King of the Hill and Barry star Stephen Root has confirmed that yes, that is him voicing Brian Heder in GTA 6.

Despite how much of the game we've seen now, Rockstar Games has kept its cards close to its chest when it comes to who is acting in GTA 6. Despite the work of internet sleuths giving us a pretty good idea, the identities of Jason and Lucia are still unknown. However, one thing was for certain from the moment the second trailer debuted back in 2025… that one old guy sounds like Buck Strickland – one of Root's side-characters on King of the Hill, alongside his starring role as Bill Dauterive.

It's not unusual for Rockstar to cast well-known actors in side roles, with the likes of Kyle MacLachlan, Luis Guzman, and Samuel L. Jackson appearing in the PS2 trilogy, so Root lending his voice to the game wasn't out of the realm of possibility.

Well, thanks to Associated Press, we now have our first actor confirmation, with Root confirming, "Yeah, you're gonna see me in there." However, Root acknowledges that it wasn't much of a secret in the first place, saying, "From the first rollout of GTA that they were doing – almost a year ago – they had my character in there, and there are too many people who knew me from King of the Hill and my voice [laughs] so I think that secret kind of got divulged already."

Root adds, "I'm so happy to be involved with it. It's an amazing thing to look at."

Personally, Root's performance was already one of my most anticipated things about the game from the moment that second trailer dropped, and this was only heightened by a moment in the GTA 6 extended look presentation on Netflix. Around halfway through the showcase, there's a scene where Jason and Brian are on top of a building, with Brian doing a monologue about a fairground he went to as a kid while it cuts to clips of Jason and Lucia robbing banks as Prefab Sprout's 1988 classic, Cars and Girls, plays in the background.

It's a story about picking the right time to get out of the life of crime, which – having seen any number of classic movies about couples in crime – no doubt bodes poorly for how the story could go. But that one-minute clip had me hooked like nothing else in the showcase, and may have completely sold me on the experience.

GTA 6 wasn't "fully formed" when Trailer 1 released, Rockstar boss says, but the Tom Petty song it used was a "mission statement" of where it was going.

Rockstar wants people to love GTA 6's Jason and Lucia just as much as they did with Red Dead Redemption 2 protagonist Arthur Morgan.

Red Dead Redemption 2's Arthur Morgan is one of the most beloved video game protagonists of all-time. Even as someone who did not completely love it as a game at times – I often describe it as the game I love that I hate the most – Arthur was a character that really stuck with me and remains one of my all-time favorites years later. And while Rockstar has done great characters in the past like Niko Bellic and John Marston, Arthur is on a whole other level.

So after a protagonist as acclaimed as Arthur, following up on that is likely a point of stress for the developers, and speaking to TroisCouleurs, Rockstar North co-studio head Rob Nelson explains: "We wanted to take the depth that we were able to add into the world of Red Dead Redemption 2 and the ability to interact with the world in a much more significant way, but then also this sort of emotional connection that people end up having with Arthur."

Nelson continues: "We knew we wanted to come back and continue playing with the idea of multiple protagonists," and that, with a couple, the studio could make the protagonists' actions a bit more impactful than what we saw with GTA 5's trio. The interviewer cites moments shown, like Lucia and Jason getting ready to go out, with a level of intimacy between the characters, unlike the GTA 5 protagonists, who tolerated each other at best.

Nelson says these quieter moments are intentional, as they make the intense bits even more impactful, explaining, "when you see her get thrown down the stairs and then you switch to him, and you can’t hear her, it’s the feeling of concern."

Nelson adds, the quieter moments "were some of the most compelling aspects of Red Dead Redemption 2 and we wanted to see if we could bring some of those elements into GTA 6."

GTA 6 wasn't "fully formed" when Trailer 1 released, Rockstar boss says, but the Tom Petty song it used was a "mission statement" of where it was going

It seems only right that GTA 6 would go heavy on advertising in Miami, Florida, since the game's location, Leonida, is based on the city. Plans for some discreet advertising there passed the city council but just barely, amid concerns over the violence therein.

On September 10, the City of Miami Beach voted 4-3 to allow for Rockstar's proposed campaign to roll out across the area. The exact extent of what's planned is unknown, but the ensuing debate revealed a few details.

There'll be umbrellas and beach chairs from Boucher Brothers, a supplier of beach equipment, emblazoned with the VI symbol from the game's logo. Rockstar's total investment is expected to come in at $3 million across the entire advertising rollout, which will run from October 15 through to the end of 2026.

The time period certainly makes sense, since it pushes the release around the holiday period for Christmas presents and such. From the sounds of things, it seems like the idea will be to make GTA 6 fully synonymous with Miami Beach by placing logos and symbols around the city in less immediately noticeable ways.

Or at least, that's my guess from the outset. Rockstar could just as easily be planning a massive boat race. Nonetheless, there was a back-and-forth between the commissioners on the council over the appropriateness of associating with the game, which can be viewed in full on YouTube.

"You can't spend years telling the world that Miami Beach has changed, imposing some of the toughest Spring Break restrictions we've ever had, to change our brand and our image," commissioner David Suarez says. "And then turn around and voluntarily promote the very image we're trying to leave behind."

He then showed a GTA 6 clip of the various violent crimes you can commit. In response, Commissioner Monica Matteo-Salinas points out that she's a fan of the series. "I played it in 1997, when it first came out; I played it in 2002 when it came out, the Vice City version, and I'm going to play it again when this one comes out," she proclaims.

"It's a video game; it's fake. We can be who we are and make a nod to this video game without endorsing it," she argues. "This won't affect our brand. This is a win for gamers, and gaming nerds, such as myself."

The adverts won't touch city property, nor will they be part of Art Basel Miami, an annual art fair that happens in the first half of December.

GTA 6 fans track down real-life nudist resort featured in leaks just to write unflattering fake reviews that are driving its owner to madness: "A nudist resort DENYING exposure?"

If you ever want to keep a secret, Rockstar Games is a good place to go for advice. The developer managed to keep a lid on GTA 6 for years, defending itself against some outlandish attempts to leak parts of the game.

The company is currently facing an employment tribunal over the dismissal of 34 employees late last year under contentious circumstances. Rockstar argues it was for gross misconduct, whereas those impacted say it was part of a concerted effort to quell unionization and they weren't given appropriate due process.

During the proceedings, as several outlets report, Rockstar revealed the kinds of security risks it has faced while making the new Grand Theft Auto game. Attacks are regular, according to the publisher, and they come in a variety of creative ways.

Hacker groups have attempted to blackmail the company as recently as the last few weeks, according to testimony from Rockstar. This stands to reason, since there were an unfortunate number of leaks in the run-up to the extended look on Netflix. The anomalous group Cyerleeks was responsible for those clips, putting out over a dozen GTA 6 clips in motion, though it's unknown if they're the same ones who attempted to extort the studio.

Meanwhile, Rockstar had to employ specific protections on its own buildings to stop drone fly-bys. People were apparently using the hovering cameras to try to take screenshots or record in-progress builds of the upcoming crime sandbox, leading to privacy film being put over some windows.

This is the last hearing and will last five weeks, concluding in mid-October. We'll see what emerges in the coming days.

GTA 6 wasn't "fully formed" when Trailer 1 released, Rockstar boss says, but the Tom Petty song it used was a "mission statement" of where it was going.

GTA 6 fans will not allow a peaceful nudist resort in Florida to be nude in peace. They tracked down the real-life location, which would appear to be in Rockstar's crass open-world after doomed crypto scammer Cyberleek showed off a similar naked palooza in gameplay clips this August, and now its owner is ready to pull a GTA 5.

Cypress Cove Nudist Resort in Kissimmee, Florida looks to be represented in GTA 6 as a pleasant retreat with a stocked bar, blue pool, and more penises than you could count – though Cyberleek tries their best to be destructive in their leaked footage that ends in a naked bullet hail. Before that, GTA 6 protagonist Jason is only passively criminal, leering at strangers with a pair of crystal-clear binoculars, which I imagine isn't what most people want to see when they have their nipples out. GTA 6 fans make this known in their fake five-star Google reviews of Cypress Cove, which are glowing, despite their in-character references to Jason and his wandering eyes.

Many of these reviews seem to have been deleted as of writing, but Cypress Cove left at least one up as a warning. That review says, "Had a great time until a man pulled out his binoculars." But this was the wrong thing to say to Cypress Cove – which also claims GTA 6 trolls are petitioning the business for money in order to delete their reviews.

"SPAM / EXTORTION REVIEW," the nudist resort labels it. "For anyone wondering about the suddenly recurring references to 'Jason Duval,' 'Lucia,' binoculars, a pool, firearms, and other suspiciously similar details — those are references to Grand Theft Auto VI. Yes. A video game."

Cypress Cove continues, "These reviews appear to be part of a coordinated series of fabricated posts using GTA VI references and attaching them to our actual business. They were then followed by a request that we PAY MONEY to have the reviews changed or removed."

The business vows: "We will not pay. We will not negotiate. We have documented the reviews and the request for payment. This activity is being reported through the appropriate channels." It continues to warn GTA 6 hopefuls that, while "we appreciate the commitment to the GTA storyline, [...] Cypress Cove is located in Florida – not Leonida."

"Unfortunately," the nudists conclude, "our marketing budget also does not contain a line item for 'internet ransom.'"

