Vortex Gaming

There are many masterpiece games in the world. The Legend of Zelda series and Baldur's Gate series, which were huge hits with new releases this year, as well as the Fallout series, God of War series, Halo, Call of Duty, and Blizzard games, it would be too long to mention them all, but there are so many great games.

However, even if all these games are great and amazing, they can't help but feel nervous when this game series is put up as a comparison.

'GTA(Grand Theft Auto)'

This game series with the strange name 'Grand Theft Auto' is, without a doubt, the series with the best status among countless games. First of all, the scale is different. During the development of GTA4, the development cost alone was about $100 million (about 120 billion won), which was listed in the Guinness Book of Records, and this record was broken by the next work, GTA5, with about $265 million. And it is known that this work, 'GTA6', cost as much as 9 times more than the previous work, and the estimate is at least $2 billion, or about 2.6 trillion won in Korean currency.

Of course, there are few comparable targets in terms of sales. The total sales of the previous work, 'GTA5', is 190 million copies. It recorded sales close to 4 times the entire population of Korea, and the only record that exceeds this is Mojang's Minecraft (about 300 million copies). Most other famous games record sales of less than 50 million copies. What you need to keep in mind here is that 'GTA5' is an adult game with all sorts of labels attached, compared to Minecraft, which is classified as for all ages.

Therefore, even though it was announced after 10 years, fans cheered rather than criticized. By 2025, the expected release date, it will be a sequel after 12 years, but they are confident that it will be a great game. The only downside is that the first public video is only 1 minute and 30 seconds long. Personally, I thought it would be nice if it was about 3 minutes long, but the wait was too long.

Still, it's okay. Because within that 1 minute and 30 seconds, there are quite a few scenes where you can see what kind of game 'GTA6' is.

The setting of GTA6 is the 'Leonaida' State. This area, based on Florida in reality, includes 'Vice City', a fictional city modeled after 'Miami', the largest city in Florida. Vice City has been featured several times in previous series (Part 1, Vice City, Vice City Stories).

The difference in this work is that, unlike the existing works that focused on 'Vice City' itself, it deals with the entire metropolitan area including Vice City. The 'Leonaida' State is a huge island like the 'San Andreas' State in the previous GTA6, which can be seen as a kind of game-like permission for marking regional boundaries within the game.

And the appearance of the 'Leonaida' State in the video is very similar to the actual appearance of 'Florida', which is the motif. 'San Andreas' and 'Los Santos', the settings for GTA5, were also depicted as very similar to California and Los Angeles, which served as real-world motifs, and this work also faithfully follows the motif.

In addition to simple terrain, the focus of this video is solely on informing what kind of world and atmosphere the game 'GTA6' maintains. Rather than new systems, gimmicks, or features, it shows the environment of the stage where gamers will be active as if listing them. And from now on, I will explain this one by one. Vice City, Leonaida, and even predicting what kind of atmosphere 'GTA6' will be.

1. Vice City Returns (Miami)

Vice City is Miami itself. It shows the appearance of Miami Beach, which is famous as a resort, as well as luxury apartments and the scenery of a city full of neon signs. In the game, Vice City is described as being made up of beaches, several islands, and coral islands, but there are some differences from the actual Miami. Overall, unlike the actual Atlantic beach, the game's depiction has a bay-like terrain like the 'Bay Area'. If you include the Bahamas across the sea, which is very far away, you get a roughly similar appearance.

2. The Great Swamps (Everglades National Park)

In reality, it is a huge swamp located southwest of Miami, called Everglades National Park. Its name is not revealed separately in the game, and the trailer shows a scene of riding a 'fan boat' (a boat with a huge fan, also called a duck boat) across the swamp, which can slide over shallow water or mud, making it one of the main tourist attractions of Everglades National Park.

Also, in the video, you can see a flock of flamingos, and American flamingos actually live on the coast of Florida, and you can also see a flock of flamingos in the Everglades.

3. Port Gellhorn, Kelly County (Small Towns and Suburbs)

The Leonaida State in the game consists of several small cities and suburbs in addition to 'Vice City', and Port Gellhorn and Kelly County are among the few areas where place names are revealed. In the case of Port Gellhorn, it is also revealed on the leaked map above, and it has not been confirmed that the area is correct, but if it is correct, 'Tampa' or 'Fort Myers' corresponds to it in reality, and 'Fort Myers' is considered the most likely motif based on the naming.

In the case of Kelly County, the location is not specified, but judging from the sign that can be seen in the video, the road they are driving on is Route 826 in reality (a highway in downtown Miami with downtown located on the right), and Route 404 west to Kelly County is estimated to be Route 41 in reality. The location of Kelly County is estimated to be west or northwest of Miami.

Another characteristic terrain of Leonaida State is that there is a lot of 'water'. As an area made up of beaches and islands, Leonaida is a very watery area, so there are a huge variety of water transportation options. In particular, everything from fairly large yachts to huge container freighters appear, and considering that the previous work focused on aviation, allowing even large passenger planes to be controlled, there may be an opportunity to drive large freighters in the 6th installment. This is because the GTA series is made so that most of the vehicles that appear can actually be controlled.

