GTA 6 is my most anticipated game of 2025

Rockstar games just hit differently

GTA 6 / Rockstar

I was a freelance games journo when the last GTA came out, working in retail and writing the odd piece for a pittance for whoever would have me. I remember the day GTA 5 review code landed in my inbox, and I was stuck at work with a creep show of a boss who wouldn’t even let me have a day off when my nan was dying, never mind for a game. When I got home and realized the download size, it was already too late.

I got up the next morning a couple of hours before work so I could give it a go and got literal chills on the startup. I remember it vividly. Rockstar games just hit differently.

Life is very different now. I have two kids, I work in a job I love, my old boss got sacked (lmao), and I’ve lost all my hair, but one thing is still the same: I’m thinking about the next GTA.

GTA 5 / Rockstar

Rockstar itself has changed a lot since GTA 5, too. Dan Houser has split off and made his own company with some other key people at Rockstar, and the new Rockstar is a mix of a bunch of old key people who are still there as well as some fresh blood. GTA 6 will be a very different game, not only because of that but because of how the company has matured. It’ll be Urban Red Dead Redemption 2 rather than GTA 5 Part 2.

That doesn’t mean we won’t get adverts for Sprunk, but the way Rockstar tells stories and creates living worlds has evolved.

Each character in GTA 5 was an extreme / Rockstar

In GTA 5, each character was an extreme, representing the different states of mind a player inhabits in a GTA game – Trevor was the id, driven by chaos; Michael was the ego; and Franklin was the superego. It’s an interesting character experiment, but from the GTA 6 trailer, I’d expect the new main characters, Jason and Lucia, to be more fully fleshed out.

We rarely see love stories play out in games – tragic or not – so I’m excited to see what Rockstar does with this new dynamic.

Outside of that, there’s the obvious thing: no one does it like Rockstar. Boot Red Dead Redemption 2 on a PC and you’ll find it’s still better looking than almost everything released on the new console generation. The same is true if you run it on a PS4. Rockstar just has the sauce.

Lucia from GTA 6 / Rockstar Games

From a technology perspective, GTA 6 will stand the test of time. It won’t be a game that shows us what this new gen of consoles is capable of – it’ll have longer legs than that. A new Rockstar game is like peeking five years into the future, from its NPC routines to every little detail crammed into the world.

I don’t know where my life will be when GTA 6 launches in autumn 2025, but I know where I’ll be if I’m not dead: clutching a PS5 controller and cruising around Vice City. Until then, I’ll be watching the trailer for the thousandth time.