Everything revealed from the GTA 6 extended look has stoked a mix of largely positive reactions online. To the group of unimpressed onlookers, we can safely add Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 director and Warhorse Studios honcho Daniel Vávra.
Discussing GTA 6 on Twitter, Vávra lays out what he and “everyone who has ever written a good story” sees as the ingredients for, you guessed it, “a good story.” The list goes: “Internal and external conflict, complex characters with interesting motives, a consistent, logically functioning world, a theme, a point, a ‘message’ (in the good sense of the word), logic, and interesting and likable characters.”
The GTA 6 reveal, Vávra reasons, did not convince him of these. He describes the showcase as “an absolutely fantastic tech demo bordering on a technological miracle” and demonstrating “an open world so open that no one has ever created anything like it.”
But at its heart, in protagonists Jason and Lucia, he sees “two uninteresting sociopaths chaotically committing mass murders of innocent people for other sociopaths and money.”
As a result, Vávra reckons GTA 6 has “zero story hook for me. It will surely work for multiplayer and people wanting to do crazy random shit. But there was much more before.”
In a reply to one user who suggested GTA 5’s cast was “pretty complex and interesting” and Rockstar surely kept the truth of Jason and Lucia close to its chest, Vávra adds, “It’s weird that you don’t show any story hooks in a 26-minute-long ‘trailer’. Just random stuff without any context. Plenty of room for some hook.” (I, too, cocked my head and squinted at the “more” we purportedly had “before,” as I don’t know GTA as a famously sociopath-free series.)
You are, as ever, allowed not to like or be interested in GTA 6. I don’t like Rockstar’s games in general, so obviously I’m not into it. But even to me, Vávra’s critique feels a bit premature, though not entirely unfair. A lot of trailers – most, arguably – are a bunch of bits strung together without context. My read of the narrative thread in the GTA 6 extended look was Rockstar showing us pages 82, 147, and 286 of a 600-page book, then filling in the gaps with shootouts and cars. I would at least want to read the first 81 pages before getting too granular.
It’s also unclear what distinguishes a “good” message here. My mind goes to a previous claim from Vávra: when it was nominated in the LGBT Gayming Awards, he argued KCD2’s optional gay romance is “exactly how something like this should be done,” and certainly not like all those games “rightfully called ‘woke’ these days.”