4. Common Leonaida Daily Life

From the middle of the video (41 seconds), scenes of all sorts of bizarre and strange scenes that have been processed into short-form SNS forms appear, with all sorts of extraordinary scenes appearing, from a middle-aged woman holding two claw hammers to an alligator strolling down the street.

Surprisingly, most of these are actually happening (...). This is a kind of 'Florida Man' meme that has been spreading little by little for 10 years, which is a meme that satirizes the bizarre things that happen in Florida. To make it easier for domestic users to understand, it's similar to small humor posts with titles such as 'Common Bear Country XXX' or 'Common Continent XXX'. If you compare it to actual scenes, it's difficult to tell which is the game and which is real, but it actually happened.

5. Two Main Characters, 'Lucia' and 'X'

There are two main characters in this work. Considering that most game series feature one main character for immersion and allow customization, the GTA series features created main characters rather than main characters that gamers create themselves, and the number of main characters fluctuates. In the case of 'GTA4', the main character of the main game is 'Niko Bellic', but the expansion pack 'Ballad of Gay Tony' features 'Luis Fernando Lopez' as the main character, and the previous game featured 3 main characters, 'Franklin', 'Michael', and 'Trevor', and in the old games 1 and 2, there are as many as 8 main characters.

This is because, unlike the common game experience where gamers become the main character of the story and experience it, the GTA series follows the process of experiencing a story made in the form of a drama, and Rockstar Games' other series, 'Red Dead Redemption', also has a similar structure.

The main characters are a male and female pair, and the female main character's name is 'Lucia'. The male main character's name has not been officially revealed, but he was called 'Jason' in the leak, so most people call him 'Jason'. In the video, only limited information about 'Lucia' was revealed, and the most distinctive part is that it starts in 'prison'. The fact that the main character is female is not a big surprise, as 4 of the 8 main characters in GTA 1 were female. It wasn't that important in the narrative, though.

Therefore, it is unknown whether the introduction will be a 'jailbreak' or a 'release', but it shows that 'prison' can be a major play sequence.

However, what is still unknown is what kind of relationship these two main characters have. It's no secret that most of the main characters in the GTA series are crime partners, but it's clear that it's more than just a simple business relationship.

However, the GTA series itself is very far from sweet emotions for the two to be in a romantic relationship (most of the couples in GTA are in adulterous relationships, show window couples, or at least one of them has a problem), and the atmosphere of the characters in the video seems rather solemn than romantic, so it is speculated that they are siblings or friends who walked different paths.

Several more speculations are added to the male main character, and the reason is that he looks too docile to be a criminal prodigy. Most of the main characters in GTA have short hair, but even so, their impressions were so fierce that if they were wearing uniforms, you could believe they were police officers, so you can even speculate that they are former police officers who have changed their minds.

6. Increased Scale and Advanced Technology

Apart from the background and narrative aspects, the most prominent parts are the scale and technological advancements of the game itself, which is much larger than the already huge previous work.

The first thing to look at is the skyline of 'Vice City', one of the main stages of the game. The previous work, 'Los Santos', was mostly made up of low-rise buildings, and only the downtown area, the center of the city, was lined with high-rise buildings, which is because the actual motif, LA, also has a similar shape.

However, 'Vice City' in this work shows an overwhelming skyline compared to Los Santos, even considering the excuse of the actual motif. There are no open world games with this many high-rise buildings, and the only comparable game is Night City in 'Cyberpunk 2077'. The expansion of high-rise buildings also requires consideration of the Z-axis space configuration, which means a much larger expansion than planar space expansion. Of course, it is realistically impossible to implement the interior of all buildings. However, since scenes staged indoors or on the roofs of buildings are also visible, it seems that they are not just buildings that take up space.

There are two things that are clearly visible in terms of technology: the amazingly improved lighting and water graphics. Water graphics ultimately combine the physical effects of fluids and the degree of light transmission to create a natural result, so the shaping of light plays a major role, and you can see that this part has become very natural compared to the previous work. The previous work was not a lacking game in terms of visuals, so it may not feel like much, but if you compare them side by side, the difference is clear.

Another amazing thing that can be seen in the image above is that the body shapes of the characters are all different. Most open world games tend to have too many characters, so they usually set a few skeletons as stereotypes and create various human images by changing clothes, skin tones, eye colors, etc. The case of 'Dead Island 2', which created a large number of zombies, is also the same.

However, the characters in the GTA6 scene have different skeletons from the start. Just looking at the three women on the left of the screen, their shoulder widths, heights, pelvic heights, muscle densities, and skin tones are all different. Even if you look at the appearance of all the characters in the video, it is difficult to find a similar appearance. This means that Rockstar Games has created a lot of skeleton types, or that the body shape elements are randomized to create characters randomly, and in the latter case, there is a risk that a person who feels too strange or has an uncanny valley may be created because everything is random.

It may be that each and every extra is not a carved character, but there are too many characters appearing in the trailer alone to do that. Of course, not all NPCs in GTA6 will be made to have natural differences, but it can be said that great progress has been made even if gamers can only reach a level where they cannot specify the skeleton.

웹진 인벤정재훈 기자
2023-12-06