This latest report comes in the form of a forum reply from renowned GTA informant Tez2, who has been leaking fairly accurate information about GTA 5, Online DLC and Red Dead Redemption 2 for years now via Twitter and GTAForums.
In a long running topic about GTA 6 speculation, Tez2 shared some surprising predictions about how the next game in the series will shape up in terms of structure and format, and went on to mention that a continuation for Online might be in the works which will be separate from the current multiplayer game - a surprising turn considering GTA Online just went standalone. Tez2 speculates that GTA 6 will adopt a similar chapter system in its story mode as Red Dead Redemption 2 did, allowing for skips in time and major changes to the map and environments as you progress through these chapters. Rockstar Games could also add additional chapters as DLC later on, which the leaker claims was the original plan for GTA 5’s story DLC. While reliable sources have revealed that assets and the basic premise from the GTA 5 story DLC which was announced but never released eventually ended up in The Doomsday Heist DLC for Online, Tez2 now states that plans for the game’s single-player expansions were non-canon “what if” scenarios involving zombies and aliens. In the years since, we’ve seen both making cameos in smaller modes for Online. Regarding the ’next GTA Online’, Tez2 mentions that Rockstar would probably use the session migration tech seen in Red Dead Online. Being an underlying element of the game’s structure, incorporating this into the current game would be impractical, and this alone would result in a separate title entirely. It is strange to see any discourse about a potential “next” GTA Online, since the whole idea behind the current version going standalone was to allow it to continue to grow and achieve success, while the main series gets to move forward. Statements regarding GTA 6 skipping multiplayer to prevent crunch have also floated, though a recent report from analyst Michael Pachter seems to contradict that. In the current climate of news and leaks about Rockstar Games’ next project, it is a lot harder to gauge what is reliable and what isn’t, so it isn’t clear if any of these latest predictions are at all true. As with just about any aspect of this game, we’ll have to wait and see.
