While games like Grand Theft Auto 5 and Red Dead Redemption 2 have garnered quite a bit of praise for Rockstar Games when it comes to a variety of factors, one of the key criticisms of the titles has been how strictly scripted and on-rails their missions tended to be. It looks like Grand Theft Auto 6 won’t be repeating the same mistakes. In an extended interview with IGN, Rockstar North co-founder Rob Nelson has revealed that missions in GTA 6 will offer some degree of player agency.
Discussing the balance struck by the team between offering players freedom and telling a coherent story, Nelson noted that, sometimes, “the narrative aspect does need to take precedence” over the gameplay. This means that the developers have to make sure that players hit certain story beats, which leads to the team needing to “kind of guide the experience.” However, with GTA 6, the team has “made a very conscious effort to open things up where possible, without compromising the quality of the experience.”
Pointing to the mission showcased in the Grand Theft Auto 6 Extended Look that had Jason and Lucia participate in what appeared to be a drug deal in the midst of a police raid, Nelson said that players will have “multiple routes out of that tower block.” Similarly, the other mission where the duo met Raul has an on-rails shooter segment in the beginning, but once players take control of Lucia to drive the car, there are more ways for players to get to the objective while evading the cops and avoiding the “optimal” route.
“Anything where a mission can become systemic, and it’s a wanted level or robbery system – we try to make it so that it doesn’t feel inconsistent with how the game works in the open world.”
Nelson also noted that this doesn’t mean that players will have the ultimate freedom to complete missions however they want. “It can sometimes be hard to keep the quality as high as you want if you allow for too much freedom or too much choice on missions, but we are really trying wherever we can.” While some missions will offer freedom, others might be a bit more scripted. To counter this, however, he also confirmed that the team has been “pushing very hard to raise the level of quality with everything that can happen in the open world”, to the extent that open-world events might feel indistinguishable from a scenario in a mission.
“We have a lot of emergent, natural-feeling stuff happening pretty often now as you roam around the world. That was truly emergent for me when we drove past that car park, and Jason suggested we do that job – I hadn’t actually heard that dialogue from him myself yet. And it worked – I was going to a pawn shop, then Jason said, ‘Should we go do this?’ as we drove by, and I changed my mind.”
He also spoke about how the character dynamics between Jason and Lucia will play a role in this, and how GTA 6 will showcase “how much fun it can be to be with your partner.” The robberies from the Extended Look served as examples, representing “a HUGE part of what you can and need to be doing in this game between story missions.”
Interestingly, Nelson also confirmed that the partner character can play a vital role in robberies. Pointing to one of the robberies where Jason is waiting for Lucia on a bike as the latter gets out of a store with a bag before the two then ride off, he said that “The partner can drive pretty well, so you can often have the partner drive to get you away from the cops, and you, as the player, can be shooting behind. Sometimes when it really works, and you blow out their tires, and the front car goes flipping around, blocking the cars behind it, blocking them all, or when the partner drives you to beat a train at the last second, blocking them off, it can feel like you’re playing a scripted mission, which is totally new for us.”
Grand Theft Auto 6 is coming to PS5 and Xbox Series X/S on November 19th.
