It appears as if we've had a lot of tidbits of leaks and project assessments from reports based on confidential sources at Rockstar. From the sequel to Red Dead Redemption to news about GTA 6, it appears as if big things could be happening at Take-Two Interactive's subsidiary.
Techradar is reporting that someone close to the project has revealed that Rockstar is already laying down the foundations for GTA 6. They reveal that a location and setting have not been determined yet but preliminary production is taking place at the moment.
This follows up on news that Rockstar is also working on a new Red Dead Redemption game and that it will be announced at this year's E3. Rockstar doesn't typically make conference announcements at E3, so this would be a first if that turned out to be true.
The Techradar article states that their source told them that Red Dead will be running on a new game engine. They point to a previous job listing by Rockstar for an engineer to design an engine in order to help corroborate the claim that Red Dead will be running on new tech.
The article also speculates that GTA 6 could be running on new tech as well, but that seems a little unlikely given that the RAGE in its current iteration is still a scale above what the Xbox One and PS4 are capable of handling. In fact, way back in 2008 GTA IV's under-the-hood tech was so far and beyond what the Xbox 360 and PS3 could handle that a lot of the features that the engine was capable of was either scrapped in the final game or barely used. It wasn't until GTA IV's release on PC did the modding scene unlock the full power of RAGE, especially with the 3.0 release of Hayssam Keilany's iCEnhancer.
Then again, sometimes new game engines aren't about being more powerful but being better optimized. From Unreal Engine 3 to 3.5 we saw a lot of new optimization techniques applied to get better looking games to run on older hardware. Epic took that to the next level with the Unreal Engine 4, which was designed to scale between very low-end and very high-end platforms with ease. Rockstar could be doing the same thing for Red Dead and the new GTA. Assuming these reports aren't as fake as the Nintendo NX leaked controller images.
One thing that the Techradar article discusses that I thought was really neat was that apparently Rockstar had plans to make a GTA: Tokyo, well before United Front Games took us to Hong Kong in Sleeping Dogs. According to the article, back when GTA 3 and Vice City were all the rage, Rockstar sent a team to visit Tokyo and do some research. Ultimately they came away with nothing because they found that the streets of Tokyo did not make for an enticing topographical setup for racing and chase scenes. They supposedly scrapped it and stuck with keeping GTA focused on satirical cities set within America.
It's a little disappointing that they're sticking to America because a GTA: London 2 would be really awesome.
Anyway, I would say take all of this with a grain of salt, because we know how easy it is to “leak” info on the internet or get inside info from anonymous sources... especially with a property as big and as popular as Grand Theft Auto.
