In an interview with Kinda Funny Games, Lazlow reminisced that if the team “needed specific accents or languages, we’d travel to those places.” For Red Dead Redemption 2, that meant jetting off to Santa Fe, New Mexico to record with Native American communities, or traveling to New Orleans to work with Creole individuals because “those accents you just can’t get right with New York, LA actors.”
Yeah they’re just not going to get it. There will be something missing, the overall audience will know something is missing but won’t be able to articulate it.
What will ultimately happen is that through successive games people in a boardroom will zero in on “what makes GTA good?” and “What is GTA’s identity?” and then exaggerate that to a degree that becomes flanderised. They will misunderstand the injection of reality that exists in it, the genuine attempt at a cultural product and the real attempt at a material basis to its contents. Most importantly they probably won’t be political enough, it’s an incredibly political game series that has always delivered something different even if it’s fucked up in places with its stereotypes that aged poorly.
I think we’ll see this in the new game immediately. But it won’t be until the game afterwards that it really kicks in.