For years Grand Theft Auto fans have wondered whether Rockstar might take the franchise out of its traditional America setting into cities in other countries. But according to one former developer, that’s never going to happen — and fans just need to accept it.

In an interview with Gameshub, former Rockstar Games technical director Obbe Vermeij, who worked at the company from 1995 to 2009, said there were “ideas” about post-Liberty City, San Andreas, and Vice City GTA games set in Rio de Janeiro, Moscow, and Istanbul, but it was GTA: Tokyo that “almost actually happened.”

According to Vermeij, who left Rockstar just after finishing GTA 4, another studio in Japan was going to take Rockstar’s code and develop GTA: Tokyo (Vermeij didn’t say which studio). “But then that didn’t happen in the end.”

Why? It sounds like Rockstar came to the realization that American cities are the natural and best setting for GTA, and given it takes so long to release new games in the series, going international is too big of a risk.

“People love having these wild ideas but then when you’ve got billions of dollars riding on it it’s too easy to go let’s do what we know again, and also America is basically the epicenter of Western culture, so everybody knows the cities, even people who haven’t been there,” Vermeij said. “They have a mental image of the cities.

“I think it’s unlikely it’s going to be in Bogota next time, especially since there’s just more and more money involved as the project gets bigger. It doesn’t make sense to set it in some left-field location for novelty. GTA: Toronto? It just wouldn’t work.”

GTA 6 is of course set to return to Vice City, the GTA series’ fictionalized take on Miami, Florida. But then what? Will Rockstar ever take GTA international and set it across mainland Europe or in London?

“It’s just not realistic,” Vermeij countered. “I would love it, and if games still took a year to make then yeah sure, you can have a little fun, but you’re not going to get that when there’s a GTA every 12 years.

“You’re not going to set it in a new location. You don’t really need to either because the technology changes so much. Nobody is going to say that they’re not going to play GTA 6 because they’ve already played Vice City. That doesn’t make sense. It’s completely different.

“They’ll revisit New York again. They’ll go back to LA or maybe Las Vegas. I’m afraid we’re stuck in this loop of about five American cities. Let’s just get used to it.”

Vermeij’s comments here echo those of Rockstar co-founder and former boss Dan Houser, who recently explained why the Grand Theft Auto series won’t leave the United States in terms of its setting.

Speaking on the Lex Fridman podcast, Houser said that — GTA London apart — Grand Theft Auto remained firmly rooted in the United States because it leans so heavily on Americana.

“We made a little thing in London 26 years ago — GTA London — for the top-down for PS1. That was pretty cute and fun, as the first mission pack ever for PlayStation 1. I think for a full GTA game, we always decided there was so much Americana inherent in the IP, it would be really hard to make it work in London or anywhere else.

“You know, you needed guns, you needed these larger-than-life characters. It just felt like the game was so much about America, possibly from an outsider’s perspective. But that was so much about what the thing was that it wouldn’t really have worked in the same way elsewhere.”

Indeed, such is GTA’s relationship with America, built up over the course of its many video games, that a University of Tennessee history professor will teach a GTA college history class early in 2026. Professor Tore Olsson recently told IGN: “Video games are great at conjuring fictional worlds, but they also impact players’ thinking about real-world times and places. And just as Red Dead Redemption 2 has shaped folks’ perception of the nineteenth-century American West or Ghost of Tsushima has informed their vision of feudal Japan, millions of people around the globe imagine contemporary America through the lens of the Grand Theft Auto franchise. Just think of how many GTA veterans have recognized landmarks in Los Angeles and New York thanks to their hours in Los Santos and Liberty City!”

Houser’s position on GTA is similar to that of the creators of post-apocalyptic role-playing game series Fallout, which has also remained in the United States. Last year, Bethesda development chief Todd Howard ruled out leaving the U.S. behind for a future Fallout video game, saying he’s a big fan of the “Americana naivete” that informs so much of Fallout’s tone.

Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

CD Projekt has said huge discounts on Cyberpunk 2077: Ultimate Edition and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – Complete Edition displayed on the Nintendo Switch 2 eShop this week were a mistake, but it will honor any sales made at the discounted prices.

