The world has never known fervour such as that which has built up for GTA 6. This isn’t hyperbole. It’s an understatement.

In just 24 hours, the first trailer blew up the internet to the tune of 100 million views on YouTube, a view rate exceeded only by K-Pop supergroup BTS (Guinness World Records anointed it both the most-watched video game trailer and non-music video ever in the same time frame). The trailer’s backing song, Tom Petty’s rock standard “Love is a Long Road,” saw a 36,979% spike on Spotify following its use. But who can be surprised? With 185 million copies sold, previous instalment GTA V has accrued nearly $8 billion dollars in revenue over a decade. Look away, James Cameron: that’s four Avatars. And if leaks are to be believed, Rockstar has spent $2 billion on the development of GTA 6. Which is to say they’re expecting the big-big-big bucks in return.

Which is all well and good. But what did the experts – and by experts, we mean the most committed, the most online GTA fans out there – think?

“The graphical leap impressed me the most,” says Broughy1322, a prominent GTA YouTuber whose own in-depth, frame-by-frame breakdown of the GTA 6 trailer comes in at over an hour long. “It’s easy to forget that GTA V came out over 10 years ago — two generations of consoles ago. The tech was so underpowered in comparison to what we have now. Although I will say that [the trailer] seemed [to showcase] cutscenes, rather than gameplay. So I’m trying to take everything with a grain of salt. I highly doubt that when you get to the beach in-game, it’s going to be that densely populated. But who knows?”

Another YouTube GTA expert, The Professional, expects the GTA 6 map to be the most ambitious game space Rockstar has ever made. By far. “One of the issues with GTA V is that it had a very big countryside area, but a huge portion of that was just mountains and hills; it didn’t have much life to it,” he says. “And I looked at the trailer and saw that there was life, y’know, everywhere. Even that one sequence where the plane flew over what looks like [the game’s version of] the Florida Keys to me, that looked very much lifelike.”

Across the board, our surveyed GTA heads speculated on how GTA 6 could evolve from the future-gen gameplay mechanics and design elements of Rockstar’s last title, Red Dead Redemption 2, acclaimed for its richly detailed landscape and diversity of nigh-on photorealistic character models. “I think that every single non-player character in GTA 6, you’re going to be able to interact with them in maybe a small or larger way. Similar to Red Dead 2, where you can greet or antagonise NPCs,” The Professional hypothesises.