"The owner definitely wasn't happy about the comments," correctly observes a Reddit thread on the topic. Screenshots show other five-star reviews that reference "what happened on August 24," the day Cyberleek shared that footage of Jason killing everyone at the nudist resort in GTA 6, and subsequent warnings to "beware of the guy named Jason Duval." Cypress Cove has the same response to all of it, "SPAM / EXTORTION REVIEW."

"A nudist resort DENYING exposure??" says one incredulous Reddit comment. But I think I understand why a friendly nudist resort for relaxed hippies in Florida wouldn't want to be associated with an illegal video game leak that shows a man murdering innocents from the edge of its pool. Even for an R-rated location, it isn't brand safe.

"They already view us as a people who can't fight back and don't care if we're chained up," writes one purported nudist in the subculture's Reddit, who is horrified with Rockstar's horny representation of people that simply want to feel the wind on their butts. "We need to make it apparent to everybody just how inaccurate this parody truly is. If we can't unite, we're already dead."

So, there are some people out there who would gladly defend Cypress Cove's honor against GTA 6 miscreants. They might encourage fake reviewers to turn off the laptop, take off their cloth tops, and enjoy the real Florida sunshine before GTA 6 glues everyone and their underwear to their gaming chairs on November 19.

GTA 6 extended reveal caused a surge in PS5 and Xbox Series X sales, analysts say – now imagine the response if consoles didn't cost an arm and a leg.

The GTA 6 extended look presentation on Netflix caused a pretty substantial surge in sales for PS5 and Xbox Series consoles in the US.

Netflix's GTA 6 extended look had 31.1 million viewers in four days, which is to say it seemed to go down pretty well, especially since you could watch it for free on YouTube hours later. It was a massive success: the game looked extremely impressive throughout the showcase, and it clearly pulled in some, as PS5 Pro stock disappeared pretty soon afterward.

Circana's Mat Piscatella reports that following the premiere of the GTA 6 extended look, "In the US, combined PS5/XBS hardware unit sales for the week ending Aug 29 increased 14% versus the prior week."

He notes that PlayStation grew by 17% and Xbox Series X|S by 9%, and that "The combined increase across both platforms amounted to less than 8k units." Meanwhile, Nielsen IQ (via The Game Business) reports that in the UK console sales jumped by 33% for PlayStation and 34% for Xbox.

But you can only wonder what the jump would've been like if consoles weren't becoming somewhat prohibitively expensive for many. The PS5 Pro is almost a grand after Sony bumped the price up by 150, with the regular PS5 consoles getting $100 on top, while Xbox consoles jumped by $100-$150 depending on whether you get a 512GB or 1TB console.

Since the GTA 6 premiere, I've had multiple people who haven't jumped in on this generation ask about which console to get for GTA 6, but many are simply unwilling to spend that much, especially since this is the only generation where consoles have gotten more expensive as it goes on.

So yes, it's a big bump, but you have to wonder how much bigger it could've been if not for the ongoing global RAM shortages courtesy of it being funneled into the AI slop industry.

GTA 6 wasn't "fully formed" when Trailer 1 released, Rockstar boss says, but the Tom Petty song it used was a "mission statement" of where it was going

It's been almost three years since we saw the first trailer for GTA 6, and Rockstar North's co-studio head has now revealed – perhaps unsurprisingly – that the game wasn't "fully formed" at that point. Despite that, though, the song used in it was a "mission statement" for what was to come.

The wait for GTA 6 has felt extremely long, with Rockstar's sparse marketing certainly not helping matters. Trailer 1 was all we had to go off for a long time, introducing us to Lucia and who would later be confirmed as Jason, the Vice City setting, and, uh, a 2025 release window. Yeah, that didn't age well, but the accompanying music – Tom Petty's 'Love is a Long Road' – really helped set the vibe for the game, and seemingly not just for the fans.

Speaking in a new interview with French outlet TroisCouleurs, Rockstar North co-studio head Rob Nelson notes that when the team starts on a new game, they don't necessarily all have the same image in their heads of what it's going to look like. "It may be an image, often it is a song we rally around," he says.

As for Rockstar's process, "the first thing we always do, once we decide where we want to set the game, is we'll go there. And just feel it, and go out and just drive around," he says, adding that the devs will "take a ton of pictures, and soak as much of it up as we can and see what speaks to us and start to talk about it and share ideas about what we want to incorporate."

He continues: "So, I'd love to say that it was an image from here that was in our heads, but you're usually chasing something a little bit out of reach and then you see something, and choose a piece of music, and these two things start to work. The game starts to pull together these sorts of pieces."

Nelson then points to GTA 6 trailer 1. "With the first trailer for this game, the Tom Petty song [Love is a Long Road] was a real sort of mission statement," he explains. "You don't have the game fully formed, you have an idea of what it's going to be, but you really have to push hard to pull that together and so when this team is able to do that – and it's definitely made with everything that you've got, but it's the best of everything you've got at that point – it's put together in such a way that it helps be a bit of a guiding light of what it needs to feel like."

Looking back, it seems pretty obvious that GTA 6 wasn't "fully formed" at that point – after all, we're going to have been waiting for the best part of three years since then when we actually get to play it. What we saw even then though looked extremely good, and I suppose that's just what Nelson is talking about when he refers to it as "the best of everything you've got."

But the music choice was clever, too – the lyrics gave us a bit of a hint at what we might be able to expect from the story and Lucia and Jason's relationship, more than what was actually shown in the trailer itself. And, if this is something that Rockstar used as inspiration itself, it's only fitting that we were teased with the very same song.

GTA 6 boss says "there will always be things to satirize," but Rockstar has to "be careful about what we pick" because after 11 years of development "it could be gone, it could change, it could be dated."

Now that the GTA 6 release date is set in stone, we can start worrying about the exact time the juggernaut crime sandbox will become available. Some detectives have dug through data on the game to find out when each territory can jump in, and as you might expect, fans down under should be getting a head start.

The outlet GTA Vice put together a full breakdown of the times by country and region, using timestamps from the PS Store to extrapolate the global launch. If you want to be among the first people to gallivant through Leonida, you'll need to head toward New Zealand or Australia.

The former is first up, getting it a good 13 hours before Britain, and 18 hours before the east coast of the US of A. That's a solid head start on one of the most anticipated games ever made, and I wouldn't put it past some particularly eager fans to migrate just for the sake of an extra half a day's gameplay.

The last region to get access to Grand Theft Auto 6 will be Mexico, lagging just behind the United States. Mexican and American players will need to cover their ears for the last day ahead of launch to protect from spoilers, since you can do a lot in 18 hours, and I suspect many won't be sleeping much during this time.

This is all assuming Rockstar sticks to a staggered schedule. The company employed one for Red Dead Redemption 2, but eschewed it for GTA: The Trilogy - The Definitive Edition.

I would say it's likely this turns out to be close to the truth. It gives Rockstar time to ensure the infrastructure can handle the millions of players who'll be downloading the game and getting into it, and lets anticipation build across social media. And it's nice to give Australia and New Zealand a bit more excitement, as well.

GTA 6 boss says "there will always be things to satirize," but Rockstar has to "be careful about what we pick" because after 11 years of development "it could be gone, it could change, it could be dated"

Rockstar North co-lead Rob Nelson says GTA 6 has been in development since 2015, so the developers have had to be "very careful" to ensure the ideas they ran with still feel relevant in 2026.

Grand Theft Auto has always managed to capture a moment in time. While the likes of GTA Vice City looked back to the era of 1980s Miami, the long-awaited GTA 6 is more like GTA 5 in reflecting contemporary times. Due to swelling development timelines, it can be challenging when something you're working on today might not release for another 10 years.

Speaking to French outlet TroisCouleurs, Nelson offers some insight into how Rockstar is trying to make GTA 6 feel immediately recognizable despite being in development since 2015.

As part of the interview, Nelson is asked if Rockstar devs keep an eye on the current news with an eye to implementing what they see into a future game – the COVID pandemic, for example.

In response, Nelson says "there will always be things to satirize," but there is a method to picking the right things to make fun of.

"We develop on very long cycles," he explains. "The game's been in development since 2015, so the idea is gestating for a long time. The majority of the team really started rolling on to it after Red Dead Redemption 2 released in 2018.

"We have to be very careful about what ideas we choose to put in there, because it can take a long time to figure out what our angle is on this. Because by the time we write it and cast it and shoot it, and implement it, whatever it is – it could be gone, it could change, it could be dated.

"And so we're always trying to think about whether something will stand the test of time. And so, you look at those things, and we only try to pick things if they work with the story we're trying to tell, in the world we're trying to tell it in. I think there will always be things to satirize, there are always ridiculous situations and behaviors that we can find, but we just have to be careful about what we pick."

From what we can see of GTA 6 so far, there's plenty of that on show already. In the GTA 6 Extended Look, we see that Vice City is no stranger to a streamer trying to capture the next viral moment on the streets, for example – something that's been around for years now, and will likely be around for years longer. We've also seen a fair few in-game TV ads, which is one of Rockstar's favorite ways to skewer capitalism.

We'll have to wait until GTA 6 releases on November 19 to see what else Rockstar makes fun of, though it's clear that the silliness of human nature has given developers ample wells of inspiration to draw from.

Rockstar boss says GTA 6 doesn't just let you easily walk around with guns because GTA 5's approach doesn't work "at this resolution."

