Xane
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A reader hopes that rumours of GTA 6 being set in Vice City are not true and argues that it should be set in a brand new location.
