We knew that better graphics, more NPC density, the sheer scale of Leonida, and improved animations were going to be a part of the new GTA 6 gameplay premiere that we just watched. There’s a stylish vibe to life in Leonida that makes even the most mundane of tasks feel like a page out of a life that is probably only just a dream. But is that all the city is going to be known for? Wasn’t all of this something you expected, perhaps even demanded, of Rockstar?
And yet there’s more to the city and your time in it hidden away in the subtle interactions that your protagonists have with the world, and the ways in which it interacts with them. Leonida was already going to be a memorable world to dive into, but GTA 6 is taking steps to let you shape the kind of person you want the city to remember you as.
And that’s a change that could be one that gives the upcoming adventure an identity of its own. As always, we’re taking you through every reason why we believe so.
What You Do Is Who You Are
We all have that one friend who manages to get into insane sorts of trouble when you let them loose in one of your video games. GTA V was a great one to do that in, allowing for a kind of spontaneity that’s never felt limiting in all the years we’ve been playing it while we waited for the sequel we knew was on the way. It was a game that was focused on giving you things to do, letting you express yourself through three unique character perspectives, and a reputation system that was certainly engaging for its time.
However, it could quickly become a loop of activities that attracted cops for a while before you evaded them, switched out characters, and then went back into the same loop again. Changes of clothes were only cosmetic, and those sudden switches between the three protagonists could feel quite jarring, as if you just left an intense moment in one character’s life and entered a random one in another’s, with no connecting thread between the two other than a cleverly designed loading screen.
Yes, pedestrians would call out anything illegal or anti-social, but the consequences of your actions were only temporary in most cases, with the world soon moving on from any disturbances you caused in it. It was immersive then, but with the intervening years, it isn’t as impressive as it once was. But from what we just saw in the 27-minute gameplay, that isn’t the case in GTA 6.
Pedestrians whip out their phones to record what you’re doing. An emergent event even saw an unhinged streamer on an insane challenge in a stolen car livestream the entire chase, his demented laughter lingering in the dust Lucia’s wheels threw up as she sped away with the trunk open. Yeah, that’s a sentence we didn’t think we’d be typing, but here we are. In the real world, that’s a story that’s going to linger on your feeds for a while. Well, it looks like it could be the case in Leonida as well.
It isn’t just the tech-savvy citizens of the city who are going to remember what you do in it, with law enforcement actively maintaining a criminal profile of Jason and Lucia thanks to their history, according to IGN’s preview. It’s probably why they don masks when they’re up to something illegal, and try not to let a certain high-ranking and especially vicious cop lay eyes on them during a simple pick-up job gone south.
Even your own body reacts to your in-game habits as per a preview by Dazed, as Jason and Lucia need to balance their food, sleep, and exercise to look and feel their best as they go about a life lived outside of social conventions, with blurred legal lines that often need them to be in better shape than most of Leonida’s other denizens.
Everything you do in the city contributes to an underlying social, criminal, and even physical identity that you’re shaping for Jason and Lucia, flitting between them to take in everything it has to offer. And that sense of identity even bleeds into how the two protagonists work together.
A Partnership For The Ages
Let’s begin this with a little sidebar: we think Jason and Lucia’s dialogue and writing in general really helps sell their partnership quite well. They’re a team in every job they take, each of them filling their roles well enough while remaining able to switch it up on the fly. One was never too far from the other in missions that carried any form of risk in the gameplay premiere, while they were certainly happy enough to go out on their own when things were a bit less intense.
That points to an experience that really sells a sense of camaraderie between the two, their conversations evidence of an easy banter that comes from years of working together and a lot of trust built along the way. That immediately sells moments such as the one where the two continue with their respective tasks in a security job that inevitably goes south, each trusting the other to look after themselves. One of the folks the duo comes across asks Lucia if she’s a professional, and she replies in the affirmative.
Well, Jason and Lucia are professionals across chases, fights, and assists in the field when things aren’t going according to plan, and quite good at improvising. It was an especially nice touch to see them maintain private communications even when the job had them splitting up to pursue different goals, even texting updates to each other when a situation began to unfold. GTA 6 is bringing a sense of personal identity to both its playable characters, and then tying that off neatly by making them indispensable to the operations they take on.
It isn’t that there’s some sort of identity stat or a whole system governing your actions, an invisible system that’s constantly judging you for what you do when you hop into Leonida after a long day. But it’s evident that there are systems in place to make the world around you acknowledge the kind of person you choose to be in it. The cops remember your faces if you forget to mask up, as do all the people who see you or perhaps pictures of you when you’re not behaving as the laws of the land say you should,
Of course, when you consider expanded NPC systems that have them quite responsive to your actions, it’s easy to see how that sense of identity can bleed into how you choose to respond in any given situation. Are you going to provoke that clearly confrontational yet feeble old lady who’s trying to jack her way into your car over a minor dispute? Are you going to keep a regular fitness routine and diet up to ensure that Jason and Lucia are the fittest pair of wrongdoers the city has ever seen?
Are you going to skulk around the city’s streets, looking for trouble by eavesdropping on conversations and being a generally unsavory presence in your neighborhood? It’s all up to you, and the difference is that this time around, the world’s going to remember all of it. You leave your mark on it as surely as it leaves its mark on you, and that’s a welcome change to an already great evolution of Rockstar’s formula.
A New Kind of Free
GTA 6 might be an expensive game to own, but can you really put a price on freedom? It’s what the franchise has already been about. You were let loose in a world that was designed to respond to the things you did, in ways that not only felt natural, but organically evolved into gameplay moments that would often leave you far from where you originally began, and perhaps equally distant from where you planned to be.
The freedom to do whatever you want has always been a part of the franchise, and a great asset to how it makes its titles immersive experiences that you don’t really forget long after you move on to other games. But with GTA 6, we’re beginning to suspect that the world isn’t going to move on from you as easily as it has done in the past. All of the gameplay we’ve seen makes us feel like each of those moments, both the good and the bad, add up to make your take on Jason and Lucia one that could differ wildly from what another player would interpret it as.
The game is going to remember the kind of people you choose to be, and that’s a form of player expression that could be a breath of fresh air. It might even be the one that makes GTA 6 the new open world benchmark if all of it comes together as well as that presentation made it look. We can’t wait to begin painting the town red. And we’re equally curious to see whether those impressions linger after the city wakes up to the news of our escapades every time we decide to cause some mayhem.
The anticipation has been agonizing, yet we’re starting to suspect that GTA 6 won’t just justify that massive wait. It’s likely to shatter every ounce of hype and demand we’ve built up.
Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, GamingBolt as an organization.