The chances of us getting an official Lego GTA 6 set are slim to nil (something tells me it doesn't fit the toy-maker's family-friendly vibe), so seeing a fan-made version is such a tease for what could be.

Creator hachiroku24 has taken matters into their own hands by making a model inspired by GTA 6, and I'd go so far as to say it's a homerun. I've got no notes; whether it's the high-speed chase or a spot-on version of the logo towering over everything else, this thing is perfect. If there was going to be an official Lego GTA 6 set for Lego's 18+ range, I'd want it to look like this.

On the reddit thread showing off this model, Cherego sums up my thoughts perfectly with "If this would be an official set, I'd buy it [in] an instant." RobberySuspect agrees, adding "Oh my god I love the design you nailed this!" (As you can see for yourself below, hachiroku24 really did.)

The kit shows protagonists Lucia and Jason escaping the law on a speedboat while the cops are left high and dry against a backdrop of palm trees. It's understated, but nails a key part of the Grand Theft Auto experience without taking the easy way out; rather than resorting to a chaotic five-star shootout, it sells the franchise's blend of action, taboo luxury, and danger in a much more subtle but effective way. It's the kind of scene I could see playing out at the beginning of the game, before the logo appears against the city skyline.

Speaking of which, this set then goes one better and adds a GTA 6 logo hovering overhead. Besides the font being pitch-perfect, the gradient colors help sell those sun-kissed Miami vibes. (It's up there with the best Lego sets so far as looks go.) A lot of fans on the reddit thread seem to agree, with numerous comments praising just how accurate the font is. "Looking at this on mobile I thought the background was printed and the model was in the foreground," nocolon writes. "Absolutely mindblown after expanding the image. That’s incredible."

This level of skill won't come as a surprise to long-term Lego fans, though. User hachiroku24 is well known for making incredible homebrew builds, and they recently dreamt up an incredible Lego Final Fantasy set, not to mention a Lego Pokemon kit that's good enough to look official. I'd argue this is their finest work yet.

Unfortunately, these kits and the Lego GTA 6 set aren't official models you can buy – and in the case of Grand Theft Auto, they likely never will be. Hopefully hachiroku24 releases some instructions, so we can have a go at making it ourselves…

Lego Astro Bot leaks as a free gift for the PlayStation kit, and I kinda wish it was being sold separately.

• See all the for-adults display sets over at Lego

In a new move for a series that has traditionally let players treat its world like a playground, GTA 6's NPCs will organically react to Lucia and Jason if they have their guns out. Rockstar North's joint boss and development lead Rob Nelson has explained the change was made because GTA 5's approach no longer works with 2026's tech.

As we saw briefly in the GTA 6: An Extended Look showcase, some of the world's inhabitants will walk away cautiously if they spot you with a handgun gripped tight. Police might even antagonize you for swinging a rifle around, too. It's a big change from past Rockstar open-worlds, GTA 5 included, which let you run about with a rocket launcher, no problem.

Speaking to TGG about why the change was made, Nelson gave quite a frank answer, explaining that the GTA 5 way might look jarring considering how believable the rest of GTA 6's world is. "We don't feel that works any longer at this resolution with the behavioral sophistication we need from our population now," he says. "In GTA 5, you can pull out a shotgun from nowhere in front of people and they don't react. That doesn't work here."

It's not just NPC reactions that are different. Gone are the days of Grand Theft Auto protagonists hiding military-grade weapons out of sight and in their pockets. "You can always have two concealed handguns on you whenever you want," Nelson explains. "You can carry two long guns and they will be visible on your back and in your hand. You can't put both on your back. One goes in your off hand [and] one on your back if you want to carry two. People will react to you if you are rolling around like that."

Nelson adds that "NPCs are more nuanced than before, so if you just have a long gun on your back, you should be fine. If you've got one in your hand, people don't like it and they react and start moving away from you."

GTA 6 is a bit too real for me - Rockstar will punish you if Jason and Lucia don't get a good night's sleep: "We track lots of things"

Looks like GTA 6 might get a little too real for anyone who makes a habit of saying 'one more game' three games ago until, whoops, it's 3am on a workday.

Rockstar Games has played around with simulating mundane, routine tasks in the past. Plenty of times, in fact. GTA San Andreas famously let main man CJ's weight fluctuate depending on how much he exercised or how regularly he stuffed his face with fast food. Red Dead Redemption 2 borrowed that weight management with Arthur Morgan, but also let the loveable outlaw grow out a beard and get real stinky if you neglected to groom him.

GTA 6 is seemingly going several steps further. Rockstar North co-studio head and development lead Rob Nelson confirmed to TGG that an in-game health app will monitor Lucia and Jason's sleep, among other things.

"It will say whether you're well rested or not," Nelson says. "That will have some effect on regen of certain attributes. We track lots of things - all this good stuff." Being punished for losing sleep in GTA 6, before being punished for losing sleep in IRL GTA? Now that's art imitating life.

What else does that "good stuff" include? Well, for starters, there's the aforementioned weight changes. Lucia and Jason will apparently get a little chubby if you eat too much, which you can see in certain screenshots from the game, "but you have to actually eat quite a bit." On the flip side, if your duo are really hench, you can lose all that muscle once "you stop maintaining it."

In what could be a controversial move by the time GTA 6 launches in two months, Rockstar will also make you refuel and recharge your cars. Going on overnight crime benders may also change our protagonists' faces, and there's even the option to doomscroll through the game's satirized social media feeds. Having to restock the couple's fridge was a step too far for Rockstar, though.

GTA 6 driving is "the best parts" of GTA 4 but with "the accessibility of GTA 5," says Rockstar boss

It's nearly impossible to nail down any one feature or mechanic that defines a Grand Theft Auto game, but the two specific suggestions from the title are thievery and driving. My memories of the early GTA games from my childhood, Vice City and San Andreas, are largely comprised of stealing stuff, cruising around listening to 2Pac, and mowing down innocent citizens, a horde of cop cars blaring sirens in the rearview. Driving is essential to a GTA game, so it makes sense that it's a huge focus in the community leading up to GTA 6.

What does it actually feel like in the hands? Does it have the bulk and heft of vehicular traversal in GTA 4? I remember that one being a little clunky to handle, something that was dramatically improved in GTA 5, which I've been playing a lot in anticipation of GTA 6. According to Rockstar co-studio head Rob Nelson, driving in GTA 6 is something of a hybrid of the two, combining the best of each.

Asked by TGG if GTA 6's cars are as "weighty" as GTA 4's, Nelson says:

"Only in the best way possible. The team has worked hard to maintain some of the best parts of the weightiness and feel of GTA 4, but have the accessibility of GTA 5. It has all been built up from scratch on this hardware, and they have much more control tuning drivetrain, tires, suspension, steering, all of that is getting applied to the physics model."

As no one outside of Rockstar and publisher Take-Two have had the chance to go hands-on with GTA 6, we don't have objective, unbiased impressions of any of the game's mechanics. Of course the guy in charge of Rockstar is going to say it's the best of both worlds; we'll just have to wait until November to find out if he's right.

GTA 6 launches November 19 for PS5 and Xbox Series X.

GTA 6 isn't flashy for the sake of it – I'm impressed at how additive every new detail feels to gameplay

GTA 6 isn't even out yet, but it's already causing a ruckus in real-life Miami-Dade as the county's sheriff and a commissioner oppose a reported pitch for a marketing deal that'd temporarily transform parts of the area into Vice City.

Late last month, it was reported (via The Miamian) that Miami-Dade County officials had approached GTA 6 maker Rockstar Games with a pitch deck proposing to turn locations such as the Miami International Airport, Metrorail stations, and other buildings into Vice City-themed attractions. At the time, Carlos Suarez, a spokesperson for the county's mayor Daniella Levine Cava, stated that "some conversations with Rockstar about potential opportunities around the launch of GTA 6" had happened, but "nothing has been formally agreed to or approved."

Well, regardless of whether Rockstar Games is actually interested in pursuing this idea, some Miami-Dade folks are directly opposed to it happening at all. A Republican Miami-Dade County commissioner, Juan Carlos Bermudez, and Sheriff Rosie Cordero-Stutz have spoken out against the concept, with Bermudez stating that "we should be promoting the Miami-Dade we have worked so hard to build, not a fictional version of our community defined by crime and violence."

Via WSVN, Bermudez claims he's "not against video games, but to go out and get a video game where – which glorifies not only our first responders getting shot, but also pedestrians and residents – it's nonsensical."

Republican sheriff Cordero-Stutz similarly points to GTA's crime-centric themes, adding: "At a time when law enforcement is working every day to reduce violent crime, prevent robberies and car thefts, combat drug trafficking, and build stronger relationships between our deputies and the communities we serve, I believe we need to seriously consider the message we send when our own government promotes a fictional identity centered around many of those same crimes."

Miami Herald reporter Doug Clark has also shared a letter sent to Mayor Levine Cava by Miami-Dade's clerk of the court Juan Fernandez-Barquin and the Eleventh Judicial Circuit of Florida's chief judge Ariana Fajardo Orshan, in which they "respectfully request that all Miami-Dade County courthouses and court-related facilities be expressly excluded" from any potential marketing, branding, or promotion related to GTA 6.

"Each day, these facilities are places where victims seek justice, defendants answer to the law, witnesses participate in proceedings, families confront difficult circumstances, and judges, attorneys, court personnel, and law enforcement professionals carry out their constitutional and statutory responsibilities," the letter continues.

