GTA 6 Doesn’t Need to Tell Me Exactly What to Do

Rockstar Games’ open worlds are a sight to behold. Technically impressive and incredibly detailed, they have distinct visual identities and are often a joy to explore. They’re also experts at creating memorable narrative experiences with a wide cast of characters, factions, and unique NPCs. As their open-world design has improved with each iteration, a major aspect of their gameplay structure has remained largely unchanged: how they handle missions.

It’s a common criticism of their open worlds at this point, but Rockstar’s design sensibilities have always clashed between the limited freedom offered in their missions and the limitless potential of their sandbox open worlds.

Their last major release, Red Dead Redemption 2, is one of the most impressive open worlds ever conceived, packed with handcrafted events, a highly responsive physics engine, an arsenal of weapons, and incredibly advanced NPC AI. However, when it comes to the actual missions, you’re bound by Rockstar’s grand scheme of how exactly each part has to play out. Sure, you’re riding, shooting, and doing all sorts of crazy things, but you’re still following a set path and can’t exactly get creative with how you approach a certain mission. Say you’re supposed to enter a room to kill a certain character. Unless you follow the intended steps and trigger the dialogue and events beforehand, you’re simply not allowed to enter that room.

I keep coming back to it, but Red Dead Redemption 2’s open-world activities let you live out your cowboy fantasies however you want. At one point, I stopped doing the main missions entirely and spent around 50 hours just hunting. It was so rewarding because there was a fully realized system within this behemoth of a game that gave me more freedom to play my own way than many of the main missions ever did. I could track animals, study them, choose what to hunt, manage my equipment, and simply disappear into the wilderness for hours without the game constantly telling me exactly what I was supposed to do next.

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And that’s what makes the contrast with the missions so frustrating. Rockstar has already built these incredibly deep systems that encourage experimentation and player expression. The open world trusts you to figure things out for yourself, but the moment a mission begins, that freedom can suddenly disappear. I don’t know how many missions I’ve been forced to restart in GTA Online because I didn’t do exactly what Rockstar expected me to do at a certain part.

Make no mistake, this doesn’t mean the missions themselves aren’t memorable. They are, and there’s a level of technical and artistic excellence that’s always on display as you go through these tightly scripted events. But I feel like giving players some degree of creative freedom in how they tackle different objectives, or even where they park a car, should be within their control. I’m not saying every mission has to play out like something from Metal Gear Solid V, but don’t punish me for trying a different approach once in a while.

This also means that replaying missions often involves doing the exact same thing you did the last time, and certain missions can start to lose some of their flavor as a result. However, something that gives me a bit more hope is that Rockstar has experimented with giving players more freedom in some of GTA Online’s missions.

The Cayo Perico Heist is a good example of what can be done. While you have to complete the necessary setup missions beforehand, once you’re actually on the island, you can change your approach on the fly. You might find bolt cutters and decide to go after some secondary loot you hadn’t originally planned to grab. You can take an exit you didn’t intend to use, or even completely change how you infiltrate the compound. Maybe you planned to blow open the gate and go in guns blazing, but then you stumble across a guard uniform and a truck, giving you the option to sneak in instead.

What’s funny is that older games like Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas often gave you more freedom precisely because they had fewer scripted events and complex mission sequences. If the objective was simply to kill a guy, you could just kill the guy. It didn’t necessarily matter how or when you did it. As long as the objective was completed, the mission would pass. Remember the iconic train mission from San Andreas? Just jump on the train and take everyone out; it’s a valid choice. There was less happening around you, but that also meant there were fewer invisible boundaries telling you exactly how the game wanted you to complete an objective.

GTA 6 Could Finally Bridge the Gap

That’s the kind of freedom I’d like to see Rockstar bring into its single-player missions, and Grand Theft Auto 6 feels like the perfect opportunity to finally do it. Rockstar has spent years refining its open-world systems, making its worlds more reactive, detailed, and dynamic with every release. GTA 6 appears to be taking that philosophy even further, with a living world that feels more interconnected and responsive than anything the studio has created before.

I don’t want Rockstar to sacrifice its incredible scripted set pieces or carefully crafted storytelling. Those are a huge part of what makes their games special and stand the test of time. But if GTA 6’s world is going to be as dynamic as Rockstar has suggested, I’d love to see that dynamism carry over into its main missions as well. Give me the tools, objectives, and sandbox, then let me figure out how to get the job done. Let me park somewhere unexpected, approach an objective from a different direction, find an alternative way inside, or completely derail my original plan because I stumbled across an opportunity the game didn’t explicitly put in front of me.

That’s ultimately what makes Rockstar’s open worlds so special. They make you feel like anything could happen, only to occasionally remind you that you’re still playing through a carefully scripted sequence. GTA 6 has the potential to finally close that gap. If Rockstar can combine the freedom of its sandbox with the cinematic storytelling its missions are known for, it could create something that feels genuinely unpredictable without sacrificing the memorable set pieces that define the studio’s games.

Rockstar already has the technology and the open worlds to make this work. Now, more than ever, I want its missions to catch up with them.