The Grand Theft Auto series of games have become such a cultural juggernaut that it’s easy to forget there’s a reason why pretty much everyone on the planet has played them. The amount of freedom they offer is unparalleled, giving players not only a huge landscape to explore with a million things to do, but also letting them take their own routes to their objectives. That attitude should be continuing in GTA 6, as one ex Rockstar dev reckons that’s exactly what the game team will be working on right now.
Ben Hinchcliffe, formerly of Rockstar and now lead designer at Just Add Water, spoke to GTA 6 podcast GTAVIoclock about what he thinks the dev team will be working on right now as we approach the GTA 6 release date in 2025. Admittedly he doesn’t work for the company anymore, but with experience on GTA 5, Red Dead Redemption 2, and GTA 6 in its earlier stages, this is someone who knows the shape of how these games are created intimately.
“Talking generalities, a year out on a title that big you’re really wanting to tighten it in every corner, so a lot of bug fixing and a lot of nailing stuff down,” Hinchliffe says. “There’ll be hundreds of side cases because the worst thing – some people might say the best thing but I’m going to say the worst thing – is you make the game how you want it to be played, and what you want the user to do, and then 90% of your work is actually doing stuff that you don’t want them to do.”
“You might want someone to drive in a straight line from A to B, just follow that car, and then they don’t. They get out of the car or they drive over there or they shoot that person or they turn around and go the other way. It’s just like, can you just do what the objective is,” he laughs. “So literally 90% of game dev is either stopping the player doing what you don’t want them to do, or accommodating that decision from the player.”
That, however, isn’t a problem, even if it is a headache for game development, and it’s one of the most brilliant things about GTA titles. “Good games are games that don’t block the player but actually allow them to do what they want to do and it still works,” he says. “So we tell you to shoot this guy with a sniper rifle from miles away but you decide to get a helicopter and drop a crate on him instead and he dies, you’ve still completed the mission. You just didn’t do it in the way we told you to. That, in my opinion, is what makes GTA games what they are, that freedom that it allows the player and the game will still handle it and still allow the player to do these weird things.”
This means if GTA 6 follows along with that ethos, and this ex-developer implies that it will, it should allow players all sorts of creative freedom in how they approach missions. After all, a crime boss probably won’t care exactly how something gets done, as long as it gets done.
If fall 2025 is too long to wait, you can instead take a peek at our guides to the best sandbox games and the best open-world games you can play, which should keep you very busy while you wait for GTA 6’s eventual arrival.
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