"The individuals who enter our courthouses are not characters in a fictional world. They are real people dealing with real consequences, sometimes involving violence, loss, family separation, criminal allegations, and other deeply personal and consequential matters. The solemnity and integrity of these proceedings must remain paramount."

Miami Herald also points out that the timing of sheriff Cordero-Stutz's opposition to this proposed marketing deal coincides with her and current mayor Levine Cava getting votes on the County Commission, specifically for competing funding proposals for the Sheriff's Office in the county's 2027 budget. Cordero-Stutz wants a 12% tax-funding increase, while Levine Cava is suggesting half of that at 6%. The same report notes that commissioner Bermudez is thought to be a potential candidate to replace the Democrat Levine Cava as mayor in 2028.

Again, it remains to be seen whether Rockstar Games takes up the marketing deal in the first place. As previously promised, it's fair to say that GTA 6's launch marketing is definitely now in full swing following the recent extended look, and we can likely expect that to continue as we get closer to its November release date.

Rockstar boss says "we'll see what people say" about GTA 6's controversial refueling system, but thinks it's so fast that "you can't complain."

In a move that could be considered extra immersive or just a tad annoying, GTA 6 will make you refuel and recharge your cars – something Rockstar North co-studio head Rob Nelson appears to be aware may prove divisive.

GTA 6's fuel system appeared online ahead of Rockstar's schedule following the recent wave of gameplay video leaks and was immediately met with controversy. There were some hopes that the system seen in the leaks may have been outdated and removed from the final version of the game, but per a new video from content creator TGG (below) – who recently attended an early preview of the game at Rockstar North – it's still intact.

According to TGG, when you pull into a gas station in GTA 6, you can choose to repair your vehicle or refuel it. The latter triggers a short quick-time event, which he estimates lasts around 10 seconds, with an animation showing the refueling itself.

TGG reckons that, from what he saw, "fuel isn't really going to be an issue unless you're not thinking about what you're doing," but it could, admittedly, catch you out if you're trying to escape after a robbery and the car you decide to steal is low on fuel.

Interestingly, though, Rockstar lead Nelson seemingly acknowledges how controversial this may prove.

After TGG expressed his surprise that the devs incorporated the system at all, Nelson replies: "We'll see what people say. Do you think people are going to like it?"

Nelson also points out how speedy refueling actually is, potentially getting ahead of complaints about its intrusiveness: "Hey, that's pretty fast for a fill-up," he apparently said after filling up his car during the preview session. "You can't complain about that."

We'll just have to see how folks gel with the system when GTA 6 actually launches – I fear that, despite Nelson's confidence, some players may well still "complain about that" no matter how fast the refueling is.

GTA 6 will lock you out of story missions if you're too broke, so it's good to know the robbery mechanics have been massively expanded.

There are a lot of things we don't know about GTA 6, but arguably the biggest is what the heck the next generation of GTA Online is going to look like. Given how much money the online mode attached to GTA 5 makes, a follow-up seems inevitable. But how is Rockstar going to convince players who've spent over a decade investing time and money in the current GTA Online to move on to an all-new game?

You can count Chet Faliszek, a 12-year Valve veteran who wrote for the likes of Portal, Left 4 Dead, and the Half-Life 2 episodes, as among those trying to wrap their heads around the possibilities. "Are they just going to kill Grand Theft Auto 5?" he asks in a new YouTube short. "Is it just going to be one continuous thing that they move over and you get upgrades? Can you play it with either game? That would be crazy."

Technically, we don't even know for sure that GTA 6 Online will exist at all. Online features similar to those built alongside GTA 5 were outed as part of Rockstar's ongoing union dispute, but even if they were in development, there's no guarantee that they'll make it into the final game. Still, with the GTA 6 budget speculated to be in the billions, it's hard to imagine Rockstar or Take-Two turning their nose up at next-gen GTA Online bucks.

"What are they going to do?" Faliszek continues. "That's a mess. We can all look through recent history, without pointing fingers, and see some people who did it by just total replacements. We can see people who tried to win people over and when that didn't happen, shut down the other thing. It's really hard to move people off, because I think people don't understand. At this point, someone's bought Grand Theft Auto 5 for, like, 50 cents, and they're playing it online for free. And that's their world. What is Grand Theft Auto 6 going to bring us online that Grand Theft Auto 5 doesn't have?"

With a knowing look, Faliszek acknowledges the big thing GTA 6 Online might have. "We all know: better monetization, right?" he says. "That's going to be their big innovation. They're going to have to figure out how to get you over to better monetization. You're in charge of Rockstar. How do you move people over to Grand Theft Auto 6 Online? Cuz you're making billions in Grand Theft Auto 5 Online, so you want to make even more billions on 6. How do you do it?"

One thing that's at least close to certain about GTA 6 Online: it won't be there at launch. Rockstar hasn't offered a single official word about an online mode even now, with single-digit days remaining until GTA 6's launch. And the studio already set a precedent with GTA 5, where its online features were turned on weeks after the release date. We might have an even longer wait for GTA 6 Online, but either way, Faliszek thinks a delayed rollout is a smart move for Rockstar.

"I think this is why they're waiting to do it until after launch," he says. "They're just saying 'oh, no, we're doing single-player at first at launch.' Cuz they don't want that negativity around whatever they're going to do at launch. They just want you to buy the game and get in the ecosystem and then they'll figure it out. I think that's a smart move by them. They're just saying 'we know we're going to anger people no matter what we do. And we're thinking about really angering people. So, let's not do that yet.'"

GTA 6 isn't flashy for the sake of it – I'm impressed at how additive every new detail feels to gameplay.

We finally have some official viewership numbers coming out of Netflix's GTA 6 extended look, and wouldn't you know it, it was absolutely massive.

Rockstar took an unconventional approach in revealing its most in-depth GTA 6 trailer so far by making it exclusive to Netflix for a few hours before unleashing it elsewhere online. Temporarily locking the showcase behind a paid subscription was a potentially risky move, but it seems to have paid off in a big way, with Netflix reporting 31.1 million views in the four days between its debut and the end of the streamer's viewing window for its top 10 rankings. That made GTA 6 the most-watched title (it's categorized as a movie on the platform) across the entire Netflix library for the week in which its new trailer debuted.

For comparison, the next most-watched movie was the star-studded thriller The Whisper Man, which premiered on Netflix the day after GTA 6's deep-dive on August 28, at 23.2 million views for the week. Meanwhile, the most-watched TV show for the same week was the mega-viral true crime documentary, Death of the Pastor's Wife, which clocked in at 19 million views.

GTA 6's Netflix extended look was big big, but it's nowhere near the streaming service's biggest debut for an English-language title if we're going by first-week numbers. That honor goes to Stranger Things season 5, which netted a mind-boggling 59.6 million views in its debut week.

Of course, comparing these numbers to the amount of views GTA 6 pulls on a platform like YouTube is really like comparing apples to oranges. For example, it only took GTA 6 trailer 2 a few hours to hit 19 million views on YouTube, but YouTube is free and easily accessible for most people with phones, while viewers had to pay for and sign in to Netflix to watch the latest trailer.

Just as crucially, the way Netflix and YouTube track views is very different. YouTube simply counts a view as any click that starts a video, and for views-tracking purposes it doesn't matter if the person watches a second, minute, or hour of the video. One click equals one view. On Netflix, the streamer tallies up the total amount of hours watched and then divides that by the movie or TV show's runtime. With the GTA 6 extended look being about 27 minutes long, that means it accumulated around 14 million hours of viewing time in its debut week, which is staggering regardless of context.

GTA 6 lets players "forget it's a game" with all its choices, and that's what Rockstar lead Rob Nelson is most proud of: "It's up to you and what matters to you"

GTA 6 won't let you progress through the story if you're too broke, which will force Jason and Lucia to make some cash from side jobs or other definitely legal endeavors.

If there's one thing the trailers and gameplay footage of GTA 6 have told us, it's that there's going to be a lot of robbing in it. Nearly every single piece of footage has featured Jason and Lucia holding someone up at gunpoint, getting cash and living large. Safe to say, it'll be a major part of the upcoming open-world game.

YouTuber TGG (via Twitter user Synthpotato) saw gameplay at Rockstar Games and went into detail about how the robbery system works. This includes word that every store in the game is able to be robbed, and that unlike the convenience store holdups found in GTA 5, there will be unique robberies depending on what type of store you are robbing, with factors like CCTV and hostages to be worried about. They also note that much of the robbery footage shown in the extended look was open-world footage rather than bespoke missions.

Perhaps more interestingly, they report that at some points in the game's story, you will be stopped from progressing until your bank account is full enough to access it, while there's no word for what reason you'll need the cash to even participate in the mission, you will not be able to keep the story going if you're broke.

But even with the lockout, it's pretty obvious there's going to be a ton of ways to make more money in GTA 6, with the robbery focus being an obvious way. However, we saw in the Netflix gameplay premiere that racing will be a major part of the game too, so if you feel a bit bad about robbing virtual stores all the time, you might be able to be a nicer person and just do illegal street races instead.

Take-Two's GTA 6 leak investigation is heating up as the publisher requests sealed subpoena to avoid tipping off leakers.

