GTA is such a strange series. To claim that it's somehow losing what made it GTA is odd. GTA's bread and butter isn't being non-woke or anything like that. GTA's bread and butter is violence and mayhem. Everything else is kind of variable depending on the title. The early games had a lot of silly humor that doesn't really translate well with more realistic graphics and much of it was lost when we got to GTAIV.
- GTAIV plays things far more seriously than previous titles and, if it had been made today, would get all sorts of "woke" comments. It's an anti-war anti-revenge immigrant story that essentially punishes Niko for choosing his destructive life of crime.
- Lost and the Damned is dour and serious as hell. None of that trademark silliness.
- Ballad of Gay Tony is a title that brought back a lot of silliness but also featured a latino protagonist and his homosexual father figure. It don't get much more woke than that, amirite?
- Then we get to GTA V which keeps a lot of the craziness, but also has a multi-ethnic trio and gets to offload a lot of it's nastiness behind a character that it presents to us as being deranged.
I guess my point is that in this post-gamer-gate world, with volumes turned up, it's easy to forget that GTA has always been pretty firmly woke. The irreverence has been toned down for a while now and the bread and butter, the mayhem and violence, is still front and center. This new title, unless it's less violent or chaotic, will not move the needle much in any regard.