This is the latest strong announcement for GTA 6, the next installment in Rockstar’s cult saga. For the first time in the history of the license, players will be able to embody a woman. Unsurprisingly, many players have known their dissatisfaction on social networks, between misogyny and two-round justifications.
If you follow the news surrounding GTA 6, Rockstar’s next juggernaut, you might know that reputable journalist Jason Schreier has leaked a lot of information about the game from inside sources.
The author teaches us in particular that Vice City will make a comeback and that it will therefore replace Los Santos. In addition, the map will be scalable and other cities / areas and solo missions will be added after the launch of the title. The main novelty, however, remains the integration of a female protagonist, a first in the “modern” history of the franchise, since the 1st opus already offered to choose to embody one of the four women available (out of eight characters in total).
As Jason Schreier explains, this choice stems directly Rockstar’s internal policy change“who have spent the last four years reconsidering their corporate culture”. In particular, the studio wants to ban jokes about “marginalized groups” such as women, the LGBT+ community, non-white people with or with disabilities.
Playing a woman in GTA: a big problem for some players
And as you can imagine, the news did not only make people happy, as evidenced by the impressive number of negative and misogynistic comments (call a spade a spade) on Twitter and other social networks.
We end up with unequivocal reactions of the type: “Damn, I don’t want to play a woman…”, “I’ve been waiting for this sequel for ten years and we announce that? Fraud, we will clean up every mission” or “We will no longer be able to make slots”.
It must be remembered that many successful video game licenses rely on strong female characters like The Last of Us Part II, the Horizon games, the Tomb Raider saga, or even Control from the Finnish studio Remedy without forgetting Forspoken which should arrive next year on PS5. In other words, this controversy only reflects the ultra masculinity of the GTA license, and it’s not so bad that Rockstar has decided to put an end to it.