The Best GTA 4 Ideas Rockstar Should Bring Back for GTA 6

GTA 4 was a monumental release for Rockstar Games, debuting their RAGE Engine and featuring Euphoria physics that emphasized realism like never before. Despite critical acclaim and commercial success, not everyone was in love with the studio’s focus on realism, and many features were cut as the studio moved to the next iteration within the same generation.

GTA 5 would scale up in other areas but leave some of GTA 4’s innovations behind. I think many of those immersive ideas are worth revisiting in GTA 6.

Deeper Friendship System

GTA 4 placed a strong emphasis on maintaining friendships through shared activities and an in-depth social system that rewarded you for doing so. Each friend had certain likes and dislikes, as well as places they liked to visit. Continuing to hang out with them improved your relationship, giving you new dialogue encounters and perks like Roman’s cab service, Brucie’s chopper, and discounted guns from Little Jacob. While you can still hang out with characters in GTA 5, it’s mostly just them joining you for an activity, and there’s no actual progression behind it.

Some people did find it annoying when Roman or any other NPC would randomly call you to go bowling, but honestly, it made me more appreciative of how much incentive there was to maintain friendships. There are so many random conversations most players will miss if they don’t engage with the system.

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GTA 6 has an even greater opportunity to make this system work thanks to Jason and Lucia’s relationship. I’d love to see certain activities and interactions reveal more about their personalities and history, while spending time with other characters could gradually unlock unique conversations, interactions, or even affect how they behave during certain missions.

The goal shouldn’t be to bring back Roman’s incessant bowling calls, but to make relationships feel like they actually exist beyond the main story.

In-depth Hand-to-Hand Combat

GTA 4’s hand-to-hand combat was a huge upgrade over San Andreas, allowing you to lock onto enemies, evade incoming attacks, block, throw them off balance by shoving, kick, perform combos, grab opponents, and execute timed counterattacks. Enemies would wobble as their health went down even during combat, and there were tons of small details that communicated actual weight behind every punch.

While GTA 5 also has an unarmed combat system, it’s been dumbed down quite a bit, resulting in a simpler fighting system where a few punches are often enough to knock out an enemy. Red Dead Redemption 2, on the other hand, takes many of these ideas further, and there’s a surprising amount of depth available if you want to avoid a straight shootout.

I hope GTA 6 has a more involved hand-to-hand combat system than GTA 5, and that there’s plenty of potential to learn new combat skills through activities. We’ve already seen Lucia train and use mixed martial arts techniques in a cage fight, so there’s a good chance some of GTA 4’s foundation could return in a more refined form.

Advanced and Reactive Police AI

Cops in GTA 4 didn’t just start shooting at you right away. They showed far more restraint and would often give you warnings before escalating the situation. At lower wanted levels, officers would try to arrest you rather than immediately opening fire, chasing you on foot and even physically tackling you if they got close enough. If you managed to break their line of sight, they would search your last known location instead of magically knowing where you were, giving you a genuine opportunity to hide in an alley or around a corner and escape. At higher wanted levels, the response would naturally escalate, but you’re basically asking for it if things get to that point.

GTA 5 streamlined much of this into a faster, more action-oriented system, with police generally becoming aggressive much more quickly once you’ve been identified. While the wanted system still allows you to break line of sight and lose the police, the actual encounters don’t feel quite as dynamic or believable as they did in GTA 4. I’d love to see GTA 6 bring back some of that restraint, with officers attempting to arrest you, investigating your last known position, coordinating searches, and escalating their response depending on what you’ve actually done.

Red Dead Redemption 2 has already done a lot of the legwork for this thanks to its greet and antagonize system, where you can piss off law enforcement quite a bit before they actually take matters into their own hands. Also, unless a cop actually sees you commit a crime, let’s not spawn them out of thin air, please, Rockstar?

Throwable Objects

This is a minor one, but I really liked how many things you could pick up and throw at pedestrians or even enemies. These included beer bottles, bricks, cans, cups, cookies, spray cans, utensils, and all sorts of things you might find lying around while exploring.

It’s a small thing and didn’t even do much damage, if any, but it made the world feel more alive and interactive. GTA 5 didn’t have this at all, and while it doesn’t radically change the game or world, it’s a neat little feature that I’d like to see again in GTA 6.

Street Vendors

Vendors were originally introduced in GTA San Andreas and were kept and improved upon in GTA 4. It’s not the biggest thing in the world, but they gave Liberty City a greater sense of place. You could buy food and beverages from them for a quick buck and replenish your health in a more involved, natural way. Unfortunately, these were cut from GTA 5, and even though literal vending carts exist throughout the world, you can’t interact with them at all.

GTA 6 is set in Leonida State, inspired by Florida, which is packed to the brim with outdoor vendors. This is the perfect opportunity for Rockstar to reintroduce them in an even more interactive way. Instead of just food, players could buy merchandise, unique clothing items, and other consumables, giving these vendors a more meaningful role in the world beyond mere background decoration.

Are there any features you’d like to see return in GTA 6 from prior games? Share your picks in the comments below.