If recent rumours are to be believed, GTA 6 will lean hard into user-generated content. Now, this isn’t necessarily a huge surprise — GTA Online has been filled with player-created deathmatch arenas and racetracks looping into the sky for over a decade now — but I can’t say it excites me either. I play Rockstar games for the engaging stories and wonderfully realised cast of characters, all taking place in a hand-sculpted world. I’m still incredibly confident that I’ll get all of that in its single-player story, but I do worry that it means that its incarnation of GTA Online might be further pushing away from what I want it to be… even if this is what GTA 6 needs to replicate the all-encompassing success that its predecessor did.
I’ve dipped in and out of GTA Online over the course of its lifetime, often finding fun when not being relentlessly hunted down by meaner members of its population. I appreciate how much freedom it’s granted to players, consistently updating its tools to allow for even greater flexibility when it comes to user-generated content (UGC). The most recent push in this direction arrived in December 2025, with the official introduction of the Rockstar Mission Creator, which allowed users to make their own campaign-like levels inside of its online world and “create your story, string together objectives, and bring your adventures to life.” It seems altogether too convenient a timing for this new toolkit to be added in the run-up to GTA 6, if indeed the upcoming game plans to lean even harder into this type of online world.
I’m not going to pretend to be naive here. I can see why Rockstar would want to do this, and, no doubt, monetise GTA Online further in whatever its new form will take. 13 years have passed since GTA 5, and its online offering has certainly remained lucrative, but there’s always more money to be squeezed out. If those optional shark card microtransactions were instead swapped out for some sort of subscription or seasonal pass-centered platform that offered full use of a “game-within-a-game” creation suite, then I can see it being a huge success, essentially turning into a multigenerational, self-sustaining beast. Especially if it melded this new mission creator with the already established Director Mode, with custom cutscenes being able to be scripted within user-generated missions. It would be a smart move for Rockstar, and not a completely unexpected one. If placed in the right hands, it could have a significant impact on the video game landscape, but that’s a huge if.
The problem is, and I really don’t mean for this to sound rude, but I don’t want to play missions designed by you. I want to play Rockstar’s. GTA 5 is one of my favourite games ever, but I never quite clicked with its online component in the same way, apart from its big set-piece heist missions. These always feel like slices of a GTA campaign that you happen to be able to play in co-op, and are exactly what I want from a multiplayer perspective. Unless GTA 6’s online tools are as generous and easy to use to a point where missions of this scale can be created, then I worry about how engaging its user-generated content can be.
Last year’s disastrous MindsEye was trying a similar thing. Granted, it may failed for many, many reasons beyond not having a great creation suite, but if anything, it just proved how important it is to have strong narrative and mission design be central to a game like this. Yes, it was a technical mess full of bugs and crashes, but even if it ran buttery smooth, it was incredibly bland anyway. Created by ex-Grand Theft Auto producer Leslie Benzies, it proved that you need far more than knowledge and love for this type of third-person shooter open-world game in order to make a successful one. There’s no doubt that a lot of very talented players, and perhaps aspiring game developers, are rubbing their hands at the prospect of playing around with a GTA 6 mission toolkit, but I have my doubts over how difficult it will be to make engaging missions in a world that has taken nearly a decade to craft.
Creating complex missions on the scale that Rockstar achieves at the height of its power is no mean feat, and the bar of expectations set by players is extremely high. So much comes from the incidental dialogue between characters and story reveals as you’re driving from location to location, or the finely tuned chain of events that make a heist go down like clockwork, as opposed to a car crash. GTA, naturally, due to its explicit content, captures a more mature audience, and thus one craving more complex game design, which is something some of the most successful UGC platforms don’t have to contend with.
Fortnite and Roblox are the two that first come to mind, both inarguably targeted at the child and family markets. Whether it be the former’s hugely popular Steal the Brainrot or the latter’s phenomenon, Grow a Garden, these are all quite simple game modes that, while engaging, aren’t operating mechanically in anywhere near the same sphere as a Rockstar production. These are games for the TikTok generation — short bursts of fun that don’t require much of your attention each day, created with relatively easy-to-learn design tools aimed at creating entry-level games for those who wield them.
Maybe this is what some people want from GTA Online, but I can’t help but feel it would go against everything GTA 6 appears to be satirising in its reveal trailers, with social media video frames prominently displayed throughout. For a studio that most recently mastercrafted the ultimate “get lost in a world” simulation in Red Dead Redemption 2, this potential shift feels like an almighty change of pace, targeting profits over curated art. Yes, GTA has always walked the fine line between gleefully poking fun at capitalist America, while also benefiting from the billions it has generated for Rockstar, but there has always been a high quality bar there. I can’t help but feel that if this rumoured shift to an even more UGC ecosystem isn’t done well, it could dilute the online experience greatly, especially if Rockstar’s own designed missions are missing from the mix.
Look, this might all boil down to me being the wrong side of 30 and not growing up inside the likes of Fortnite and Roblox, but on the streets of Vice City. I could also just be how my brain is wired — I’ve always preferred to have been told engaging stories, rather than set free in a sandbox filled with a “make your own fun” approach. I’m confident that GTA 6 will still deliver on the former in its single-player campaign. I just hope that the world of Leonidas and the characters inhabiting it have been designed with that foremost in mind, and not the potential remixing power of them.
Simon Cardy is a Senior Editor at IGN who can mainly be found skulking around open world games, indulging in Korean cinema, or despairing at the state of Tottenham Hotspur and the New York Jets. Follow him on Bluesky at @cardy.bsky.social.
