Good News, GTA Fans! Development on GTA 6 is "well Underway." - Latest Tweet by GameSpot

 After police officers killed George Floyd in the summer of 2020, Rockstar Games quietly shelved the game modes it had planned to release for its Grand Theft Auto online game.

Dubbed Cops 'n' Crooks, the mode is a twist on child's play where players are put into teams of good and evil, but with a global reputation for police brutality. Company executives have sidelined it, concerned about how the story will be interpreted at a time of heightened skepticism and mistrust of the U.S. police force. According to people familiar with the development, they have no plans to bring it back yet.

According to studio insiders, GTA 6 will reportedly offer single-player DLC, with Rockstar returning to a content model similar to what it had before the GTA Online release.

In a GTAForums (opens in new tab) post, well-known tipster Tez2 was asked about claims that GTA 6 will be expanded with regular updates. In response, they said that "the `expanding over time' means Rockstar will go back to how they were planning future content before GTA Online success boomed."

The "substantial additions" once planned for GTA 5 were canned for several reasons, including the need to switch development resources to Red Dead Redemption 2 and the ongoing success of GTA Online. The MMO portion of GTA 5 has been home to much of its add-on content, but that's come at the expense of any new single-player offerings.

Tez2 goes on to claim that the "new cities and missions" mentioned in previous GTA 6 reports to make up the game's DLC will "definitely be planned out before 6 releases." They speculate that "for the most part we will receive instanced new cities or islands," similar to how the Cayo Perico or North Yankton maps work

As well as planning the scrapped single-player content for GTA 5, Rockstar made substantial additions to GTA 4, with the narrative add-ons of The Lost and The Damned and The Ballad of Gay Tony. Given the various factors that disrupted potential GTA 5 DLC, it's certainly possible that we could see the studio returning to its former approach.

Earlier this year, Rockstar confirmed GTA 6 development was "well underway," and says that it knows the game needs to be "the best it can possibly be". That means it will take a while at best before you can see the game.