GTA 6's Guns Could Aim for Realism, But The Opposite May Be…

The release window for Grand Theft Auto 6 is drawing closer, with fans waiting with great anticipation for the next batch of revealed information for the project. Players are still relatively in the dark in terms of information officially revealed by Rockstar, yet this has not stopped a lot of lofty expectations already forming around the game featuring some massive evolutions of core mechanics that the franchise has previously portrayed.

Fans are expecting the playable area of Grand Theft Auto 6 to be much larger than its predecessor, for example, with a much wider range of side content potentially being introduced in the way of things like hunting. Of course, the weapons of any Grand Theft Auto release are massively important, and a lot of the expectations for GTA 6 are contingent upon the game going bigger and bolder than ever before with its own arsenal of firearms. Of course, Rockstar set an excellent precedent for more realistic weapon mechanics with 2018's Red Dead Redemption 2, though Grand Theft Auto 6 may be better off keeping things simple with its own guns.

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By Mark Smith

Less Might Be More with Grand Theft Auto 6's Approach to Weapons

Guns are a staple of Grand Theft Auto's core gameplay experience, with Grand Theft Auto 5 featuring a wide range of different firearms with a level of customization that the franchise had not seen before prior to that point. While some fans have called for improvements to be made to the actual shooting mechanics of the franchise in Grand Theft Auto 6, the overall approach that GTA 5 took with the design and availability of weapons seems better off left untouched.

Crucially, Grand Theft Auto 5 did not attempt to feature hyperrealistic portrayals of real-world guns throughout its single-player and online modes, giving a much greater level of freedom to Rockstar in terms of the overall variety of weapons the game eventually ended up including. This has been best evidenced in the massively successful post-launch life of Grand Theft Auto Online, which has gone on to feature a long list of wacky weapons that would feel more out of place if the series took a more hyper-focused approach of realism with its arsenal.

While the guns of Grand Theft Auto 6's single-player story should still be grounded, it is expected that its own online mode will eventually be quite ambitious in what it will allow players to do, making GTA 5 an excellent blueprint to follow in this regard. Of course, some players are also expecting Grand Theft Auto 6 to lean into the more realistic mechanics of firearms that Red Dead Redemption 2 featured, but this would likely end up being another misstep for GTA 6.

While nothing is currently confirmed, current theories suggest that Grand Theft Auto 6 will release its online mode as a separate title at launch, emulating the distinct releases of Grand Theft Auto 5 and Grand Theft Auto Online.

Grand Theft Auto's High Octane Worlds Do Not Need Hyper-Real Weapons

Red Dead Redemption 2 drew criticism as well as praise for its focus on realism, with things like clothing having status effects in certain environments, as well as the gun-wear mechanics that necessitated consistent cleaning of weapons to maintain things like accuracy. Grand Theft Auto 6's modern setting puts much less importance on its guns being an overwhelmingly important feature compared to RDR2's Wild West story, and things like wear-and-tear for GTA 6's weapons may only serve to bloat the game's core experience.

The crazy sandbox worlds that the GTA franchise often portrays are the key to its success, and a focus on more realistic mechanics will likely only dampen the pick-up-and-play reputation that makes Grand Theft Auto so addictive and widely accessible. Of course, Grand Theft Auto 6 still needs to do a lot to exceed the record-breaking success of GTA 5, but it seems clear that there are many other avenues of expansion away from the franchise's approach to guns that would provide much more sensible ways of achieving this.

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