For all of Rockstar Games' technical prowess, the genius of Grand Theft Auto lies in the beautiful simplicity implied by its title: brazenly commit crimes, and have a good time doing it. Grand Theft Auto 6 is set to be an industry milestone for open world density and attention to detail, and what we've seen of GTA 6 so far is still pinned on that promise. It remains as strong a hook in 2026 as it was in 1997 watching pixels skid across a screen from a top-down perspective.

Rockstar's commitment to its criminal fantasy means it remains utterly unreplicable. As close as the likes of Volition Games' Saints Row or Sleeping Dogs from United Front Games have come, I always find myself describing them as 'like GTA but…' There's a purity to Grand Theft Auto's crime sandboxes – simply existing in the world (and causing havoc within it) is just as valid as following their crime caper storylines. Even when cutting about off-leash, building up Wanted meter and going wild with vehicles and weaponry, it feels like you're doing so in a convincing if exaggerated world.

It's here that GTA 6 is really taking Rockstar Games' promise to the next level, as Bonnie and Clyde-like couple Lucia Caminos and Jason Duval take us on a spree across the sweeping Leonida state – Rockstar's riff on Florida.

Grand by name…

Which isn't to say that GTA 6 isn't innovating. Far from it. Only a developer with such a storied history as Rockstar Games would have the knowledge and confidence to identify Grand Theft Auto's integral foundations and build on top of those. Rather than reinventing any element of GTA's mechanics from scratch for the sake of it, it feels like GTA 6 is interrogating the purpose of every design decision the studio has made until this point, with a commitment to taking them further without diluting the joy of chaos.

In fact, the recent deeper dive into GTA 6 puts the likes of Red Dead Redemption 2 into a new perspective. Cowboy outlaw Arthur Morgan's adventure is already one of the best open world games ever made, with an emotional story and a staggering amount of detail and little touches that bring the digital world to startling life – walk into the Saint Denis theater to take in an actual stage show that changes depending on day of the week; Arthur's hygiene can get seriously bad if you don't give him time to relax with a spongebath; and of course, horse testicles are affected by the weather. These are seriously impressive details, making RDR 2 easy to get lost in, but also many of these elements were easy to ignore as you followed Arthur's journey through to its end.

Now, after taking in the full GTA 6 extended look and getting to see the game in action across several missions and side-activities, RDR 2 feels like a training ground or precursor for the type of detail we're seeing across Leonida. The difference here is that most of those finer details aren't just for show, but have an impact on core gameplay while being so natural they avoid being intrusive or cumbersome.

There's a reason GTA 6's gameplay reveal kicked off with following Jason and Lucia into a violent police raid as a drug pickup goes south. The fidelity of the world is immediately striking as the pair stroll up to the shady establishment. The camera moves in and out of cinematic scenes fluidly as they make their way up many floors to complete the hand-off. Then, guns are drawn and the action explodes into motion – cops shooting lead before anyone has a chance to speak, bodies entangling and slamming through thin drywall.

Jason and Lucia are caught in the middle of this eruption, the camera swooping behind the player to allow for some third-person blasting with a smooth cover system. These mechanics are expected in a game like this. But for GTA, which has had floatier shooting in the past, the motion feels wonderfully refined and fluid. It's like watching Rockstar's attention to action detail, as seen in Red Dead Redemption 2's frontier west, get pulled right into the modern age, where maze-like apartment blocks hide danger around every corner.

Bag it up

Crucially, though, the duo aren't about to leave this drug lab without the bag they came to collect – they're not about to risk letting underworld kingpin Bobbie Ike down. They need to make the most of this chance to impress. Jason grabs it, shrugs it over his shoulder, and continues moving to take cover out in the hallway without breaking motion.

Here I have to admit: I have become obsessed with GTA 6's bags.

Money, usually illicitly obtained, has been one of GTA's arcadiest mechanics over the years. Each game's blip as your money counter rings up has become a universally understood shorthand, just like Pac-Man munching on a cherry. But, bags crammed with valuable loot – full of drugs, or money robbed at gunpoint from a cash register – promise to have a physical presence in GTA 6 rather than instantly being displayed within the UI.

I love how this realizes and deepens the relationship between players and money. In a game about being a criminal, having to pick up and stow a bag isn't just a visual differentiator, but a promise of a mission genuinely in progress with parameters that feel real. What's more natural and easy to understand than actually, physically completing a bag drop-off?

This physical nature to committing crimes has an affect on gameplay, as well. During one sequence, we see Lucia laden with bags as she has to shoot her way out of an abandoned building through gang members, blasting and reloading a shotgun one-handed because one arm is so full of goodies. In another, Lucia walks into a store to commit a quick robbery, using a mechanic to hold her pistol behind her back to delay causing alarm while walking in. NPCs throughout Leonida will seemingly react realistically to seeing such danger, and even take the law into their own hands in some cases. Moments later, Lucia sprints out of the store loot in hand, linking up with Jason on a motorbike as the two make their escape to literally secure their bag.

If GTA 6 is making loot more of a physical presence in its world, then where better for its next major evolution than by overhauling the crime caper's second major pillar as you scramble to secure those goods: the getaway?

Another GTA 6 mission we've seen revolves around showcasing how the series' classic Wanted loop has been iterated upon, having Jason and Lucia work as wheelmen on behalf of criminal fixer Brian Heder to help notorious bank robber Raul Bautista make a quick escape.

Wanted has always been a crucial system for giving the sandbox chaos stakes. The more crimes you commit, and the more brazen they are, the higher your Wanted level will soar. It's always been an incredibly intuitive system when it comes to pushing at the boundaries of what you can get away with in an open world. If you're more Wanted, the more police presence will be out to cuff you. This mechanic alone has formed the bulk of my late-night GTA playtime with friends. How long can you survive? Can you get that level all the way up, and then through canny criminal skill successfully make your escape?

GTA 6 has the biggest overhaul of the Wanted system I've seen from the series to date, adding new elements of nuance to evasion while tighter driving and shooting mechanics ground the fast-paced action. Every crime you commit as Jason and Lucia contributes to a criminal profile whether you're directly seen by the police or not, but once a crime has been committed, reported, and attracted attention these modern cops will be able to track your face, clothes, and car to pick up your trail.

While the mission has Lucia drive the crew down an alley to briefly lose their pursuers – which might be enough to lose them in earlier games – here it's only the quiet in the storm. It's not until they manage to ditch their car and torch it, moving to a discreet van, that escape is possible. But, crucially, the Wanted system remains active, merely switching from white stars to red stars. Sirens signal the police hunt is still on, and you'll need to be careful to remain incognito to throw off the police.

While similarly bombastic escapes were part of GTA 5's heists, and, admittedly, this takes place in a story mission, the impression is that these different layers will present throughout the Wanted system more broadly. Choosing to rob a store clerk and escape with a bag of loot isn't a success until you manage to actually get away safely. It's such an elegant loop that I'm surprised it's taken GTA this long to truly codify it within its standard mechanics.

GTA 6 will make keeping a low profile tougher, as well. Social media isn't just for show (though one character can doomscroll while the other drives) – it hints at a more lively network of observation that means NPCs will be taking more notice of what's going on around them, and aren't scared to get involved. One dicey gas station robbery has Jason and Lucia dodging gunfire from an understandably irate clerk. And, while the driving model seems much improved in GTA 6, that simply means a more realistic and grounded scale with tighter streets that can offer more challenge when it comes to deftly escaping behind the wheel.

While it seems you can dive into petty crime whenever you want, this scheming duo have their eyes on bigger prizes. The circumstances of Jason and Lucia's need to rise through the criminal ranks are still something of a mystery, but it's linked to a job gone south that saddled Lucia with jail time. Now, released from behind bars, the duo are feeling the pressure to grow beyond their small-time life of gas station robberies and store hold-ups. Like the alligators that crawl through the Leondia's Grassrivers swamps, we're in dangerous waters here.

Double trouble

There are still some secrets around quite how deep GTA 6's many systems will go. The extent of criminal profiling, for instance, is being kept under lock and key – but sounds like an evolution of RDR 2's honor system. Jason and Lucia's physiques can be affected by how much they snack or pump iron in the gym, but without a longer look at how the game's many side-activities feed into this, it's hard to say how big an impact it'll have on their criminal skills – but I'm betting it's not zero.

Likewise, while Jason and Lucia will always be a pair, how their relationship will grow, evolve, or even devolve, remains to be seen. One mysterious moment during character switching has the two connected with a love heart but with angry emoji, suggesting that for some reason they've had a falling out. Every main story mission so far handles the two being together so well that they almost seem incomplete when apart – they move through shootouts in tandem, covering one another to keep each other safe.

Similarly, in the narrative cutscenes we've seen the two are constantly chattering about their thoughts on dealing with these criminals safely. No one character is simply along for the ride like the Michael, Trevor, and Franklin trio often felt like in GTA 5, which it often revelled in. In GTA 6, 'partners in crime' is the name of the game, and something felt in every major mission that has been revealed so far.

It's in that final sequence we get more of a sense of how both Jason and Lucia can hand-off play in a single mission and feel distinct from one another. It sees the pair playing security for a rich man at an expensive party in a large office building at night, with the event being thrown into chaos when – Die Hard style – it's invaded by a gang looking for a major score.

