Grand Theft Auto 6 (GTA 6) and Starfield may seem different, but they share more similarities than you might think. Just like Starfield, GTA 6 is under a lot of pressure to meet high expectations.

Starfield, despite having many fans, got negative reviews on Steam, showing that not everyone loved it. Bethesda, the creator of Starfield, might turn things around with continued support and DLC releases, but the game didn’t hit the mark it was supposed to.

Some fans feel Starfield doesn’t match up to the excitement generated by games like Skyrim, and it doesn’t feel like a game from 2023.

This disappointment casts a shadow over GTA 6, which has been highly anticipated for years. Rockstar Games confirmed the development of GTA 6 in February 2022, and after nearly two years, they released the first trailer, creating even more anticipation.

The game has already broken records on social media and won an award for the most anticipated game of 2024 from PlayStation Blog.

While GTA 6 and Starfield differ in genres, they share challenges. Both are successors to some of the best games ever, releasing over a decade later. Both come from developers known for groundbreaking releases.

The key is that they face similar challenges. Starfield faced criticism for not meeting expectations, and GTA 6 needs to avoid the same pitfalls. The road ahead for GTA 6 must be different if it wants to live up to the massive anticipation that surrounds it.

Starfield and GTA 6 Open-World Design

Starfield and Grand Theft Auto 6 (GTA 6) both have some big challenges, with two main things standing out: how their open-world works and how much people connect with them culturally.

Starfield, when you’re on a planet, kind of feels like older games Skyrim and Fallout 4. There are some new things, but it doesn’t feel as fresh as it should. It’s like a game from 2011 and 2015, not 2023.

Bethesda’s open-world style, which made Skyrim popular, is now seen in many other games, making it less special.

What makes it tougher is that, in some ways, Starfield feels like a step backward. Unlike Skyrim and Fallout 4, it’s not entirely open-world.

Moving from one planet to another involves a lot of fast travel, taking away from the immersive experience. Fans miss the challenges of climbing mountains or dealing with invisible barriers. Starfield doesn’t have that unique identity.

GTA 6 is dealing with a similar challenge, but with a bigger problem – nobody really knows what the gameplay looks like, and we might not find out until most of 2024. The hype is building up, and GTA 6 needs to meet the expectations set by modern games like Red Dead 2 and GTA 5.

The question is, can Rockstar make GTA 6 better and different from GTA 5? If not, it might end up like Starfield, feeling like an older game released in 2025.

An interesting note is that the newer versions of GTA 5 on PS5 and Xbox Series X/S got lower reviews because they didn’t feel like big improvements. If GTA 6 gameplay is too similar, it might face the same disappointment.

It’s not impossible for GTA 6 to succeed, but that shadow of doubt is there, just like with Starfield. Some fans speculate about things like Lucia’s ankle monitor limiting the game’s map, but it’s still uncertain. The challenge for GTA 6 is to be fresh and exciting, avoiding the pitfalls that Starfield encountered.

Starfield and GTA 6 Cultural Relevance

Skyrim sparked a decade-plus of memes, modifications, community interactions, discoveries, lore dives, and fan theories, eventually making it one of the industry’s most significant titles.

Even non-gamers who have never held a controller are likely to be aware of Skyrim’s influence and link with current society. Starfield lacks all of these qualities. Perhaps it’s because to its more realistic, grounded NASA-like approach, but it’s easy to recall a variety of Skyrim inspirations, characters, groups, and so on.

It’s not the same with Starfield, and whatever Bethesda’s blunder was, it’s difficult to envision Starfield ever being the cultural behemoth that Skyrim was.

Then there’s Grand Theft Auto 6. Rockstar is going all-in on the broad meme-ification of Florida, displaying items such as the Florida Joker, including “Florida Man” headlines into its visuals, and satirizing features of social media, party culture, and the modern-day person.

In this regard, GTA 6 may have an edge over Starfield, despite the latter being an imagined, pseudo-realistic future, in that it is immediately more relevant now.

GTA 6 is, however, more anticipated than Starfield ever was, raising the same question: is it enough to assure that GTA 6 is on par with Grand Theft Auto 5, the most profitable entertainment product of all time?

If the anticipation keeps doubling, tripling, and quadrupling on such little information with no genuine expectations, it becomes much more difficult to anticipate.

That shadow remained over GTA 6’s pre-launch hoopla, as it currently does over Starfield’s post-launch time, just as it did during both games’ development.

The Future of Starfield and GTA 6

The perfect future is obvious. Bethesda continues to work on Starfield, offering updates, DLC, and fixes that bring the game full circle to the pre-release hype. Updates can make some of its open-world drags more enjoyable while also providing new features that stand out.

Its future features might add more to the main game, making it culturally relevant to at least some, if not all, players in the business.

At this time, it’s unclear whether Starfield will ever reach the same heights as Skyrim, but there is a future in which the Starfield protagonist may stand in the same echelon as Skyrim’s Dragonborn and feel at home.

GTA 6’s perfect future is more scarier. In the best-case scenario, GTA 6 lives up to the expectations, potentially making the anticipation feel insufficient.

It receives rave reviews, defines a generation, innovates on the open-world crime genre, achieves something no other developer has done, becomes culturally relevant for the next 20-30 years, and sets a commercial success standard that makes GTA 5 look paltry in comparison. That is what the current amount of buzz for GTA 6 forecasts as it continues to rise.

Hopefully, Starfield will be able to emerge from this shadow, while GTA 6 will be able to chase enough of it away so that it does not collapse under its own weight.