GTA 6 may "disappoint" players hoping for a technological "jump", says former Rockstar North tech director

rockpapershotgun.com:

While "blown away" by the beach scenes in the first GTA 6 trailer, former Rockstar North technical director Obbe Vermeij thinks the forthcoming open worlder might underwhelm players hoping for a palpable technological update on GTA 5, which has been reworked and re-released extensively since its 2013 launch. This has less to do with GTA in itself, Vermeij says, than with the fact that changes in computing capacity today simply aren't as dramatic as in the days of the very first PlayStation. It's becoming rare, he suggests, that you see a "jump" akin to GTA going 3D.

'Technological change' obviously covers a lot of bases, and what counts as a "jump" varies by the player or at least, the hardware manufacturer trying to flog you a new graphics card. One day people are frenziedly associating "the next gen" with the absence of crawlspaces, the next it's all about whether the vegetation rustles when you shoot it.

To chuck my own hat into the ring, I'm grumpy about placing video game hardware on a timeline from less to more advanced - this kind of rigid teleological, market-driven thinking cancels out and buries a wealth of specific usages of technology for particular artistic ends. I also agree with BioWare's Mark Darrah that chasing fidelity for its own sake is a "death cult". Still, I can see Vermeij's point that it's generally harder to screenshot the difference between, say, two sequels released in the past five years than two sequels released in the early noughties.

"It's harder to make the same step again because well the technology is moving much slower," Vermeij observed in an interview with SanInPlay. "Like, the difference between PlayStation 1 and PlayStation 2 was enormous, and PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 is not that not that big, right. So you don't really have that technology jump to make things different and better.

"So I think yeah, so I think GTA 6 is not going to be wildly different from GTA 5. I don't know, maybe they pulled it off, maybe it's