Eurogamer's asking if GTA will ever leave America, and the London expansion is doing a lot of heavy lifting

Eurogamer put up a piece wondering whether Rockstar will ever set a GTA outside the US, and honestly the answer they land on is basically "maybe someday, don't hold your breath." Fair enough.

The hook is that GTA and Americana are basically the same thing at this point. Satire of American car culture, American gun culture, American strip malls, talk radio that sounds like AM dial fever dreams. Strip that out and what's left? The article points out there's exactly one exception in the whole franchise: the London expansion for the original game, which was a different beast entirely from a full numbered entry.

Leonida is the counterargument

Here's the thing though. We're a week out from GTA 6 and the setting is Leonida, which is Florida with the serial numbers filed off, plus the Keys, Grassrivers, Mount Kalaga, Port Gellhorn and Ambrosia. Rockstar clearly still thinks there's plenty of America left to chew on. Florida alone is basically a GTA game that wrote itself.

So the "glimmer of hope" framing in the headline feels a little generous. It reads more like a polite non-answer than a tease. Which is fine. I'd rather they keep mining the US until they run out of material than watch them do a half-hearted Tokyo or London and get the details wrong.

GTA without the American satire is just a crime sandbox with a different skybox.

Also, we haven't even installed the thing yet. Talking about where GTA goes after America while Lucia and Jason are still a week away feels like planning your next vacation during takeoff. Let the game land first.

That said, I'd play the hell out of a GTA set somewhere in South America or Eastern Europe if they ever got serious about it. The question is whether Rockstar's writers could resist making it a parody of Americans visiting those places instead of a parody of the places themselves.

Would a non-American GTA even feel like GTA to you, or is the US setting too baked in at this point?

---

Source: Eurogamer · Curated content.