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After years of speculation and rumors, Rockstar is finally giving us a deeper official look at Grand Theft Auto 6. (Unlike the various unofficial looks we’ve been getting courtesy of a certain vegetable.)
The GTA 6 “Extended Look” airs Thursday, August 27 on Netflix at 12 pm PDT/3 pm EDT/8 pm BST. Six hours later, it’ll be available on Rockstar’s YouTube channel.
Rockstar has not said exactly what the video will entail, but we’re assuming we’ll see a good amount of gameplay and find out more about our two lead characters, Lucia and Jason. We’ll be responding live to the reveal in the blog feed below, cataloging all the details and sharing reactions from around the web.
GTA 6 is due out on consoles on November 19. There’s frustratingly still no PC release date, and Rockstar is unlikely to speak on that anytime soon. Perhaps we’ll at least hear something about GTA Online, which has been conspicuously absent from the conversation so far.
What we’ve learned from the leaks
Ahead of the official GTA 6 reveal, someone who goes by “Cyberleek” has been releasing gameplay clips that apparently come from a build of the game they have continuous access to.
I assume there’s a control room somewhere in which suited lawyers are pointing at giant maps and saying “enhance,” but Rockstar hasn’t tracked down the leaker yet, and in the meantime, we’ve learned a lot about GTA 6’s gameplay.
Here are some of the big details, with the caveat that we can’t be sure exactly how recent Cyberleek’s build is:
- There appears to be a morality system, a la Red Dead Redemption 2: During a particularly violent action by the player, a devil icon with a minus symbol appears
- Cars have gas meters, but refuelling looks easy (drive into a gas station, press a button)
- Another RDR2 similarity, we see at one point that Jason has the option to “greet” or “taunt” NPCs he encounters
- Your identity as it relates to police APBs is represented by three icons, which we’ve deduced probably refer to your clothing, face/hair, and car
- The wanted level now goes to six stars, one more than it used to
- There’s a stamina meter, and at one point we see Jason struggle with a driver during a carjacking, depleting the meter
- Full nudity: At one point the leaker wanders into a nudist party, and Rockstar withholds nothing
The GTA 6 reveal is ‘rousing’ and ‘violent’
That’s according to the descriptors Netflix has chosen for the reveal. According to the Netflix mobile app, the video will be 26 minutes long.
I still think it’s quite poor form for Rockstar to make fans subscribe to Netflix to see the reveal of a game they’ve probably already preordered. Yes, we can all just wait six hours for it to be posted on YouTube (and realistically, it’ll be ripped from Netflix well before that), but it’s the principle of the thing.
PC Gamer’s Andrea Shearon has reminded me that Hannibal is on Netflix—the brilliant NBC show with Mads Mikkelsen—so I guess that’s what I’ll be doing with the renewed subscription I didn’t want.
We’re 30 minutes away
It’s almost time. The anticipation for this big reveal has perhaps been dulled by the leaks that preceded it, but I still find myself quite curious to see what Rockstar is going to show.
So far, we’ve gotten the impression that GTA 6 is going to be something of a hybrid between previous GTAs and Red Dead Redemption 2, and that may manifest in deeper ways than we’ve seen from the infamous vegetable’s clips.
I don’t expect to hear much, or possibly anything, about GTA Online, but even if it’s omitted, the fact of its omission will be notable. Rockstar surely has big plans for its future, but given how closely GTA Online (and its roleplaying community in particular) is associated with PC gaming, I wonder if those plans will be withheld until the studio is ready to talk about the PC version of GTA 6 itself.
There are also rumblings about user generated content being a focus, and but I’m unsure if that will have anything to do with the singeplayer game—we’ll see!
Here we go!
The time has come! Reminder that, if you don’t have a Netflix subscription, the video will be available on YouTube six hours from now. But we’ll be documenting what we see over the next several hours, and will grab stills images and clips of the most interesting stuff.
We open with a drug pickup gone wrong
We’ve gone straight into gameplay with no preamble, which is nice. The reveal opens with Jason and Lucia arriving at a drug distributor for a pickup. Naturally, things go wrong: This kingpin has been betrayed by his partner, and police are incoming. A shootout follows.
The player is controlling Jason, and we see them use a dynamic cover system. A computer-controlled Lucia follows suit, interestingly. They chat back and forth mid-action. There’s a nice fluidity to the animations. At one point we see a slow-mo kill cam after Jason takes out one of the corrupt cops—very Max Payne.
Obligatory ‘yes, you can pet the dog’
The in-game GUI seems to be a special overlay 🤔
I’m wondering if we’re in for a “you can cloud stream GTA 6 on Netflix” announcement at some point, because as I grab stills from the video, I’m noticing that parts of the in-game GUI are not showing up. They must be rendered on a different layer that OBS isn’t capturing. Might not mean anything, but that’s weird, right? Thinking emoji, thinking emoji, thinking emoji…
Lucia seems fun, Jason’s a bit boring so far
Jason’s personality, so far, seems to be “doofus with a deep voice.” Lucia’s a bit more fun. After the shootout, we cut to a look at their domestic life, which includes a moment to watch a couple parody TV ads.
Yeah, Lucia’s definitely the cool one
A few details we’ve noticed
- Lucia dodges a punch at one point, and we briefly see Jason wrestling in a makeshift ring, suggesting more complex melee combat than we’re used to
- Jason and Lucia appear in disguise during an interrogation, and claim to be tourists. Later we a montage of simple disguises. In the leaks, we saw that police have multiple ways to ID you, appearance being one.
- The couple are offered a job, but only for one of them, and Lucia accepts. Already expected, but confirms that some jobs will be for one character only.
- During a mission, Jason climbs into the backseat while Lucia drives, and then shoots at pursuing cops through the window. It’s unclear how much of what we’re seeing is bespoke to the specific mission, and how much can be done at will.
- Lucia sets a car on fire to destroy evidence.
- The player hot swaps from Lucia parachuting off a tower to Jason hanging out with a friend, mid-conversation. The camera pans across the city during the transition.
There are lots of recreational activities
There’s a clip of Jason shooting hoops (which we’ve seen in the leaks), plus lots of other recreational activities: scuba diving, jet skiing, kayaking, dirt bike riding, base jumping from a tower, street racing, dancing at a club, making it rain in a strip club.
Here’s what that mid-jump character swap looks like
More details and reactions to come, but as we continue to process what we’ve seen, how are you feeling about the reveal? Is it worth breaking out a console for (or buying one for way too much money if, like me, you don’t have one) or are you going to watch from the sidelines for now?
