GTA 6 stand back, GTA 7 is already causing controversy

Heads up, GTA 6 fans. It appears that GTA 7 might already be the subject of some controversy.

Grand Theft Auto 6 is still just under 11 months away from release, so we’ve got plenty of time to sit back and speculate about just what the future of the series holds.

GTA 6 fans have thought about everything, from the price to how big the open world is, but it seems like GTA 7 could be the one to cause the biggest amount of discourse online.

Obbe Vermeij is a former Rockstar Games developer who worked as a Technical Director on the GTA series from GTA 3 up to Chinatown Wars.

In an interview with Kiwi Talkz (thanks, GamesRadar), Vermeij said he believes that development for GTA 7 will be cheaper to develop than GTA 6, and this is largely down to advancements in AI.

“GTA 7 will be cheaper to make than GTA 6, but we'll have to wait 15 years to see if I'm right or not,” Vermeij says. “Let’s say you do a cutscene, in the cutscene it could be rendered by AI, including the conversation if you described a scene.”

He then predicts that the “bulk of the work is going to be replaced”, and that it has “already been happening to programmers all through the years.”

In a worst case (but unfortunately realistic) scenario, publishers would be laying off these talented artists, animators and programmers to replace them with AI to automate the work.

Although Vermeij is hopeful that doesn’t happen, you need only look at the volume of mass layoffs and studio closures happening at the moment to see that this is an unfortunately possible scenario.

“I don’t think AI will be doing the creative part,” Vermeij adds. “You’ll still have artists setting the style and the look, and you’re still going to have writers writing the story. I don’t think AI can do that. But there’s a lot of boring work that artists do now that I think, probably, AI could do.”

At the end of the day, it’s important to remember that humans create art, and that a computer will never be able to do it with the same detail, love and care. We’ll have to wait and see what the future holds for GTA 7.