Since the GTA 6 trailer dropped last night and Miami (Vice City) is practically flooded and burning permanently ITTL, where is GTA 6 taking place in Icarusverse?
GTA 3, GTA: Vice City, and
San Andreas were released in 2001, 2002, and 2004 respectively, all to critical acclaim.
Rockstar North was working on
GTA IV, set in the sprawling state of Liberty (modeled after New York, New Jersey, and parts of Connecticut) when Take-Two Interactive downsized and restructured following a corporate takeover in the aftermath of the 2010 recession. Development on the game stopped and the company focused on porting its existing games over to the soon-to-be-released PS4. Employees were frustrated at the company's direction and a large portion of them left to start their own studio.
GTA IV released in 2012 and was panned by critics.
GTA: Vice, the studio's next game, would be an always-online multiplayer open world game set in Vice City, and was released in 2016. It was financially successful for the company, but fans disliked the in-game paywalls and Rockstar straying away from the singleplayer story-focused aspect of previous installments. The game's scathing criticism of Miami was also criticized by mainstream media outlets in the wake of the evacuation of Miami in 2018. The game's servers shut down in 2021, and Rockstar is not known to currently be working on any future GTA projects.
If I could choose though, I'd go with New Orleans. Unique culture and aesthetic, different crime scene from other cities. You could probably just call it New Marseilles or something. Although at that point it'd basically just be
Mafia.
2024 is apparently going to be a solar storm year, which makes me wonder, just how much worse would it be with a dying ozone layer? I know something like the end of Knowing is scientifically impossible, but if there’s less ozone protection, how much worse would things be on Earth?
I'm not a scientist by any means, but by what I've read, the ozone layer shouldn't impact the solar flare, since Earth's magnetosphere is the one that mitigates the impacts of solar flares. There might be more UV light that seeps through during solar flare events, however. And it looks solar flares can thin the ozone layer, so 2024 probably isn't going to be a great year.
Marijuana illegal in California?
Libertarian attitudes are much less prevalent in the American political mainstream ITTL. Aside from gay marriage, which has progressed about the same as OTL.