Poll: Where should GTA VI be set?

[mardocOz]

Fair points, all. I think there are ways to work around a lot of these issues, though.

Scenery could change up by not limiting it specifically to London, but to other parts of the UK as well. Rampaging over the Yorkshire Moors or the mountainous regions of Wales/Scotland, the idyllic countryside of south-west England, there's plenty to see. Similar to how they did it in San Andreas you wouldn't be limited to just Los Santos necessarily.

Guns? Well sure, getting your hand on a gun is not as easy in the UK or Australia as the second-amendment loving US of A but that's not to say they don't exist. It's entirely possible for criminals to be armed, and since it would be such a rare occurence for a nutter to be running around with military grade hardware a la GTA then it actually makes sense for the police to respond as they do in the games (shoot first, ask questions later etc). Of course you'd need to work around the fact that your average British bobby isn't armed, but meh... who cares for accuracy anyway? (And again, there are armed police in the UK, just not all of them).

Rockstar's game design does seem to follow certain formulae, true. I'm not going to get my hopes up for a non-American GTA, as long as it's fun to play they could send it back to Liberty City or Los Santos again. My only concern, and I'm sure I'm not alone, is that by releasing the same (or very similar) settings over and over again it may start to get stale. There's only so many "America! Fuck yeah!" jokes that can be made. A different setting is one way for them to mix it up a bit and keep the series fresh. Not the only way, for sure, but it's definitely one.

Ultimately though it's all subjective, and I think most of us will be happy as long as the game is fun to play regardless of the setting.

 

[Rangaman]

For the satire in GTA to work the setting and culture need to feel familiar for the audience, which rules out any games set outside of the US.

Why?

Are you suggesting that an American audience is not familiar enough with the stereotypical portrayal of other western nations to find entertainment?

Yes. It's an international audience, rather than American, but American culture is the most dominant.

If you think about all of the various radio stations in the previous games, the television shows, and the pop culture references, there isn't enough familiarity with other cultures to provide that level of satire. There is zero chance of a GTA game set entirely outside of the USA. The best you could hope for is some kind of border location with Mexican, Canadian or even Cuban locations.

I don't know if you've ever been to Australia and England, but there's easily enough to satirize in those two countries. Xenophobia, bogans, cockneys, pretentiousness, the clash between the liberal city-center dwellers and the conservative country folk...actually, it's not that different from the US.

For the record, London was actually a previous setting and Rockstar North is still based in Scotland, so you never know.

 

[Rangaman]

I think the issue with setting GTA outside of the USA is that most, Western, countries aren't as lax with their gun laws.

It would be kind of unheard of to see someone in Australia shooting up civilians in the streets, unless you set it back in the 80s or something and even then...

The US of A is kind of, uh...great(?)...when it comes to violence.
I mean, this country FEEDS of it.

We couldn't even pass any kind of background check laws, even when 90+ of the population wants it, because the NRA and their bitches in DC ain't got the stones to do it.
Shit, we've had little kids being killed and all the NRA/GOP does is drink their blood like Dracula.

So, yeah...U.S.A! U.S.A! U.S.A! U.S.A! U.S.A! U.S.A! U.S.A! U.S.A!

It's still entirely possible to obtain firearms in Australia, the United Kingdom, etc. Not as easily as in the US, true, but not impossible either.

Massacres have occurred more recently as well. The Port Arthur Massacre is the reason we have gun laws nowadays.

 

[Tayh]

In the capital city of Denmark: Copenhagen, of course.

 

[WolfThomas]

I think the issue with setting GTA outside of the USA is that most, Western, countries aren't as lax with their gun laws.

It would be kind of unheard of to see someone in Australia shooting up civilians in the streets, unless you set it back in the 80s or something and even then...

The US of A is kind of, uh...great(?)...when it comes to violence.
I mean, this country FEEDS of it.

We couldn't even pass any kind of background check laws, even when 90+ of the population wants it, because the NRA and their bitches in DC ain't got the stones to do it.
Shit, we've had little kids being killed and all the NRA/GOP does is drink their blood like Dracula.

So, yeah...U.S.A! U.S.A! U.S.A! U.S.A! U.S.A! U.S.A! U.S.A! U.S.A!

Technically GTA 4 portrayed a city with strict gun laws. You couldn't walk into an Ammunation, you had to buy guns off blackmarket dealers in warehouses or out of the trunk of cars. It's why you lose your guns if you are caught by the police.

GTA V has some narrative dissonance in that you had to steal guns for one heist (the first one) because you couldn't be using store bought guns, but then let you commit every other crime with store bought guns.

Australia has conservative 250,000 semi-automatic rifles, shotguns and pump action shotgun that were never surrendered. Some analysts think it is actually in the low millions (calculating from sales and imports). Then there's guns that were stolen, went missing from the police (a disturbingly high number), are imported illegal (5% of all shipping containers are searched) or made in the backyard.

Plenty of criminal have guns in Australia. Just not ordinary people. Heck Mick Gatto (supsected organised crime figure to those from out of Australia) just walked with a slap on the wrist from being caught with an illegal handgun.

 

[008Zulu_v1legacy]

Another country. Australia and England are pretty tough on guns, so maybe not an ideal setting. Mexico would be cool. Run drugs across the border for the Cartels. You could even have a Trump parody promising to build a 100 foot tall electrified laser fence or something. Perhaps somewhere tropical, like Cuba or Haiti (they did have a gang war in Vice City, perhaps an offshoot?). Or change things up, and go to Alaska. Imagine the multiplayer snowball fights.