It’s been quite some time since Rockstar did anything except GTA and Red Dead Redemption. Gone are the days of Max Payne, LA Noire or Midnight Run, and there were wilder ideas on the drawing board, too. A former lead who spearheaded one of those prospective projects doesn’t believe there were any missed opportunities, simply because they wouldn’t have lived up to Grand Theft Auto.
“The reality is if you have a studio that has one mega successful game, it just doesn’t make sense to do any wild changes,” Obbe Vermeij, previously a technical director at Rockstar who worked on GTA 3, Vice, San Andreas and 4, told GameHub. “Whatever weird ideas you have, we really should put them into GTA rather than just launching an entirely new game.”
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“In retrospect, I don’t think there’s a missed opportunity at all, either with that zombie game or with other experiments like Agent,” he states. “They wouldn’t have been as good as GTA. They would have been a waste of time and a distraction.”
Heavy words, but then, you have to wonder if those games would’ve made an impression with players. LA Noire didn’t linger too much, as many likely saw it as a stopgap to getting the next slab of GTA or Red Dead. Those feelings have only intensified, especially as GTA 6 suffers more delays.
That said, Vermeijj thoroughly respects developers for turning away from success when the reason doesn’t suit them, like Larian Studios doing a new Divinity instead of pushing straight into Baldur’s Gate 4. “It’s quite cool to see like Larian Studios who just did Baldur’s Gate 3 and they’ve said, ‘We don’t feel like Baldur’s Gate 4. We’re just gonna do another game,'” he says.
“Good for them. But it’s a bold move. It’s not obvious. It’s very risky. It’s easier to just keep on doing what you’re doing.”
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