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All going to plan, GTA 6 will finally be with us this year. Set for a fall 2025 launch, the next chapter of the enduring Grand Theft Auto series has been several years in the offing, with a series of high-profile leaks, batshit internet rumours, and one single GTA 6 trailer punctuating the journey.
It's been a long road, to paraphrase that trailer's Tom Petty-driven soundtrack, which has given us plenty of time to ponder what we want to see from Rockstar's next conversation-setting crime simulator. GTA 5 has barely slipped from the top-sellers charts since its debut 12 years ago, after all, and we suspect number six will cut a similar pop culture-defining shape.
From its story to its characters, its world and whatever's in store for the next evolution of GTA Online, here's our GTA 6 wishlist – and everything we want from the next installment of Grand Theft Auto
More dynamic world
Even at first watch, the first GTA 6 trailer showcased a playground buzzing with activity. From its busy beaches to its neon-blazed thoroughfares, packed-out nightclubs, violent police raids and more, everything looked alive. Without mods, one thing GTA 5 lacked at launch in comparison to its contemporaries – and even its own series predecessors – was accessible buildings.
Over a decade on, it's a safe assumption that GTA 6 will include more accessible interiors in its bid to craft the series' biggest and most credible open world. With this, more sophisticated NPCs and how we interact with them are bound to follow, and we'd love to see the return of NPCs reacting to weather fluctuations (in GTA 4, for example, NPCs would hoist umbrellas at the first sight of rain).
We'd also love more destructible set dressing. The likes of The Finals has shown what's possible in wide scale landscape manipulation, and it'd be great to blow holes in Vice City in the throes of GTA 6's break-neck action.
More dynamic heists
The best bit of Grand Theft Auto 4 was its Three Leaf Clover heist mission, so much so, one could argue Rockstar built a full-blown successor on the foundations of its premise. GTA 5 was, of course, defined by its heists and folk are still playing the first-ever GTA Online snatch-and-grab – The Fleeca Job – almost 10 years on.
The best bit about these high-profile criminal excursions? Their unscripted moments. Those manic, inadvertent flashes of blockbuster bonkers, where police choppers crash from the sky, flipping your getaway car and forcing you to reroute through the woods while other players dressed in alien suits indiscriminately shoot firework launchers at you from behind the trees.
With a bigger, more varied landscape, we're banking (pardon the pun) on all of the above not only playing a bigger role but being ramped up to 11 – be that in story mode or whatever shape GTA Online 2.0 takes in tandem with the arrival of GTA 6.
GTA 5's larger than life narrative marked a distinguished stride away from GTA 4's grittier tale, and for the most part it suited number 5's whimsical, overly-stereotyped characters. GTA Online has since carried the lighthearted mantle to new heights, with flying DeLorean rip-offs, Batmobile clones, and jet-pack missile-firing motorcycles that've blighted public lobbies since inception.
In doing so, GTA 5's online counterpart has cemented itself as the no-holds-barred arena to hang out in and have fun. We'd love to see the same applied to GTA 6, and so if the next Grand Theft Auto's online space is where it can let its hair down, perhaps its story mode could relay something darker or moodier as we return to Vice City some 40-odd years on from our first visit with Tommy Vercetti and co.
We still know very little about the game's protagonist Lucia, but given the fact the first GTA 6 trailer kicks off with her chatting to a prison officer, dressed in an orange jumpsuit with detainees pacing the courtyard grounds beyond the office window, there's definitely scope for something that's more Nico Belic in style over the batshit trifecta of Michael, Franklin and Trevor.
Meaningful relationships with mission-givers
Against its gritty story and dark and moody pseudo-NYC cityscape setting, GTA 4's relationship systems offered much-needed levity between all its criminal activity. We'd love to see more of this in GTA 6 because not only did bowling with cousin Roman allow us to take a load off, it made the world around feel more real, more explorable and more alive.
Taking a love interest for a coffee or necking several pints with Packie McCreary allowed us to see parts of the map we might not have stumbled upon on our own, and while GTA 5 had golf and tennis – GTA Online also introduced a Little Jacob-esque gun van not too long ago (that's had us asking where is the GTA Online Gun Van location every week ever since) – the ritual of building friendships that can help support you down the line hasn't been bettered since number 4.
Given protagonist Lucia is thought to be in a romantic relationship with her as yet unconfirmed partner in crime Jason, leaning into the pair's platonic commitments beyond themselves could work wonders for worldbuilding and storytelling.
