Rockstar isn’t ruling out a GTA set outside the United States, but don’t hold your breath: the studio says there are plenty more stories to tell in America.
In an interview with The Guardian, Rockstar North co-studio head Rob Nelson was asked whether or not the developer would ever make a GTA game set outside of America. His response was simple: “Never say never.” However, Nelson continued his response by stating, “There’s still so much to do in America.”
The GTA series has largely rotated between three locations for the last 25 years: Liberty City (New York), Vice City (Miami), and San Andreas (California). We got a brief glimpse at the Midwest of GTA in GTA 5, when the game’s story opened in a snowy state called North Yankton. But that’s about as much as we’ve gotten outside of the coastal cities that GTA rotates through. It’s unclear what else Rockstar wants to do with GTA, specifically the American setting.
GTA has flirted with going overseas before, as Rockstar came close to making one set in Japan in the early to mid-2000s. The first GTA also had an expansion set in London, and GTA 5 seemingly had scrapped DLC that would’ve at least partially taken place in Paris. Ex-GTA writer and creative director Dan Houser also stated last year that he doesn’t think GTA would work as well outside of America.
“I think for a full GTA game, we always decided there was so much Americana inherent in the IP, it would be really hard to make it work in London or anywhere else,” said Houser. “You know, you needed guns, you needed these larger-than-life characters. It just felt like the game was so much about America, possibly from an outsider’s perspective. But that was so much about what the thing was that it wouldn’t really have worked in the same way elsewhere.”
Maybe one day it will happen, but it does seem like Rockstar’s interests with GTA are rooted in American culture.
GTA 6 will, of course, take us back to Vice City next week when it launches on November 19. It is expected to have one of the biggest launches in history, with it already being the most preordered game in the history of Xbox and PlayStation’s digital stores. Players are able to preload the game right now, and they absolutely should, as the game is a whopping 210 GBs.