What to play while you wait for GTA 6

There are seventy-three days left and a countdown is a bad way to spend them. These are the games worth going back to, and more usefully, what each one actually tells you about the game arriving in November.

Red Dead Redemption 2

The most important one on this list, because Grand Theft Auto 6 is visibly built on it rather than on Grand Theft Auto V.

The weight in the animation, the way characters interact with objects rather than snapping to them, the ambient conversations that continue whether you are listening or not: all of it starts here in 2018. When Rockstar says 600,000 animations, this is the game where that approach was invented.

Play it and the Extended Look footage stops looking like a graphics jump and starts looking like a continuation.

Grand Theft Auto V

Obvious, and worth it for a specific reason: it is the control group.

Almost every change Rockstar has described is a change from this. The wanted system building a case instead of a star rating, weapons living in your car, the return of the San Andreas body system. Playing thirty minutes of Los Santos makes the mechanics coverage land differently, because you can feel exactly what is being replaced.

It is also the size comparison everyone quotes. Vice City alone is reported at roughly twice Los Santos.

Sleeping Dogs

Fourteen years old and still the best argument that a smaller city with more texture beats a bigger one with less.

Hong Kong in Sleeping Dogs is dense, specific and full of places that feel used. That is the quality Rockstar appears to be chasing in Vice City, and it is a different goal from the empty scale of Red Dead's frontier.

The Mafia trilogy

For the crime story rather than the open world, which is the honest way to recommend these.

Mafia II in particular understands something Grand Theft Auto 6 looks like it is aiming at: a partnership where the interesting part is the relationship going wrong, not the heists. Jason and Lucia are being sold as a couple first and criminals second.

Like a Dragon, or any Yakuza

The other model for a city, and the opposite of the Rockstar one. A handful of streets, absurdly dense, with a side activity behind every door.

If the thing you are most looking forward to is the return of real side activities, the gym, the diving, the fishing that you cannot profit from, then this is the series that never stopped doing it.

Cyberpunk 2077

Worth including now in a way it was not in 2020. The 2.0 rework turned it into the thing it was sold as, and it is the closest recent comparison for a dense first-party-scale city built for current hardware.

It is also a useful reminder of what happens when an enormous open world ships before it is ready, which is the exact fate Rockstar has spent two delays avoiding.

What not to bother with

The Definitive Edition trilogy remains a hard sell. If you want the original Vice City, the argument for playing it is the district names that came back, Ocean Beach and Washington Beach among them, and the Vercetti name Rockstar wrote into its own marketing copy.

That is genuine context for the new game. Just go in knowing the remaster is the weakest way to get it.

The honest answer

If you play one, play Red Dead Redemption 2. It is the direct ancestor, it is long enough to eat most of the seventy-three days, and it is the only game on this list that makes the wait feel like preparation rather than killing time.