Bruce Straley, who co-directed The Last of Us and Uncharted 4, went on X and asked a question that was always going to start a fight. Why are you going to play Grand Theft Auto VI? He added that he was not sure he was interested, that he might be an outlier, and noted he worked in "the sausage factory" a long time, a nod to his years at Rockstar Games rival Naughty Dog.
At first glance, it looks like a veteran developer dismissing the biggest game on the planet. However, if you actually read the replies he left, the truth is actually quite the opposite. Straley was not sneering at GTA 6 for its popularity. He was poking at the gap between how these games look and how deep they actually play. When someone brought up dynamic weather, he got genuinely excited about using Red Dead Redemption 2's weather tech for dynamic events. However, he was also straight forward about how the game's systems weren't very deep, leaving him disappointed that so much of it came down to "follow the yellow line."
To be fair, this isn't exclusively a Rockstar problem. He pushed back on the idea that deep systems do not sell, arguing that deeper systems let more kinds of players approach a game their own way, and that the whole promise of "open world" should come with "open approaches" to actually playing it. Instead of hating, Straley is wishing for the most powerful studio in gaming to raise the standards and basically force everyone to keep up.
Whether he is right about GTA 6 specifically is the part nobody can answer yet, including Straley, because Rockstar has shown almost no actual gameplay. He is judging the new game by the last one. It is entirely possible GTA 6 answers his complaint with the deepest systems Rockstar has ever built. After all, Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser did say that its underlying systems were always the franchise's best assets and not its storytelling.
Unfortunately, we will not know for sure until Rockstar lets us see the game move, which may or may not happen anytime soon.
What Straley Is Actually Arguing
The Surface Read | What He Actually Means |
|---|---|
"Why do you even care about GTA 6?" | Why do we accept beautiful worlds with shallow systems? |
"I'm not interested" | I want deeper, more reactive gameplay, not just graphics |
A dig at Rockstar | A challenge to every big-budget open-world studio, his own included |
Breaking down what Bruce Straley meant and why he isn't bashing GTA 6 at all.
There is a small irony worth flagging, too. The reason a two-line tweet questioning GTA 6 became a story at all is the same reason everything about this game becomes a story. The hype is so total that even a respected developer mildly wondering aloud gets treated as an attack.
You can't pin this all on Straley. It's because of the vacuuum that this game creates. When there's nothing new to talk about, everything about it gets amplified to the nth degree, including hot takes by "rival" developers.
With that said, this isn't a decorated developer hating on the next Grand Theft Auto. He is asking whether we have set the bar at "it looks amazing," which GTA 6 admittedly accomplished based on what we've seen from Trailer 1 and Trailer 2, when it could be "it plays like nothing else."
Between everything is trying to hold Rockstar accountable for, this might be the one worth sitting most on.