The two trailers released for Grand Theft Auto 6 so far are undeniably impressive, but the more I sit with the second trailer, the less I'm convinced that it's impressive in a way that really matters. GTA has spent decades pushing boundaries, both in a technical sense and in its habitual affront to moralizing parties. The series would never have become so special if GTA 3 hadn't been willing to explore the limits of open-world game design at a time when the concept had barely expanded beyond the RPG scene, but the bounds being tested have radically changed.

GTA 6's trailers currently lack a clear distinction between gameplay segments and cutscenes, and without a specific reel of gameplay footage to talk about, most of the current discussion focuses on the graphics. They're pretty staggering, to say the least, particularly in that they appear to have been captured on a standard PlayStation 5. With a densely populated city, clearly advanced lighting and textures, and no evident signs of aggressive scaling solutions muddying the overall clarity, the game appears to be a feat of both raw graphical power and exceptional optimization.

Grand Theft Auto 6's Graphics Come At A Major Cost

Rockstar Used To Release Far More Games

I've been oohing and aahing over everything GTA 6 has shown so far, and visual splendor is the perfect ingredient to make a trailer memorable. When the game releases, I can already imagine myself spending just as much time taking screenshots as stealing cars, and I find a lot of joy in treating games like Cyberpunk 2077 as photography sims with a side of mayhem. Gorgeous graphics can add something meaningful to a game experience, but my appreciation starts to falter when I think about just how long this game has taken to develop.

In the early 2000s, Rockstar was a game-making machine. From 2001-2004, the primary studio, Rockstar North, pumped out GTA 3, Vice City, Manhunt, and San Andreas, Rockstar San Diego handled Midnight Club 2 and Red Dead Revolver, and the publishing umbrella covered titles like the first two Max Payne games. This certainly involved some crunch, so slowing the pace a bit would have been fine, but even halving the rate of releases and ignoring games that Rockstar published but didn't develop would still be a world apart from the company today.

GTA 5 released in 2013, and since then, the only entirely new game Rockstar has released is Red Dead Redemption 2. A significant amount of time and resources can be attributed to the continued development of GTA Online, but GTA 6 has been the studio's primary focus for at least five years now. While that dedication looks like it's resulting in a truly impressive experience, both the time and money necessary to make a game with such staggering detail might be a bit overkill. I also miss Rockstar making other games like Bully, which these huge development cycles have sidelined.

GTA Was Great Without Amazing Graphics

Vice City Didn't Need Much To Make Its Mark

I've always had some level of frustration with the way the graphical arms race has mutated in the modern age, but my feelings about GTA's place in it sharpened when I booted up Vice City recently. Vice City's got style, and the rough frame rates that it can encounter on the PlayStation 2 are a reminder that it wasn't a graphical slouch for its time. At the same time, its graphics are far from the most cutting-edge that the system ever saw, and the technical wizardry was more in the scale of the game than its level of detail.

While cutscenes in Vice City are expressive, they achieve their panache with characters who bob heads and gesticulate wildly rather than conversations that even slightly resemble film or real life. Textures are fuzzy even on a CRT, and many buildings keep polygon counts to single digits. None of this really matters, though, because it all conveys everything it needs to. The world is sun-soaked and seedy, the story is dynamic, and, as Nintendo's Reggie Fils-Aimé once memorably said (not of Vice City, to be clear), the game is fun.

There's obviously no world in which Rockstar would still be releasing games that looked like Vice City today, and graphical advancements have certainly provided meaningful contributions to plenty of games since. With GTA, I'd argue that the track record is a little more questionable than the average. GTA 5 felt like a huge achievement on release, but in 2025, the PS2 games almost hold up better. They're chunky, but they avoid the waxy, flatly lit appearance that GTA 5 can be prey to.

Pushing the technical boundaries of the medium isn't necessarily less valuable than focusing on other elements.

More importantly, the technical leaps made by GTA 5 didn't really make it a better game. While tastes vary, you're much more likely to get San Andreas or GTA 4 as an answer to the best story in the series than GTA 5. Exciting missions and an expanded sandbox are major GTA 5 highlights, but it also trades away some other elements, like GTA 4's controversial but certainly more sophisticated driving physics. The complete package isn't necessarily better or worse, but it might have a stronger claim for better if half the time spent on the graphics was spent elsewhere.

Graphical Progress Is Valuable, But GTA Is An Odd Candidate

Other Games Get More Out Of Graphics

There's merit in having a true graphical flagship franchise, and pushing the technical boundaries of the medium isn't necessarily less valuable than focusing on other elements. It's possible that nothing else could truly fill GTA 6's place in this equation, as nothing else has generated the same extraordinary revenue that GTA 5 has. Setting that practical element aside, though, I'm just not convinced that GTA is among the franchises where the graphics really matter that much.

From the visual splendor of exploring Red Dead Redemption 2's world to the Spielberg stylings of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, plenty of games turn their graphical prowess into something especially meaningful. I'm sure GTA 6 will have moments where that really lands, but I'm equally certain that these moments will be surrounded by an experience where the technical wizardry flies by in car chases or gets blown apart in explosions. The graphical benchmark that Grand Theft Auto 6 sets will be something to behold, but if the game looked like Vice City, it might be even more fun.