While we got plenty of information about Grand Theft Auto 6 thanks to the Extended Look showcase last week, more details have been revealed thanks to a deep dive by YouTube channel TGG. One of the biggest new features in the upcoming title is how it deals with the characters’ morality through its Criminal Profile system.
As the Extended Look revealed, players will be able to move their Criminal Profiles towards the “good” or “evil” side depending on their actions; petting a dog counts as “good” while robbing a store counts as “evil”, for example. In their video, TGG has offered a more detailed breakdown of the system, confirming that players will be put into one of four possible states: Professional, Aggressive, Violent, and Psycho.
Interestingly, there is also a fifth state that players can fall into depending on how unnecessarily violent and chaotic they act in the game. This unnamed state is seemingly quite difficult to actually reach, and actually getting to it means that the game will stop measuring players’ actions as good or evil. The system was essentially designed for players who don’t really care about the Criminal Profile system and just want to do what they want.
For an added layer of potential chaos, the two protagonists – Jason and Luca – each have their own Criminal Profiles that can vary depending on their actions throughout the game. This could even lead to situations where one of them is in the “Psycho” state while the other is on the other end of the spectrum – Professional.
This likely ties into Rockstar’s larger attempts to ensure that, despite its intermingling of a variety of game systems throughout Grand Theft Auto 6, players that don’t want to engage in any particular system can simply choose to ignore it.
In an interview with the same YouTube channel, Rockstar North co-studio head and head of development Rob Nelson had spoken about how the game’s various systems will come together to make players forget that they’re simply playing a game, and will encourage them to roleplay their lives in Vice City and Leonida County.
“The way the whole thing works together, we’ve got a lot of very complicated systems working in an interconnected way; you can forget it’s a game that has been designed to try and work this way. I think it allows you to sort of role play as heavily or as lightly as you want to.”
However, Nelson has also spoken about how the team didn’t want to make Grand Theft Auto 6 too complicated in its chase for realism. Among the ideas that were ultimately cut out of the game was one that would involve players needing to restock Jason’s and Lucia’s refrigerator with groceries.
“At one point during development, we were experimenting with a system that would allow you to buy groceries to restock the fridge. We had specifications for stores with groceries that you could buy and take home, and the fridge could be replenished. However, because this would have complicated the mechanics, we had to simplify it.”
Grand Theft Auto 6 is coming to PS5 and Xbox Series X/S on November 19th.