Cyberpunk 2077: Ultimate Edition for Nintendo Switch 2 went on sale with a whopping 75% off in the U.S. earlier this week, making the normally $69.99 game just $17.49. Making this deal all the more eye-catching is the fact the Ultimate Edition includes the DLC expansion Phantom Liberty. This DLC normally costs around $30 (or around $21 with a discount), which meant the base game plus the DLC was cheaper than the DLC itself if you bought it with the discount. As you’d expect, plenty of people bought the game at that price. “I couldn’t believe it lmfao,” one fan said. “I bought as soon as I saw the price. I had been waiting for it to go on sale but was amazed at the discount.” Said another: “I was on the fence for a few hours, and would have skipped it if it was $20. So they got money out of people like me who weren’t super interested. Bought it on PC years ago and barely started it. Hoping the switch 2 edition/cross save gets me to finish the game.”

Now, CD Projekt has corrected the discount so Cyberpunk 2077: Ultimate Edition costs $39.99 (a 42% discount). The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – Complete Edition, meanwhile, now costs $14.99 with a 75% discount properly applied.

CD Projekt issued the following statement on social media:

The discounts for Cyberpunk 2077: Ultimate Edition and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – Complete Edition displayed on Nintendo Switch 2 eShop in the Americas on December 22, 2025 were incorrect.

The situation is a result of an error we made when submitting the discount. We have corrected the error and new discounts have now been applied.

Purchases made at the previous discount rate are unaffected by this change.

As you’d expect, CD Projekt’s statement is going down well with fans of the company and its games, and in particular with those who jumped on the discount error before it was corrected. “At that price it’s basically a no-brainer impulse buy. Props to CDPR for honoring it though, lot of companies would’ve just cancelled the orders and blamed a ‘system error.’ Makes me want to support them more,” said one fan.

If you’re jumping into Cyberpunk 2077 for the first time this Christmas, check out our huge guide. Similarly, if you’re getting to grips with The Witcher 3, we’ve got a sweeping guide to help.

Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

It’s no stretch to say I wouldn’t possess the privilege of having this job without Vince Zampella. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare changed the way I played games, interacted with them as part of a community, and made me think deeper about level and mission design than I had up to that point in my life. I was fifteen upon its release in 2007, and, although I had enjoyed playing games throughout my childhood up until then, nothing had a stranglehold on me quite like the rhythmic nature of the original Modern Warfare’s multiplayer. For hours on end, I’d run around the tight hallways of Vacant’s disused office block with a shotgun or sit cowardly waiting at one end of Crossfire, hoping someone ran across my sniper-scoped view. You see, I had also been firmly rooted in single-player until now, growing up on a mixture of point and click adventures and Grand Theft Auto (at far too early an age), but it was COD 4 that opened my eyes to this whole other side of gaming that I have grown to love in the years since. Thousands of hours of my life have now been lost to Call of Duty, Rainbow Six Siege, and Overwatch, and I have Vince Zampella to thank for that.

Of course, no one man makes a game of the scale of Call of Duty by themselves, but there’s no denying the impact that Zampella had on that particular series and the shooter genre in general over the past two decades. Long before Modern Warfare, unbeknownst to me, he had been shaping my video game tastes for years. A lead designer of Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, he helmed EA’s signature WW2 shooter at a time when cinematic aspirations were a relatively new idea in the medium. Taking cues from Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, I’ll never forget the first time I played through its phenomenal Normandy landing sequence on Omaha Beach and how it evokes the terror of that scenario to full effect.

That philosophy would then be translated to the series with which Zampella will always be synonymous: Call of Duty (which, in Zampella’s own hilariously blunt words, only exists because “EA were dicks”). Its early entries were fantastic, with 2 being a particular favourite of mine back in 2005. I’d always had a fascination with this period in time, with my dad subjecting me to many, many WW2 films as a child — The Great Escape, The Longest Day, The Dambusters, A Bridge Too Far. I’d sit down in front of all of them on a Sunday afternoon (at, again, likely far too young an age), so it was only natural that once I reached my teens, I’d want to experience these battles and behind-enemy-lines missions for myself.

