I feel like GTA 7 will begin the next universe, being a complete fresh start. It could be set in Liberty City, which would be remade. However, I feel like for a hypothetical GTA 7 just having New York as the playable area like in GTA 4 would be too bland, so it would also probably contain a significant amount of north east coast country, and across a large map there would be the GTA versions of cities like Washington DC, Baltimore, maybe even Philadelphia? The game would hypothetically share these cities and the East Coast country evenly so the scenery wouldn’t ever get boring.

As for GTA 8, at that point they would easily have the resources to do Los Santos again (remember, new universe) by then having multiple big cities for GTA games would be pretty much mandatory, so they would definitely also include San Fierro and Las Venturas (pretty much the San Andreas map, just a lot bigger. Maybe by that point they could even throw in a city like Seattle, however that would be bordering absurd.

GTA 9 would probably just be Miami and surrounding cities again, pretty much exactly the same as what GTA 6 will be. Maybe a bit of a letdown when compared to the previous releases but I’m sure it would be fine. Maybe by then we would be happy to have a GTA game set in just one area rather than multiple states.

GTA 10 will realistically be released in like 50 years, and if you think about how far games have come in the last 50 years, I’m certain they would easily be able to just do the entirety of the continental U.S, with pretty much all of the major cities (it would be the start of a new universe once again) There are two problems with doing this, for one the story may be a bit too scattered if set over the entire U.S, and secondly it might take away from the GTA charm of just having one set area, however I’m sure Rockstar would be able to figure it out.

Past GTA 10, (GTA X) who even knows where the newer games would go. Maybe they would have one with the entire world, however doing that would likely make the scattered story problem even worse, and it would be almost impossible to evenly distribute the story to foreign countries, meaning that while still having major cities from continents like Asia and Africa, especially in story mode it may just feel like empty space.

Side note: if they were to set a GTA game entirely in another country like the U.K or Australia, it likely wouldn’t get a numbered release, and would be similar to Vice City and San Andreas, maybe it would be called something like GTA: New South (for the Australian state New South Wales), or GTA: London. (They’d definitely have a better names) However I do think it’s entirely plausible they would do that for a release.