re-watching GTA III and GTA VC's trailers and comparing it to GTA VI's trailer I'm reminded why I didn't finish GTA V despite having played like, every GTA game and expansion from III to V.
GTA V's main storyline was a lot of uhm, I'm not sure how to put this, massive budget storytelling and unique gameplay experiences. I think the last mission I did was where I hung out in a helicopter shooting things with a rocket launcher and they had a carefully crafted narrative, custom helicopter + rocket launcher gameplay and a lot of extra stuff to make the game feel more like a movie than a game. All I really wanted to do was what was highlighted in the GTA III trailer: you drive around and shoot things in an open-world sandbox game.
Watching the GTA VI trailer, it's a looooot of dialog and basically nothing that resembles the core gameplay mechanics. Maybe the genre has passed me by, but I also played Cyberpunk 2077 for the first time recently and the ratio of storytelling / random bullshit to core combat was too high for my liking. The joke I made was it was the best movie I've ever played. Still a great game but by the end I was just waiting for it to be over so I could go start playing a game with no dialog and cutscenes.
But back to GTA, I'm reminded of this cutscene from ProZD.
I'm pretty sure that no matter how good it is and how much $$$ they spend on it, the amount of fun I'll have playing GTA VI will be based on the ratio of time I spend driving (a normalish car) / shooting (a normalish gun) relative to cutscenes and goofy game mechanics.