It’s pretty hard to make a “small scope” 3D open world city game with driving and shooting elements. The sheer amount of work is more than the vast majority of indie devs can achieve. There’s a reason most of them go with procgen wilderness survival games. The closest I’ve seen is something like Cloudpunk but that has a fraction of the gameplay elements that makes GTA popular
If an indie dev stuck with PS2 style graphics they could pull off something at least on the scale of Vice City. A lot of OG GTA fans, myself included, would be thrilled to see a game like that
Even still, it’s a bit of a trick to pull off. When you make a game like GTA, you’re not really making one game. You have to make a good driving game, you have to make a good shooter, you have to make a good story.
Graphics being complex or not it’s not in a lot of indie dev’s wheelhouse to make several kinds of gameplay strongly enough that none of them feel considerably weaker when you move from one to the other during play.
Indie devs these days don’t have to create their own engine and tooling are these tools are accessible and have tons of tutorials. Something like this wouldn’t be hard to make, it would be hard to make good.
I wish someone would, even a shitty little indie game with a smaller scope and a ton more soul would be preferred.
It’s pretty hard to make a “small scope” 3D open world city game with driving and shooting elements. The sheer amount of work is more than the vast majority of indie devs can achieve. There’s a reason most of them go with procgen wilderness survival games. The closest I’ve seen is something like Cloudpunk but that has a fraction of the gameplay elements that makes GTA popular
If an indie dev stuck with PS2 style graphics they could pull off something at least on the scale of Vice City. A lot of OG GTA fans, myself included, would be thrilled to see a game like that
Even still, it’s a bit of a trick to pull off. When you make a game like GTA, you’re not really making one game. You have to make a good driving game, you have to make a good shooter, you have to make a good story.
Graphics being complex or not it’s not in a lot of indie dev’s wheelhouse to make several kinds of gameplay strongly enough that none of them feel considerably weaker when you move from one to the other during play.
Indie devs these days don’t have to create their own engine and tooling are these tools are accessible and have tons of tutorials. Something like this wouldn’t be hard to make, it would be hard to make good.