In a wild world, Rockstar's playing it straight with GTA 6

As Chris Tapsell pointed out a while back, every GTA game is love wrapped in satire. The series seems edgy because the satire is very broad, and often fairly misdirected. But the series sells - and the individual games stick around for so long - because after thirty hours of playing, you're responding purely to the love. Love of the genre, certainly. Love of the excess, sure. But love of the characters too and, more than anything, love of place.

I expected love of place to be firmly in the foreground for the GTA 6 trailer, which leaked earlier tonight, causing Rockstar to just go ahead and publish the thing itself. I expected this because Rockstar's first trailers tend to be vibe affairs. These games take so long to make you're often getting glimpses of the team working on new hardware for the first time and that's always interesting, but also, Rockstar just likes place. It likes to capture the essence of a location - New York, LA, the south-west in the days of stagecoaches and whatnot - in a few key frames suffused with the kind of billowing bloomy light that you don't often see outside of Turner. And then it moves in close for the details that will sell the place: the oil wells scandalously close to the LA beach (they're there in real life), the exhausted realtor hammering in a sign, the people living under the bridge.

In these trailers you get a bit of plot - Michael talks about why he tried to settle down and then you see him kicking in a bank door with his crew, or Nico muses on his violent past and hopes for something different. But it's still mainly vibes. Look at the light flooding through Grand Central at various times of day or offering different illuminations to the Chrysler Building. Look at Venice Beach in the morning with joggers checking each other out and the smog gathering.

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