Travel to other maps
Speaking of world-building, we hope GTA 6 unfolds beyond its centralised Vice City map. GTA Online's Cayo Perico update, as well as GTA 5's snow-swept North Yankton prelude mission, teased the potential of exploring beyond default boundaries. The once-rumored, but since debunked, Project Americas set-up seems unlikely – it was once suggested GTA 6 would cover large portions of North and South America, including an area that resembled Cuba – but being able to hop between different maps in a grander-scale version of how San Andreas had us travelling between Los Santos, San Fierro and Las Venturas would be superb.
We don't really care how this is achieved, either. Grand Theft Auto has always excelled in the sleight of hand that makes smaller spaces appear larger than they are. One only needs to look at the furore that followed the emission of fog in the GTA Trilogy Definitive Edition's San Andreas to understand the importance of making us believe versus making us see.
A killer soundtrack
GTA is renowned for its killer music soundtracks, and GTA 6 will be no different. From Harry J Allstars' The Liquidator in GTA London, to DMX's Ruff Ryders Anthem Remix in Liberty City Stories, Michael Jackson's Billie Jean in the OG Vice City, LCD Soundsystem's Get Innocuous in GTA 4 and so many, many more, every Grand Theft Auto entry has a catalogue of top tunes.
We already know the late Tom Petty's Love is a Long Road will feature in GTA 6, given it soundtracked the first trailer, and the steady evolution of GTA Online's soundscape over the years – adding the likes of Frank Ocean, Solomun and Dr Dre along the way – has been a joy to see and hear.
Whatever your poison, from techno to Texas blues, our guess is you'll find it blaring from the car radios of Leonidas.
Full use of CircoLoco Records
Speaking of music, we're certain nightclubs will feature in GTA 6 more heavily than ever before. Of course, the original Vice City had the Scarface-inspired Malibu club, but the series took nightlife establishments to new levels via 2018's GTA Online After Hours update. There, a host of top world-famous talent featured in-game alongside exclusive music and the ability to run criminal enterprises from nightclubs from dusk until dawn.
Between times, Rockstar has launched CircoLoco Records – a collaboration with the titular event most famously associated with Ibiza techno nightclub DC-10 – meaning it seems likely even more real-world talent will spin the wheels of steel in this modern slant on Vice City.
We got a glimpse of a jam-packed Vice City hot spot in the GTA 6 trailer, and while we couldn't quite determine who the DJ shown was in the booth (it could be Peggy Gou?), running unscrupulous schemes behind the thick fog of a smoke machine feels inevitable.
FiveM across PC and console releases
In 2023, Rockstar officially acquired Cfx.re and FiveM – a community-driven GTA 5 mod that allows players to create and join custom servers – marking a new era for user-generated content in the Grand Theft Auto universe.
One particularly popular vertical of the FiveM space is roleplay, wherein players treat Los Santos like the real world, abiding by real-world rules, holding down jobs, and conversing with each other via headsets. In the last few years, Rockstar has turned its attention to a series of official community-driven initiatives in GTA Online, and thus by bringing FiveM under its control in an official capacity, the developer appears to be planning for the future.
What form GTA Online 2.0 takes remains to be seen, but with FiveM now operating under the Rockstar umbrella, the scope for UGC is exciting. FiveM currently operates exclusively on PC, so getting player-made projects onto console would be huge.
And if players were performing Shakespeare in-game in 2024, imagine what they might do in GTA 6 powered by modern hardware.
GTA Online 2.0
This is the big one. As noted above, we know absolutely nothing at this point regarding the next evolution of GTA Online, and indeed what that'll mean for GTA Online as it exists today.
But giving players a whole new world to explore, one that's said to be the biggest playground Rockstar has created to date, makes unprecedented and off-the-charts chaos inevitable. Again as mentioned above, we'd love the ability to travel between maps in GTA 6, and perhaps one way to do this would be allowing us to flit between Vice City and a souped up version of Los Santos, using the same GTA Online 1.0 map we now know like the backs of our hands.
In any event, even the thought of new missions, new contacts, new adversary modes, new community challenges and more is enough to send shivers down our spines.
Fortnite-style events
At the time of The Contract update, GTA Online was just over eight years old. It'd already wowed with its larger-than-life Doomsday update, it'd grown its scope tenfold with its After Hours update, and it has taken us to a tropical island via its Cayo Perico update – the latter of which was delivered during the height of the pandemic.
And, over eight years after launch, it introduced Dr mother f**king Dre to Los Santos. Taking a leaf from the likes of Fortnite, we'd love to see GTA 6 push the envelope with real-world talent, and we'd love to see GTA Online 2.0 – whatever shape its winds up taking – roll out some show-stopping events.
Fortnite's in-game Travis Scott concert was incredible, as was its Ariana Grande event. With Phil Collins, Ricky Gervais, Interscope head honcho Jimmy Iovine, and, indeed, Dr Dre among its cameo cast already, we'd love to see Rockstar take Grand Theft Auto 6 to the next level.
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