What to play while you wait for GTA 6

There are seventy-three days left, and staring at a countdown is a bad way to spend them. These are the games worth going back to, and more usefully, what each one tells you about the game arriving in November.

Red Dead Redemption 2

It's the most important one on this list, because Grand Theft Auto 6 is visibly built on it, much more than on Grand Theft Auto V.

The weight in the animation, the way characters actually handle objects instead of snapping to them, the ambient conversations that carry on whether you're listening or not: all of it starts here in 2018. When Rockstar talks about 600,000 animations, this is the game where that approach was invented.

Play it and the Extended Look footage stops looking like a graphics jump and starts looking like a continuation.

Grand Theft Auto V

Obvious, and worth it for a specific reason: it's the control group.

Almost every change Rockstar has described is a change from this. The wanted system building a case instead of a star rating, weapons living in your car, the return of the San Andreas body system. Thirty minutes of Los Santos makes the mechanics coverage land differently, because you can feel exactly what's being replaced.

It's also the size comparison everyone quotes. Vice City alone is reported at roughly twice Los Santos.

Sleeping Dogs

Fourteen years old and still the best argument that a smaller city with more texture beats a bigger one with less.

Hong Kong in Sleeping Dogs is dense, specific and full of places that feel used. That's the quality Rockstar seems to be chasing in Vice City, and it's a different goal from the empty scale of Red Dead's frontier.

The Mafia trilogy

Play these for the crime story more than the open world. That's the honest way to recommend them.

Mafia II in particular gets something Grand Theft Auto 6 looks like it's aiming at: a partnership where the interesting part is the relationship going wrong, more than the heists. Jason and Lucia are being sold as a couple first and criminals second.

Like a Dragon, or any Yakuza

The other model for a city, and the opposite of Rockstar's. A handful of streets, absurdly dense, with a side activity behind every door.

If what you're most looking forward to is the return of real side activities, the gym, the diving, the fishing you can't profit from, this is the series that never stopped doing it.

Cyberpunk 2077

It's worth including now in a way it wasn't in 2020. The 2.0 rework turned it into the thing it was sold as, and it's the closest recent comparison for a dense first-party-scale city built for current hardware.

It also shows what happens when an enormous open world ships before it's ready, which is the exact fate Rockstar has spent two delays avoiding.

Skip the Definitive Edition

The Definitive Edition trilogy is still a hard sell. If you want the original Vice City, the reason to play it is the district names that came back, Ocean Beach and Washington Beach among them, and the Vercetti name Rockstar wrote into its own marketing copy.

That's real context for the new game. Just go in knowing the remaster's the weakest way to get it.

If you only play one

Make it Red Dead Redemption 2. It's the direct ancestor, it's long enough to eat most of the seventy-three days, and it's the only game on this list that makes the wait feel like preparation instead of killing time.