GTA 6 NEWS · WHAT COMES AFTER GTA 6
Rockstar’s Next Game After GTA 6 Is an L.A. Noire Sequel, Says the Leak That Keeps Being Right
Locals, we are officially in the final stretch — Grand Theft Auto VI locks in on November 19 for PS5 and Xbox Series X|S, and for the first time in a decade the question after “when does it launch?” is becoming “what does Rockstar do for an encore?” Red Dead Redemption 3? Bully 2? According to a resurfaced leak that just picked up an unexpected endorsement from Rockstar’s own interviews, the answer might be the deepest cut in the catalog: a successor to L.A. Noire — set in San Francisco, built around the Zodiac Killer, and pointed at 2030.
Before anyone mortgages their hype: this is a rumor, full stop. Nothing is announced, Rockstar has confirmed nothing, and the source is a forum post. But this particular forum post has spent 2026 quietly being proven right about GTA 6 — and one of its biggest claims was just verified by the game’s own developers.
What Happened: A 2023 Leak Just Refused to Die
The claim comes from a December 2023 post on GTAForums by user Shahanshah, which resurfaced hard this week after a thread on Reddit’s r/GamingLeaksAndRumours put it back in circulation, with ScreenRant and Metro’s GameCentral both now covering it. The post’s GTA 6 story spoilers can’t be verified until the game is actually in our hands — but one structural claim already checked out (more on that in a second), which is why its other bombshell is getting a second look.
Per the post, as of late 2023 Rockstar was in “very early stages of development” on a follow-up to 2011’s L.A. Noire. The alleged pitch: a game set in San Francisco across the late 1960s and early 1970s, with the story built around the Zodiac Killer — the still-unidentified serial killer who murdered at least five people in the Bay Area between December 1968 and October 1969 and taunted police with unsolved ciphers. The post pegs the release window at “probably 2030,” and claims Rockstar was “talking about doing the face scanning stuff again, but making it insane” — a nod to the original game’s MotionScan technology, which turned interrogation into a poker game of reading actors’ digitized faces. ScreenRant adds the supposed ambition bar for the project: nothing less than the best-looking game ever made.
One ironic wrinkle worth flagging: if the game really is set in San Francisco, it almost certainly won’t be titled L.A. Noire 2 — whatever the name ends up being, it would function as a true successor to the 2011 detective drama, with a new lead and a new city decades after Cole Phelps’ story closed for good.
Why This Leaker Is Getting the Benefit of the Doubt
Here’s the part that changed. Among the post’s GTA 6 claims was that the game originally featured four playable characters, later narrowed to two. In August, that turned out to be true: as part of the Game Informer cover story cycle we covered in detail, Rockstar’s Rob Nelson confirmed GTA 6 once centered a four-protagonist roster before the team focused on Jason and Lucia to avoid “diluting the amount of player time” across the cast. A leak nailing a detail like that — the character count, the reasoning, and the cut — earns a longer look than most.
There’s corporate-level smoke, too. Back in April, Take-Two boss Strauss Zelnick said the company was considering more L.A. Noire — not a confirmation of anything, but a notable door to leave open for a franchise with exactly one entry in it. Combine a partially-vindicated leak with a CEO publicly musing about the IP fourteen months later, and you get this week’s firestorm of speculation.
The mandatory cold water: the post’s remaining claims are story spoilers that cannot be verified until November 19, leakers have short half-lives, and “considering” is not “greenlit.” ScreenRant itself counsels the traditional pinch of salt. And to be clear, this is a prediction post from a forum account — a totally different animal from the 192GB stolen-files saga we’ve covered at length, even if both end up being graded on the same answer key on launch day.
L.A. Noire, Quickly: Why a Sequel Would Be a Monster Deal
If you skipped 2011: L.A. Noire was developed by Team Bondi and published by Rockstar, and it remains one of the strangest big-budget games ever shipped — a police procedural where the core mechanic was staring at digitized faces (captured with a 32-camera MotionScan rig) and deciding who is lying. It reportedly sold over 7.5 million copies, and then… nothing. Team Bondi collapsed, Rockstar moved on, and the franchise has sat dormant for fifteen years — which is exactly where the “sequel we’ve waited 25 years for” framing comes from.
The Zodiac angle is the part that should make series fans sit up. The original’s best moments were interrogation deduction — evidence, tells, bluff-calling. Now point that loop at a real, unsolved, cipher-taunting serial killer across a foggy 1969 San Francisco, on hardware that can finally do faces and fog justice. That’s not a nostalgia grab; that’s a genre Rockstar effectively invented and then abandoned.
It would also be the least predictable pick possible. Fan consensus assumed Red Dead Redemption 3 or Bully 2 was next in line, with Max Payne already covered by Remedy’s incoming remakes. An L.A. Noire successor is the deep cut nobody bet on — which, if you’ve ever read a Rockstar announcement, is exactly the kind of swerve they enjoy.
What This Means for GTA 6
The roadmap math actually works. GTA 6 launches November 19, 2026. The multiplayer component is widely expected in 2027 — Twitch’s CEO said as much on the record — and Rockstar ships one planet-sized game at a time: GTA 5 in 2013, Red Dead Redemption 2 in 2018, GTA 6 in 2026. A 2030 single-player follow-up isn’t just plausible; it’s almost exactly the cadence.
November 19 just became a verification event. Every December 2023 claim — the spoilers, the character cuts, all of it — becomes checkable the moment the credits roll. If the post passes that audit, its L.A. Noire claims graduate from forum folklore to roadmap. If it fails, we all pretend we never believed it. Either way, the answer key exists now, which is more than most leaks ever get.
And the tech through-line is real. “Insane” face scanning sounds like forum poetry until you remember GTA 6 is about to ship the most detailed digital humans ever put in a mass-market game — the same leap Game Informer’s Rockstar interviews keep circling, from advanced weather systems to ecosystem-scale wildlife. Whatever the studio learns rendering Jason and Lucia across a living Leonida feeds directly into any next-generation detective game. If this leak is right, GTA 6 isn’t just the main event — it’s the R&D invoice for the one after.
None of this changes the next seven weeks. The 50-day point of no return came and went, the marketing blitz is running at full confidence, and Game Informer’s 14-page Rockstar deep-dive lands September 29. If you haven’t locked in your launch plans yet, you can pre-order GTA 6 for PS5 on Amazon or grab the Xbox Series X|S version here — and our things to do while you wait for GTA 6 list just gained a new entry: “dig through a 2023 forum post with a highlighter.”
For now, file this one squarely under rumor — vindicated once, unproven everywhere else. But keep the case file open, Locals. If 2026 has taught us anything, it’s that the craziest GTA leaks keep turning out to be the real ones.
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Related reading: The Game Informer GTA 6 cover reveal, explained · GTA 6’s advanced weather system, decoded · Twitch’s CEO expects GTA 6 multiplayer in 2027 · The 192GB GTA 5 leak · GTA 6’s 50-day point of no return · Things to do while you wait for GTA 6