It would be foolish of them not to design it from the ground up around the online components to maximize the average number of microtransactions per player. They're a big company with a lot of people on their payroll. It would actually be immoral for them not to.
My other concern is that the social climate has changed a lot over the past 10 years. Perhaps it would be in the best interest of the company to not press on any hot button issues or cultural taboos. The game should be a safe space for people of all backgrounds.
Don't know about immoral, might be illegal though if the investors have anything to say.
As far as social climate being radically different then not really. The Jack Thompsons of the world have a bit less power, maybe, owing to them all being old and dying off but everything else is much as it was (maybe see the kill all the Haitians controversy, or kick it really old school and see the orange hat people from the 2d eras) and there will be whiny types with no sense of humour of all flavours that they skewer completely. Equally other than those with no sense of humour has any previous entry been unsafe (whatever that might mean) for any group?
We'd have it sooner if someone could make a good GTA clone. Cyberpunk proved it's not as easy as it looks to make a city sandbox game.
I don't know that Cyberpunk proved all that much other than the devs being rather too ambitious.
As far as good clones... come back Saint's Row I guess.
The next GTA entry WILL BE set in the states, it's in their best interest to.. if i would guess, they might go back to either Liberty City or Vice City, with the latter being more likely. Or they might go with a new region akin to San Francisco, or maybe Chicago.
Please don't fuck it up this time!
Also GTA VI UE5 ray tracing would be insane, though that might be a bit farfetched for the moment.
I'm not expecting anything of course, just not as pessimistic as some of you here.. would be a shame for a generation defining series to be reduced to a online cash-grabbing shitfest.
Does San Francisco have much in the way of a criminal background in pop culture?
On Vice city then they could do it but I will note the timing of the PS2 effort there coincided very nicely with the retro Miami nostalgia (got to have that Scarface poster to be like your favourite rapper on MTV cribs and all that) where they would possibly be on their own for this one (though they are a big enough force and we are probably long enough from Vice City for it to be its own driving force and nostalgia cycle in one). Granted if they wanted to do some of the missions like 5 then I would be up for Burn Notice the game, which would even dovetail with the grim und gritty they seem to have gone in for since... possibly the 3d era entirely but definitely starting with 4.
On Chicago. For settings you have then prohibition era (would be older than any other GTA game, and harder if you want weapons and cars. Might also invite unwelcome comparisons to LA Noire) or the depressing wasteland it has been since... when did the car industry go pop there?
Texas, which has the culture both high and low, is probably off because don't want overlap with Red Dead. I could see an Atlanta one but I don't know how much that really has for that sort of thing outside the US (if we are worried about murricans not playing dem dere foreign cities then the reverse might be in play here -- no real crime films or TV shows set there and outside the US people are more likely to tell me about Seattle rap scene than Atlanta, even more so if they were not around for the 5 minutes the dirty south rap scene had a bit of momentum). Vegas/Nevada tends to get subsumed into San Andreas rather than being its own thing. Hawaii could be an interesting one actually, might even be my top pick for non any of the usual three or London -- high rises, opulence, underclass, beaches, area limitations by default, nice bit of crime, interesting political maneuverings (would look to see their take on the independence thing), fair bit of pop culture (Hawaii Five-0, both of them clocking at least 10 years a piece)...
If they were really brave (I am amused just imagining the whining if they do a proper political satire -- you know you would end up a political fixer for a house of cards style setup) DC Baltimore Philly... which has a fair bit but we might also be a few too many years to piggyback on The Wire.
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