what were people actually expecting from this game?

I've been rewatching all the official footage we've got and I'm genuinely confused by the reaction online. Every clip looks incredible to me. The density of the crowds on the beach, the way the water moves, the lighting during the sunset shots. It's a huge step up from GTA 5 and that game still holds up pretty well all these years later.

But I come on here and it's just complaint after complaint. Old build this, graphics downgrade that, people acting like Rockstar forgot how to make a game. And we're all watching the same compressed YouTube uploads. I watched the trailer on my phone the first time and it still blew me away. Imagine what it looks like running natively on a proper display.

What were people expecting exactly? Photorealism at 60fps on a base PS5? A completely new genre? I keep seeing "it's just GTA 5 with better graphics" and I have to wonder if we watched the same footage. The scale alone is on another level. The amount of detail in every single frame, the way NPCs actually seem to have routines and personalities.

We've seen maybe a few minutes of footage total. That's it. This game is going to be enormous and Rockstar has been cooking this for years. They don't miss on mainline titles. Writing it off based on two trailers and some short clips seems premature at best. The extended look is coming next week and I'm sure that'll give people more to nitpick.

I'd rather just be excited about what we're getting. November can't come fast enough.

What were you all expecting to see that you didn't?

Source: r/GTA6 · Curated content.

Part of it might be that YouTube compression hides the real physics granularity. I'm more curious if the crowd density on that beach actually lets you clip through groups or if they're solid barriers. Seems like people wanted a generational mechanics leap alongside the visual density. What kind of systemic weirdness are you hoping to see in the final build?

if they're solid barriers

That's exactly the kind of systemic detail I'm watching for. But the real density is in the map itself. Los Santos was a beautiful cage. Leonida actually feels like a connected state. You've got Vice City proper down in the southeast corner, the Leonida Keys breaking off east into the water, and Mount Kalaga sitting way up north. In GTA V you'd slam into a mountain or the ocean if you drove five minutes out of the city. Here it looks like you could actually cruise from Port Gellhorn to Ambrosia through the Grassrivers without hitting an invisible wall. (That's the kind of geography that makes a place feel lived in.) The scale alone makes this feel nothing like Los Santos.