I figured with all the speculation prompted by those images popping up on Rockstar's site I might as well share what I know. Fair warning #1: it's very thin and not very exciting. Fair warning #2: I'm not able to provide any proof of this, so feel free to ignore it or call me a liar or what have you, it's all good.
TL;DR: Whatever Rockstar's next game is, it's doubling down on the NPC reactivity stuff Red Dead II started doing, appears likely to still be first and foremost a single-player experience, and will probably not be coming out for a long time.
Full Information: I'm acquaintances with a developer who works at R*. Not gonna specify which studio or which department. I last saw them in the fall. Back in 2017, they fucked up while drinking and told me some things about Red Dead II that had not been officially announced yet (specifically confirming the existence of first person mode, that the leaked map from 2016 was real, and that a PC version would eventually come out), so I somewhat jokingly pressed them for information on what they were currently working on. They held firm, but did broadly say that whatever the next R* project is (I assume it's GTA6, but they never tipped their hand one way or the other) is doubling down on the NPC-on-NPC AI interaction and player/NPC reactivity that Red Dead II was doing (think the contextual button presses when you lock on to a character and all that sort of stuff).
With that information, combined with other broad comments they made about the nature of their department and development role, it also seemed pretty clear the next game will continue to have single player at the forefront despite GTA Online's success.
Also (this is more speculation than fact, but it seems a safe conclusion), based on how stressed and tired they were when I saw them during the years leading up to Red Dead II's release and how completely relaxed and nonchalant they were when I saw them this past fall, whatever R*'s next thing is is a long way off.
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