Jason takes point in the emptier upper floors, where the game's gorgeous lighting really jumps out – the dark, sparse office dimly lit by desk lamps gets thrown into stark relief as bright white light floods from the elevators as enemies arrive. With guns, Jason is able to crouch around corners to ambush enemies, gunfire slowing when he uses his focus skill to slow time and line up devastating shots. This is a similar ability to Michael's in GTA 5, but here it also highlights red and yellow weak spots on enemies.

As Jason and Lucia text one another to share info – the message popping up on-screen – the action switches to Lucia, who has had her own guns confiscated. Here, she's involved in brutal melee with these attacking mercenaries, stabbing a man with a high-heel. We've also seen Lucia training at the gym and going Street Fighter mode with enemies in the open world. At least in this mission, Jason has a gunfire specialty while Lucia is thrust into close-quarters – though it remains to be seen how strict these roles will be in the wider game. Given the detail with which side-activities seem to reflect the pair's growth and condition in an RPG-like simulation style, I wouldn't be surprised if some of this comes down to how you play.

The deeper dive into GTA 6 has allayed my fears that Rockstar Games' sharp new details might come at the cost of simply having fun. But this is still a game in love with the fantasy of committing daring crimes and getting through by the skin of your teeth. What's blown me away is how many evolutions GTA 6 is packing that simply feel like natural additions. Of course Jason and Lucia feel best working together, like two characters becoming one. Of course I actually have to think about keeping my loot safe before I can bank it. Of course a new Wanted system breathes new, unpredictable life into tense chases through its detailed world. GTA 6 has so obviously become a milestone for the gaming industry for good reason – but, shocker, this tight design might also make for some of the smartest sequel decisions in a game ever from a design stand point. Of course.

Our GTA 6 guide details everything you need to know about the story, gameplay, and world so far! Or, check out our best GTA games list for what to play while you wait!

GTA 6, much like its predecessors, emphasizes player choice – and that's what has Rockstar Games most excited about its new Grand Theft Auto game, apparently.

Or, at least, Rob Nelson, current head of development and co-studio head at Rockstar North, is. When asked what he's most proud of regarding GTA 6 by YouTuber TGG, he makes as much evident and explains just how choice-heavy the game truly is.

TGG has Nelson's full response transcribed over on Twitter, and boy does it make Rockstar's upcoming Grand Theft Auto sound massive… as if the GTA 6 extended look didn't do so enough already.

"The way the whole thing works together, we've got a lot of very complicated systems working in an interconnected way," Nelson says. "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 roleplay as heavily or as lightly as you want to."

So, in other words, it's wildly immersive on top of emphasizing player choice – the perfect recipe for a good GTA, if you ask me.

There's that "idea that you have a fair amount of choice now in terms of the way you can approach situations," as the Rockstar lead goes on to describe.

"You can still cause as much carnage as you can imagine. How does that make you feel if it has an impact on certain things? Do you still want to do it? Do you want to do it more? Do you want to do it less? Do you care at all? It's up to you and what matters to you."

GTA 6 is truly shaping up to be one of the most ambitious new games underway, it seems – if not the most ambitious, judging by Nelson's words here and everything else we've seen of the Rockstar project thus far.

As for its prospective online mode, though, TGG clarifies that the developers "didn't make any comment" on it… but something tells me that, when it presumably comes, it'll be as impressive as it is in GTA 5, and then some.

Take-Two's GTA 6 leak investigation is heating up as the publisher requests sealed subpoena to avoid tipping off leakers.

Take-Two Interactive's hunt for the person or people responsible for recent GTA 6 leaks is "rapidly evolving," the publisher says in newly revealed court documents.

Take-Two was quick to file DMCA subpoena requests for Discord and Microsoft in the wake of the initial leaks, but a new filing (via TorrentFreak) is very different in nature. Not only is it much more specific, seeking "targeted information" related to the previous subpoena and individual Discord users, but Take-Two is also requesting that it remain sealed to avoid benefitting the leakers. The previous request, which cast an extremely wide net in terms of the information it sought, remains available to the public.

"Take-Two has identified one additional Discord user and obtained additional identifying information for a previously identified Discord user, as well as additional information concerning the community servers identified in its prior subpoena for which it now seeks more targeted information," reads the new request.

Take-Two says the subpoena attachment "reveals highly sensitive, confidential information about an ongoing investigation into copyright infringement and the misappropriation of Take-Two's confidential information."

"Public disclosure of this information could compromise Take-Two's ongoing investigation and even tip off the alleged infringers as to the nature and progress of Take-Two's investigation and information Take-Two has gathered about the infringement," Take-Two writes. In a footnote, it adds that its investigation "is rapidly evolving and ongoing," and that the new subpoena request "seeks different information" than the first one.

It's worth noting that Discord's marketing director, Ryan Rigney, said as recently as August 25 that the company had yet to be served a subpoena from Take-Two, which may or may not have contributed to the language in the latest request. Either way, the court has yet to make a decision on Take-Two's request for a sealed subpoena and nothing new has been issued so far.

This does seem to suggest Take-Two's investigation is heating up very quickly as the GTA 6 leaks have only been going on for a couple of weeks. It also seems the company is narrowing the scope of its investigation down to specific people potentially involved, which would definitely make me very nervous if I had anything to do with the leaks.

GTA 6 became too realistic for even Rockstar so the devs had to cut a system for restocking Jason and Lucia's fridge to "find the right balance between realism and ease of play"

Rockstar North's co-studio head and head of development, Rob Nelson, has explained how and when players can switch between dual protagonists Jason and Lucia in GTA 6. He says there are some missions where you are forced to use a certain character, some where you are made to switch, and some where you can choose who to play as and change at will.

In an interview with Famitsu that's been translated by GamesRadar+, Nelson describes the team's design philosophy as it pertains to character switching and restriction. "Sometimes [switching characters] is limited by story progression," he explains.

"During the story, there are times where you can't switch from one character for some reason. There are some missions where you are free to switch as much as you want, but there are some sections where we want you to experience it from a certain character's perspective, like GTA 5, so we limit switching."

He goes on to explain how and why the devs limited players to Jason in a certain scene. "There is a mission that takes place in a high-rise apartment complex where you used to be able to switch freely between characters," Nelson says. "However, as ex-special forces, we thought it would be a more natural fit for Jason to be in control, so we decided to set the character. The mission is early in the game, so we thought it would be unnatural for Lucia to lead and give instructions as the two navigate the area."

Alternatively, he compares this to a mission where the player has to switch between Jason and Lucia. "There are some operations where you're forced to switch characters," he says. "In the trailer, we showed a mission where they left a bank robbery and drove away in a car. At first you control Jason firing at the police vehicles from inside the car, while Lucia is driving. Then, during the mission you switch characters, and this time the player is driving the car as Lucia, while Jason and Raul continue to fire at the cops from the back seat."

Finally, he explains parts where you can swap between the two characters whenever you want. "There are missions that are designed in this way, then, like the mission at the end of the trailer where they are under attack, there are times when you can freely alternate switching between Jason and Lucia," Nelson explains.

After 13 years, GTA 6's gameplay deep dive has been so worth the wait even my 76-year-old mother has been texting me about it

Rockstar has just released a massive pile of new GTA 6 screenshots, and even after seeing nearly 30 minutes of 4K gameplay last week, there are a few new details to pick apart in these stills. Sure, there are displays of cars, weapons, locations, and sick outfits for Jason and Lucia, but I keep coming back to this one picture of an iguana.

Seriously, if the image above does not fully communicate why I'm looking at this iguana so intensely, go check out the 4K original on Rockstar's official website. Zoom in, and start counting scales. Every single scale on this little (big) guy is fully visible, in sharp detail, from head to tail.

Of course, Rockstar is already known for ridiculously detailed animals, as Red Dead Redemption 2's horses are famously some of the most lovingly rendered creatures in gaming, right down to testicles that grow and shrink depending on the temperature. But that's a cowboy game – one where horses are central to the experience, as are all kinds of other little varmints you've gotta track, hunt, or avoid.

It wouldn't be out of pocket for us to see an iguana model this detailed if, say, this were a AAA game about keeping iguanas as pets. But this is a game about stealing cars and robbing banks. You'll probably look at one of these iguanas for a couple of seconds, tops. Rockstar might be the only studio in the world willing – and more importantly, able – to invest its resources into such minute details.

Maybe the iguana we're seeing here is a hero model that'll be front-and-center for a brief establishing shot in a cutscene or something. But there's still no reason for it to look this good. Other than, of course, Rockstar's desire to absolutely dazzle us with an uber-detailed sandbox.

GTA 6 became too realistic for even Rockstar so the devs had to cut a system for restocking Jason and Lucia's fridge to "find the right balance between realism and ease of play."

You probably don't need to be told that GTA 6 is big. Rockstar sandboxes are known for their size and depth, and this one seems like it'll be the biggest of the bunch by a wide margin. So much so, the studio doesn't think a single member of the team has seen every corner of Leonida.

Chatting about the blockbuster release with IGN, Rob Nelson, the head of development and co-studio head at Rockstar, spoke about the philosophy underpinning the map and all the various things you can do. "I think the challenge for us on this game is the same as it is on any new game for us," he explains.

"How do we evolve and build upon the good things we have done before in all the ways these things need to evolve," he adds, "but at the same time ensure that the game still has everything that made the previous games in this series resonate with people?"

