Like many others, my first reaction to the GTA 6 leak was, ‘Nonsense. Second, I had a flashback of safety breaches or leaks after my time on the event side of the business. Normally, these were angry-faced men bursting into rooms and demanding that no one contact anything. Third, I thought about Rockstar, the knowledge movement, and picture management king. I thought of that sequence in The Bourne Id. It is where an embattled CIA station chief orders the company to ‘get all the people up. This was a group of assassins with cool names and even cooler intentions.
According to my knowledge, Matt Damon is not concerned. Rockstar’s brass hasn’t dispatched Clive Owen for a gun-point philosophical conversation with the person responsible for this leak. However, it has teamed up with the FBI, so maybe I was not that far away. The response to either approach will likely be quick and comprehensive, just like the Half-Life 2 leak. Everyone knows what happened there.
Will GTA 6 look almost as good as GTA 5? (Yet, once it is finished).
These explanations are obvious. This is where a huge monetary factor plays a role. Safety issues regarding supply code and other exposures could potentially derail a mission. There will be reputational damage, as it has already happened. The web was filled with people disillusioned by how it looked just seconds after the leak. It looked like shit. It could be a huge disappointment if this were what it looked like. And, just quietly, what have the lazy? What have the (lazy) developers done all these years?
These were just a few extra lucid takes. No less than the phrases made sense. Others seemed to be thrown out there without regard for logic or sanity. What’s the truth? It’s my first impression that no online game has ever been launched. If you could see the same games three months before launch, you would think some magic was used to complete them.
I know this because, since 2007, I’ve labored straight on video games and high-profile or seen franchises/manufacturers (together with Battlefield, Harry Potter, Burnout, Half-Life, Whole Conflict, and others) as an author. As a pre-release person, I have seen them, and a nervous PR person pleads with me to remember It Isn’t Complete. As a consultant and mechanic expert, I have consulted on high-profile releases. No matter what my 15-year career has been, one thing remains constant: making video games is hard. It both comes together on the finish, or it doesn’t. Even for triple-A games, the margin between success and failure is very small.
The weapons wouldn’t have worked on a well-received gun, which you will likely have done, until about two months after launch. The weapons. Another shooter had the crosshairs disabled until very deep into the dev. Crew members were required to stick a bit of blutac at the gun’s goal to use it. This was a port for a sport that had been around for many years, I should add.
One admirably ambitious and over scoped open-world racing game that people are determined to make a sequel to (and which I will never play again), it wasn’t easy to get it to run even a few months ahead of its E3 demo. This in itself caused many, many meltdowns. It was particularly noticeable on PS3, which at the time was like trying to program superior graphics onto an old kazoo. The E3 demo was finally broken by a colleague and me, which caused the entire PS3 to go into a tizz. Michael Corleone would have been embarrassed hearing the anguished wailing.
There are many more stories like this. My boss informed me that I had been promoted to the battlefield for my bold turn-based strategy sport. I received the promotion after I arrived on the night shift (many others were on it 24 hours a day trying to reach the discharge date). I stopped and walked out of my workplace.
The reason was that the highly-anticipated naval battles, which were supposed to promote the most important thing, didn’t work. Every morning, at the end of each shift, I have to write the handover stories (to incoming take a peek at groups and growth and manufacturing groups), explaining as diplomatically as possible. We remorsefully admit that it’s Completely Fucked.
Guess what? Guess what? These video games were all released and bore very little resemblance to how they looked weeks ago. Some video games, such as yearly sports titles, can drastically change between launch and overview. Some of them did well, but most are familiar to you. Only one percent of them caused an actual problem on overview day. An essential journal gave the sport an 8 in August. One mission developer stated that he would have given the sport a 10. Someone replied, “That’s why they don’t oversee them.”
It was able to calm down much quicker than it had received uncontrolled. This kind of emotional reaction was not out of the blue.
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It can be exhausting to spend so much time on this stuff.
It is, in my opinion, shattering to have so many movies out there – particularly when people who don’t know anything about it are giving it the boot. One example of how quickly online opinion can change is the E3 trailer for the sport I used to be connected to. It was kept secret, and there were no leaks. The intro was long, and chatter had been saying “what the fuck” about it. When the trailer was revealed, everyone was shocked. It’s so positive.
There has been a lot of criticism on social media, with many developers of video games – both large and small – showing off how Metacritic darlings looked in dev. I’m not sure if that will be enough for the Rockstar teams. But, I think what I saw was very good for the position it appears to be in the dev cycle.
With that thought in mind, imagine how it will look when it launches in 2148.