Speculation about a new GTA game is always going to be widespread and wide ranging, and until I get news that it’s going to be something I really don’t want, like GTA Stockholm or something, I’m going to talk about and dream about GTA being set in the future.

1. Scope for all kinds of neat toys.
What is the coolest thing about the future? All the crazy gadgets we hope to have. Rayguns, flying cars, moonbases, robots, etc. etc. San Andreas already went a little in this direction towards the end, with those crazy jetpack missions and suchlike, but the scope for including all kinds of completely crazy vehicles, weapons, and other gadgetry is never going to be higher than in a game set in the future. Given that the point of the GTA series is fun, and that R* seem to have realized this in making Gay Tony much more flamboyant and contain much crazier missions than IV, a setting where pretty much anything you can imagine can legitimately be said to exist opens the door for that.

2. Scope for social commentary.
“But Mister Adequate!” I hear you cry “GTA relies so heavily on making commentary on the period in question! How could a future GTA do this?” Well, okay, it can’t actually comment on the future proper for obvious reasons, but it CAN comment on our imaginings of the future. And it’s not like we have a shortage of that. R* can quite easily poke fun at futurist utopians like me, as well as cynics or those who feared despotism and destruction, or anyone else. Moreover, it’s not hard to imagine issues in the future which will parallel existing or historical ones; clone rights, human-robot marriage, and so forth and which would be ripe for making fun of, as well as letting R* comment on current events with references to ‘history’, e.g. “Remember back in 2013 when we legalized gay marriage and within a month, the military collapsed because of all the gay sex?” or whatever.

3. Variation in setting.
Of course, there are a multitude of visions of the future, both in terms of individual ideas and broad movements. This doesn’t constrain, it does the opposite. R* has so much to choose from that they could use a great deal of it to create a varied and engaging environment. The high-end part of town could be all 1920s modernism in appearance and style; the middle-class suburbs 1950s all streamline moderne and raygun gothic; the business district could remind us of Mirror’s Edge with businessmen in their mile-high gleaming towers overlooking a city rife with crime, poverty, and misery; the densely packed urban areas reminiscent of Blade Runner and Judge Dredd, with blocks of intolerably densely packed buildings overlooking perpetually gloomy and rainy streets, all while, off in the distance, the Space Elevator that carries hopeful immigrants to Mars is always visible and is the dream of millions. This ties in again with #2; what if America’s population was falling because people were so desperate to leave?

4. Music.
As with #2 there seems on the surface to be a problem here, but #2 itself actually solves the problem. Assuming the setting is fairly unpleasant (And it’s GTA, so it will be), it’s pretty easy to say “Well everyone’s on a massive nostalgia kick because things suck” and then voila, you can pick any music from any period. For contemporary stuff you can just get people like Brian Eno to create it – he knows how to make it sound like the future. If done right the setting could be sublime precisely because it isn’t so constrained by a specific era.

5. “Five” and “Future” alliterate.