That's a tricky thing to do. No doubt Rockstar wants GTA 6 to feel fresh and contemporary, without completely eschewing the ideas that have carried the series this far. Chaos, comedy, and constant pull to explore are hallmarks of the franchise, and have been since the very first entry.

That last part is key, and the team appears to have spent the 13 years since GTA 5 well in terms of providing us with things to do. "The game is so big, I don’t know that there’s anybody on the team that knows all of it," Nelson says.

Normally I'd balk at such a statement, but he's likely correct in this instance. Leonida seems big, and between just getting around and all the side-quests, I've little doubt there's an ungodly amount to see and do, to the point that it'll take hundreds to uncover all of it. And it all kicks off in November - at long last.

GTA 6 became too realistic for even Rockstar so the devs had to cut a system for restocking Jason and Lucia's fridge to "find the right balance between realism and ease of play"

GTA 6 had even more daily-life role-playing features, like buying groceries to restock your fridge, reveals Rockstar North co-studio head and head of development Rob Nelson, but the team decided to scrap the idea so as not to overcomplicate the game's mechanics.

In an interview with Famitsu that's been translated by GamesRadar+, Nelson discusses a feature the team planned but eventually cut: dual protagonists Jason and Lucia could buy groceries at the supermarket and then restock their fridge.

"At one point during development, we were experimenting with a system that would allow you to buy groceries to restock the fridge," he says. "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."

This would have likely been part of the GTA 6 system that allows you to gain weight, with your body, health, and stamina changing depending on how you eat and exercise. However, it appears the team thought shopping for groceries was a step too far, and opted instead for cleaner gameplay.

"We are always trying to find the right balance between realism and ease of play," Nelson explains. "Rather than just going to the fridge to grab a snack or visiting a restaurant just to roleplay, we want to give meaning to each action."

Seems living our TikTok ASMR restock fantasy is one of the only things we won't be able to do in GTA 6.

GTA 6 wanted system goes up to 6 stars and lets police track your face, your clothes, and your car

People were concerned about the quality of GTA 6's gameplay before the Netflix extended look, given the limited footage previously released. Now that those fears have been quashed, head of development and co-lead of Rockstar North Rob Nelson wants the next biggest concern, another release date delay, to be squashed as well.

In an interview with Famitsu that's been translated by GamesRadar+, the interviewer discusses how they no longer have concerns about the game's quality after watching the GTA 6 extended look that premiered on Netflix. However, the one thing they were still concerned about was whether the game would be released in November.

GTA 6 has seen two release date delays. The first was from 2025 to 2026, and the second GTA 6 delay moved the launch date six months from May 26 to November 19. However, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick has remained firm on the November release date, reiterating his confidence in multiple interviews.

Nelson has now added his voice to the choir, certain that GTA 6 will come out in November. "It was our hope that people wouldn't be worried about the quality [after watching the extended look]," he says. "We're really pleased. Also, it will be released on time."

As it's expected to be the biggest game of all time, there is a lot of pressure weighing down on GTA 6 and Rockstar's shoulders. It seems that the studio is firm on its promise that we'll be able to dive into Vice City come November.

GTA 6 doesn't feature microtransactions or AI, Rockstar says, but I doubt its take on GTA Online won't have Shark Cards

GTA 6 hype is reaching a fever pitch after yesterday's big Netflix reveal, and it's seemingly making PS5 Pro consoles pretty hard to come by. In the wake of the GTA 6 extended look, most retailers have seemingly run out of stock of Sony's high-end machine, which has left third-party retailers eagerly selling it at exorbitant markups.

As I write this, you can still get a PS5 Pro console from PlayStation Direct for $899. But that seems to be the only major retailer in the US that currently has the console in stock, and I wouldn't count on the supply lasting much longer.

PS5 Pro is in stock at Amazon, but only at $1,299 from a third-party seller. The situation is the same at Walmart. It's out of stock altogether at Best Buy and Target. There's no way of telling if people are actually buying at these prices, but recent eBay listings tell the story – new consoles have been selling for as much as $1,200 there.

It's possible – likely, even – that Sony will replenish PS5 Pro stock for retailers ahead of GTA 6's actual release, but I guess this is the power of GTA 6. People want the best possible experience for Rockstar's next game, and they're apparently willing to pay a premium for it.

GTA 6 is confirmed to feature PS5 Pro enhancements, but we don't yet know what those improvements will look like. Certainly the game looked plenty impressive on the base PS5 during the extended look, and it's apparently unlikely to hit 60fps even on the Pro.

After 13 years, GTA 6's gameplay deep dive has been so worth the wait even my 76-year-old mother has been texting me about it.

The GTA 6 extended look at long last gave us more insight into the long-awaited new game from Rockstar, and by Leonida was it worth the wait. With around 26 minutes of gameplay to feast our eyes on, there was plenty to soak in. From the sights of the expansive city, to the many activities we'll be able to get up to, and so much more, it certainly painted a picture of what's in store after the likes of GTA 6 trailer 1 and GTA 6 trailer 2.

But after watching the Netflix GTA 6 extended look (which is now up on YouTube) maybe too many times now, I've spotted some smaller details that you might have missed. From little references that call back to places and features we've seen in some of the best GTA games over the years, to things in the background that make the prospect of GTA 6 arriving this November even more exciting, there's a lot packed into this latest look, and I'm here to shout about it.

One of the things I love when it comes to big reveals like this is seeing the community come alive and pick apart the finer details, and as someone who's all about worldbuilding and life-sim-y elements, I've already honed in on things that make me personally excited. Be sure to share any discoveries you've made in the comments section below. But without further ado, join me as I break down the 7 things you might have missed in the GTA 6 extended look.

7. Hello there, Misfire Games

Right at the beginning of the GTA 6 extended look, Jason and Lucia meet with a character called San4San rocking a T-shirt (which also briefly appeared in the first trailer) with a logo that instantly caught my attention. Emblazoned on the front is "Righteous Slaughter: Hood Ops".

Parodying FPS games like Call of Duty, those who played GTA 5 may remember Righteous Slaughter 7, which you could see being played by Michael's son Jimmy at home. So it looks like the fictional in-game universe's developer, Misfire Games, is still going strong in GTA 6. It begs the question: will we see or even be able to play this new entry as Jason or Lucia?

6. Vice City wheels

My first proper introduction to the Grand Theft Auto series was actually GTA: Vice City. But I wasn't interested in the action, guns, and missions. I was there for the cars. I loved cruising around to '80s tunes of Flash FM back then, and there was one set of wheels I enjoyed hopping into the most: the Sentinel.

As GTA's fictional car brands go, it was always my favorite for some reason. So, imagine my delight when I clapped eyes on Jason and Lucia driving in an old convertible Sentinel model, which feels like a true call back to those Vice City (Dance Hall) days.

5. Fridge finds

During the extended look, we see Jason go to his fridge to get a drink. As much as it makes my life-sim-loving heart happy to see smaller activities like this alive and well in GTA 6, I actually honed in on the front of the fridge, which is adorned with a variety of stickers and photos.

One sticker comes from Fleeca Bank, a little nod to a well known bank chain in the GTA universe. I particularly remember it being featured in radio ads when I was playing as Nico Bellic in GTA 4. But it also appears in various entries in the series.

4. Box meals

GTA has always done a lot of parodies, and there's one very prominent one that sticks out in the GTA 6 deep dive. During the extended look we see some TV ads, with one showcasing the Prairie sandwich box meal.

With a frankly wild amount of meat slices piled between bread buns (with top bun fashioned like a cowboy hat), it clocks in at "only 30,000 calories. The ad at once looks like the many stacked sandwiches found at Arby's. So, it certainly looks like it's poking a little fun at the fast food chain.

3. '80s tunes

The extended look is full of music tracks, but to my well-trained Vice City, I loved hearing some of the '80s tracks that throw it back to the feel of Tommy Vercetti's era. As Jason goes up in an elevator, for example, you can hear Phill Collins' Against All Odds playing in the background, which instantly feels like a nod to GTA: Vice City stories.

Not only did Collins actually appear in Vice City Stories, where he performed In the Air Tonight, but it also features another one of his most iconic '80s tracks, Easy Lover, which played on Flash FM.

2. Under the sea

The GTA 6 map already looks very impressive, with sprawling cityscapes made up of various notable locations. With so much of the footage showing off a bustling Leonida and its many NPCs, I couldn't stop noticing the aquatic side of things.

The ocean is absolutely teeming with life, from manatees to dolphins, and stingrays. GTA 5 also boasted a highly detailed ocean, but it looks like GTA 6 is building on this even more. And with lots of scenes showing Jason underwater, or diving off a pier and riding on jetski, it looks like we'll have plenty of occasions to see this underwater world for ourselves.

1. Sweating it

With Leonida being home to a modern take on Vice City, the feel of the place wouldn't be complete without some neon-tinted nightclubs. During the extended look, we see Lucia and Jason go to a few, but what really caught my eye was the fact that Lucia is actually perspiring during one visit.

With GTA 6 promising to dial things up in the immersion and interactivity department in the expansive open world, we're set to see lots of new features that will affect Lucia and Jason in different ways to reflect your choices. And it looks like the interactivity will even extend to things like the temperature of the place you're in having an effect – like going into a busy nightclub, exercising, or sitting in the hot sun and sweating for it.

Join us as we Countdown to GTA 6 with lots of coverage on the next big GTA game.