I’ll admit, then, that I was sceptical about Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare in the run-up to its release. I’m someone who is naturally wary of change, and I was hesitant to trade in my trusty M1 Garand for an M16. I couldn’t have been more wrong, though, as it would almost instantly become my favourite shooter campaign I’ve ever played — with Titanfall 2, a later Zampella project, the only one to run it close. The way it took those movie-like aspirations into the present day was stunning, turning its lens from the likes of those films my father showed me to discoveries of my own, such as Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down and Body of Lies. The way it placed you in the action was unlike anything I’d played up until then, with the exhilarating opening to Crew Expendable and the explosive crescendo of Shock and Awe just two of its many highlights.

And then, of course, there’s All Ghillied Up, which turns each of the campaign’s ideas on its head at its halfway point, in what is still to this day one of video gaming’s most iconic levels. It’s no hyperbole to say that this is one of the missions that opened my eyes to what goes into video game design and what is possible when ideas are taken out of the box and given the freedom to be built upon. It’s such a delicate, balanced piece of work that runs like clockwork, even when you try to mess with its systems, that I couldn’t help but think about how it was constructed. The stealthy crawl for a haunting Pripyat is a masterclass in level design, and credit has to go to Zampella, who was Studio Head at developer Infinity Ward at the time, for encouraging and incubating such creativity.

Modern Warfare’s campaign is a landmark in its own right (among many other achievements, it’s also got one of the most memorable blockbuster sequences in gaming history), but when you also add to it, perhaps the most revolutionary multiplayer shooter pre-Fortnite, a package that would set the stage for a series to take over the world, is born. Call of Duty 4’s multiplayer is the first time I can remember engaging with video games online to a great extent. For my sins, I didn’t own an Xbox at the time, so I was late to the Halo party. Instead, Modern Warfare was my gateway into this world, as I began to hoover up anything I could to get better at the game, and watch clips at a skill level I knew in my heart I could never reach. I’d look up meta builds, which felt like a novelty at the time, and engage with wikis and guides on sites like IGN at a time when I had zero aspirations of one day being someone who would pen words there myself. The simple but effective loop of Modern Warfare’s multiplayer opened my eyes to all of this, with its moreish loop of levelling up guns and unlocking attachments, only to prestige and do it all over again, filling most of my after-school evenings. I simply could not stop playing, and didn’t want to, either.

Zampella’s influence on me would ring on long after his time on Call of Duty was done, though. After forming Respawn, his work on Titanfall saw its 2016 sequel reach, and some would argue maybe even eclipse, the heights of Modern Warfare’s campaign. The fluidity of its movement, the destructive joy of piloting its many mechs, and, of course, the level design of the likes of Effect and Cause and Into the Abyss are all-timers when it comes to single-player shooters. From that universe, Apex Legends would form. Still, my battle royale of choice captures that Titanfall mobility and combines it with a punchiness to its arsenal of weapons that few can match. And then there’s Star Wars. 2023’s Jedi: Survivor is one of my favourite games to come out in recent years, and fulfilled the promise of its original to fantastic effect, making me feel like I was playing a new Star Wars film, much like the original trilogy my dad also used to show me as a kid in between those WW2 epics. Incidentally, I had been floating the idea of replaying Survivor around in my head over the Christmas break. I now know, I definitely will be.

As I said earlier, no one person makes a game of the scale Vince Zampella would be a part of creating by themselves. But there is just no denying the impact that the legendary Call of Duty, Battlefield, Medal of Honor, Titanfall, and Star Wars Jedi developer had on video games in the 21st century. Not only a pioneer when it comes to first-person shooters, but his drive to consistently create cinematic experiences is one that has permeated through the medium for decades now. On a personal level, I’m incredibly grateful. Not only because many of these games have been some of my favourites to play throughout my life, but because if it wasn’t for how much more engaged they made me in them, I likely wouldn’t be lucky enough to enjoy writing about them for a living. To Vince, I say thank you. I may never have got to meet you, but I have loved playing the games you helped create greatly, as I know so many millions of others have too.

Simon Cardy is a Senior Editor at IGN who can mainly be found skulking around open world games, indulging in Korean cinema, or despairing at the state of Tottenham Hotspur and the New York Jets. Follow him on Bluesky at @cardy.bsky.social.