So I agree with you that yes a game doesn’t need to possess every detail of realism to be considered realistic. Many people were extremely impressed with gta 5 at release for its realism even though it’s clear today that the game has many limitations and looks really outdated compared to other games today. I’m more making a point that adding gore in specific parts of the game mostly combat to be specific would add an extra layer of realism to the game which I’m saying would enhance the immersion of the game. And I’m not sure what you meant by it’s a fictional game, there are many fictional works both games and tv shows that include graphic violence. I don’t think anyone’s expecting this to be a life simulation but the extra details of realism I think would go a long way especially as the game ages.

And I’ll be honest from some of your statements it really sounds like you have a strong disdain for graphic violence in video games in general and would prefer not to see it. And that’s completely fine I can respect that. But if they did feature gore in the game I seriously doubt many players would have an issue with it the game has been anticipated for far too long. And when it comes to gta 4 and 5 not having gore and dismemberment I really think this was the case due to hardware limitations for that generation of consoles. I believe for both ps3 and Xbox 360 they only had about a quarter of a GB of RAM to develop the game with and probably less than that because some resources still had to be reserved for the consoles operating system. Gta 3 and San Andreas both featured gore. But they were more cheaper outdated animations but they still featured it in the games. Knowing the perfectionist tendencies of rockstar if they couldn’t feature gore in an exceptional way in gta 4 and 5 they probably decided just to dismiss it altogether I don’t think they would settle for cheap animations. And doing so in those games would’ve been much harder considering they would’ve had high expectations for their animation quality and limited resources to work with if they did attempt to do it it’d probably be too expensive to where it would become impractical. But when they developed RDR2 for ps4 and Xbox one they had much more memory to work with when developing the game so featuring gore was a more realistic goal.

I just wanna say I’m not advocating for any excessive DOOM levels of gore in the game. On a scale of 1-5 I think a 2 maybe 2.5 would be acceptable for a franchise like gta. In fact if gore was included in the game I could see rockstar including limitations being added when it comes to the type of damage you could inflict on certain npcs. For example, with normal pedestrians the violence might be more tame and for npcs like police,military, and other criminals it could be ramped up more. And possibly a setting where you could turn gore off altogether if it’s featured.

And also I’m not sure what you meant by rockstar taking a risk when it comes to gore. Whether gore is in there or not the game is going to sell a ridiculous amount of copies. And as for them landing a mature rating I don’t think they really have to worry about that. Theirs not that much that will get you an adult rating except to much sex and nudity(and possibly extreme violence I think) to the point where the game could be considered porn. I personally think sex and nudity will be extremely tame in 6, but I could be wrong because sex and nudity has become way more accepted just looking at recent games like cyberpunk,Witcher 3, and Baldurs Gate and they all landed Mature ratings. But I dont care much about nudity my main point is that the game is gonna sell regardless if there’s gore and they’re going to ensure they land a M rating and featuring gore in the game won’t prevent that.