Bad News For Gamers This Week!

    Very Bad news for gamers this week! This Friday night was made gloomy for me by a massive bad news. The super popular game title GTA's sixth sequel would be delayed until May 2026! For a gamer like myself, I have been waiting for this ever since I started gaming. Just to give you an Idea on the scale of this situation, let me hit you with some stats real quick. The previous sequel to the series, GTA5, was released 13 years ago. It was such a revolutionary game that until this very month, there are still 10 million players that log in EVERY SINGLE DAY to play the game. The game itself has sold over 210 million copies and it is still selling like crazy as we speak. Because of all these crazy stats, GTA5 is widely considered as THE most successful entertainment product of all time, clocking at a revenue of over 8.5 billion US dollars. Now we're not talking about most successful game or some weird stuff like "Electronic entertainment", we are talking about all of the entertainment products in the history. If that's not crazy, I don't know what is.

    It would be weird to talk about how successful the game is without even introducing what the game is about, so here we go. GTA5, full named Grand Theft Auto 5 is an open world RPG with realism cranked to the absolute maximum. Now I might have just spelled a few words that looked like total gibberish, but let me explain. An open world game means that players would be put inside of a world where they can explore  freely without limitations. You can think of it like being put inside NCKU without anyone walking you through the campus. So with this setting comes great freedom, and players loved the feeling of exploring a digital world. To make the experience as good as possible, the developer, ROCKSTAR GAMES, created a world so massive and so detailed it was unheard of ever before. The developers recreated the entire downtown Los Angeles with all its details and the suburb around it inside the game, and for people in 2012, this was crazier than what anyone would have dared to imagine. RPG means role-playing-game, and in GTA5, you role play as one of three characters, Michael, Franklin, and Trevor. All of them have super distinct personalities and different stories to play, so that players could experience the story line from three different perspectives.

    What makes this game so captivating and complete to me is that how the game connects to the real world. Not only is the map itself a digital version of Los Angeles, many of its signs and companies carried over to the game as well, so if you've been to or seen certain parts of LA that you remember, it is super surprising to see the thing you expect to see actually pop up right in front of your eyes. Another important element of world building for me is the radio. Despite the song selections being from 2012 and before, ROCKSTAR chose such a great list of hits that all of the radio stations still sound awesome even today. Famous song from Maroon 5, Rihanna, and 50 cent hold up so well after 13 years. Even the hosts are amazing, Non-Stop-Pop fm introduced me to one of my earliest celebrity crush, Cara Delevingne, her looks and her voice was so fascinating to me back then.

    All these factors contributed to the cultural significance of this franchise, and that's why it took so long to make the next one. People have such high expectation for the next game that it would be next to impossible to top GTA5. However, if there is one company that's going to exceed people's expectations, then ROCKSTAR will definitely be the one. So this is it then, one more year of waiting, at least it serves as a big motivation for me to work hard in life, till the next GTA we shall meet!