We may not know much about Rockstar's plans for GTA Online in the wake of GTA 6, but the two worlds are already crossing over. The first character to make the jump from the crime MMO to the latest mainline installment is Valentina, revealed during the GTA 6 extended look showcase.

If you don't immediately recognize her, that might be because she was only a minor GTA Online character introduced to its universe in 2025, as part of the game's Money Fronts DLC.

In GTA Online, you only see Valentina in passing when you go to meet Mr. Faber, while she's telling someone on the phone she's around for just 24 hours.

Valentina seems to have a bigger role in GTA 6 based on the extended look we got, in which she gives Jason and Lucia jobs as bodyguards during a swanky event for Megamundo, a Spanish-language TV network. If she's handing out main missions, it's possible she'll be a recurring character in some capacity – though this is a big game, and you might not run into her often.

Fans have been comparing how Valentina looks in GTA Online versus her upgrade in the new mainline sequel, and it's quite the step up. Her features are considerably more defined, including around the birthmarks on her face. These minor details have long been where Rockstar truly shines as a studio.

I would consider her inclusion in Netflix's extended preview a harbinger of more reveals. Keep an eye on everyone you meet if you're hanging around GTA Online these days, because you might be about to see them get a serious glow-up, too.

GTA 6's criminal profile will track how heinous your crimes are, just like Red Dead Redemption 2's honor system.

Knowing how to steal cars in GTA 6 is going to be a key part of your progress around Leonida, because it's not like you're going to catch the bus across Vice City! While previous entries in the series have relied on vehicles being conveniently unlocked or sticking your fist straight through the glass, the GTA 6 process is going to be considerably more nuanced. With that in mind, here's what we know so far about stealing cars in GTA 6.

Find out what rides you'll be swiping with our round up of the GTA 6 cars identified so far, along with the GTA 6 weapons you can arm yourself with.

How stealing cars works in GTA 6

From what we've seen during the Extended Look, when you approach a vehicle that you can thieve a selection of prompts will pop up, offering different ways to steal the car in GTA 6. In this example, you can either use a slim jim (a thin strip of metal that's technically called a lockout tool) to slide in and pop open the lock non-destructively, or simply smash the window to gain access. Presumably, breaking the window will be quicker but draw more attention and increase the likelihood of getting a wanted level, while popping the lock will take longer but help you remain inconspicuous.

If you opt to use the slim jim then a simple lockpicking minigame appears, where it looks like you need to use the right stick to push towards a curved bar until it fills up completely and the door opens. It's likely that higher end vehicles, if the slim jim option is available, will have a smaller or even moving target bar to fill and make this process more difficult, though from what we've heard so far about character development it's also possible that the more cars you steal in this way, the better you'll get at lockpicking and the easier it will become.

Although this is all we've seen so far, Rockstar says GTA 6 won't let you magically hotwire every car and that you'll acquire certain tools as you progress through the game to access more of them, though you can still carjack any driver you see to take control of their vehicle. There will even be a phone app you can use to get more details on any cars you have your eyes on, telling you what you need to steal it, how much it would be worth to sell, and the cost of registering it as your own vehicle. Certainly some big changes when it comes to grand theft auto!

© GamesRadar+. Not to be reproduced without permission.

One of the scenes featured in last night's GTA 6: An Extended Look premiere might be very familiar to anyone who caught the massive leaks from four years ago.

Cast your mind back to 2022. Very early GTA 6 leaks are flooding the internet. An unnamed couple breaks into a diner called Hank's Waffles, holds up hostages, and steals what they can before the police have them surrounded. Sure, it looks like another Grand Theft Auto romp, only this time with lighting that makes little real-world sense and would-be waffle-munchers who don't react as you'd expect Rockstar NPCs to.

Now it's 2026. GTA 6: An Extended Look reveals near-final gameplay from the open-world epic for the very first time. Lucia and Jason are again robbing a diner, but wait a second... is that Hank's Waffles again? Those poor waffle makers, this time rendered in almost unbelievable detail - the difference four years made to GTA 6 is both incredible and unsurprising.

Re-introducing one of the very first scenes we ever saw from GTA 6, now in almost complete form, is certainly a flex, especially when the game looks this darn good. Whether Rockstar Games did so intentionally (with tongue in cheek) is anyone's guess, but it's certainly a nice reminder to the internet that leaked in-development footage is never a good indication of what a game will actually look like on launch day.

Of course, those first-round leaks are disconnected from the unofficial clips that have been circulating via CyberLeek this past month. Although, the hacker seems to have now cashed out of the memecoin they were using GTA 6 videos to promote, potentially putting a stop to all the leakage once and for all.

Now that we have a real meaty look at Lucia and Jason's adventure, the public's appetite for leaked footage should calm down, either way. We finally have concrete details, after all. GTA 6 will run at 30fps as Rockstar isn't sure if a 60fps mode will be ready in time. We also know the game doesn't include microtransactions or AI-generated materials, and the Leonida map is apparently three times bigger than Red Dead Redemption 2's.

Check out every GTA 6 version for more information and all of the GTA 6 map that's been pieced together thus far.

We haven't gotten official word from Rockstar yet on GTA 6's frame rate, but if you're holding out for a 60fps mode, the prognosis is not looking good. A new tech analysis suggests that it would be uniquely challenging for even high-end PCs to run GTA 6 at 60fps – never mind current-gen consoles.

That's according to Digital Foundry, which has gone over the footage from GTA 6 extended look with its usual fine-tooth comb. They found that the game appears to be running at a native 1440p on base PS5, with a simple upscale to 4K. That's a damned impressive resolution target given GTA 6's visual fidelity, and, given the base console's limitations, it's downright astounding that the game manages to hold 30fps as well as it does.

It's impossible to do a full frame rate analysis given the limitations of Rockstar's upload of the extended look video, DF says, but the outlet has found that the footage indicates "a relatively stable and well-paced 30fps output, with only very occasional single frame drops."

The consistency of that frame rate output indicates that "Rockstar has clearly spent immense effort balancing CPU and GPU workloads to fully saturate the hardware. That makes a 60fps version extremely unlikely on console hardware." PS5 Pro could, in theory, throw more GPU power at the problem, but that's unlikely to improve performance by much when the game is so heavily focused on a densely detailed open world and vast crowd tech – two things that normally require more CPU power.

We know that GTA 6 will feature some enhancements on PS5 Pro, but Rockstar reportedly hasn't settled on whether any sort of performance mode will ever be introduced. High-end PC hardware has, of course, already well outclassed Sony's monster machine, and it sounds like even the theoretical PC port of GTA 6 would struggle to reach 60fps on all but the latest and greatest CPUs.

"The CPU demands of a world this complex – tuned around console Zen 2 cores at 30fps – could make hitting 60fps genuinely challenging in a way we don't often see," Digital Foundry says, "and will likely require a high-end CPU like a recent Ryzen X3D to avoid bottlenecks."

A stable 30fps would still be the best performance we've seen out of a mainline GTA game in decades, as GTA 4 and 5 both had consistent, severe frame rate dips when they originally launched on Xbox 360 and PS3. Standards have admittedly changed over the past decade, but I doubt a 30fps cap is going to dissuade too many GTA fans from picking up the long-awaited blockbuster.

GTA 6 is "Rockstar's magnum opus" according to "proud" devs excited about the Netflix extended look after two weeks of "heartbreaking" leaks.

Everything revealed from the GTA 6 extended look has stoked a mix of largely positive reactions online. To the group of unimpressed onlookers, we can safely add Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 director and Warhorse Studios honcho Daniel Vávra.

Discussing GTA 6 on Twitter, Vávra lays out what he and "everyone who has ever written a good story" sees as the ingredients for, you guessed it, "a good story." The list goes: "Internal and external conflict, complex characters with interesting motives, a consistent, logically functioning world, a theme, a point, a 'message' (in the good sense of the word), logic, and interesting and likable characters."

The GTA 6 reveal, Vávra reasons, did not convince him of these. He describes the showcase as "an absolutely fantastic tech demo bordering on a technological miracle" and demonstrating "an open world so open that no one has ever created anything like it."

But at its heart, in protagonists Jason and Lucia, he sees "two uninteresting sociopaths chaotically committing mass murders of innocent people for other sociopaths and money."

As a result, Vávra reckons GTA 6 has "zero story hook for me. It will surely work for multiplayer and people wanting to do crazy random shit. But there was much more before."

In a reply to one user who suggested GTA 5's cast was "pretty complex and interesting" and Rockstar surely kept the truth of Jason and Lucia close to its chest, Vávra adds, "It's weird that you don't show any story hooks in a 26-minute-long 'trailer'. Just random stuff without any context. Plenty of room for some hook." (I, too, cocked my head and squinted at the "more" we purportedly had "before," as I don't know GTA as a famously sociopath-free series.)

You are, as ever, allowed not to like or be interested in GTA 6. I don't like Rockstar's games in general, so obviously I'm not into it. But even to me, Vávra's critique feels a bit premature, though not entirely unfair. A lot of trailers – most, arguably – are a bunch of bits strung together without context. My read of the narrative thread in the GTA 6 extended look was Rockstar showing us pages 82, 147, and 286 of a 600-page book, then filling in the gaps with shootouts and cars. I would at least want to read the first 81 pages before getting too granular.

It's also unclear what distinguishes a "good" message here. My mind goes to a previous claim from Vávra: when it was nominated in the LGBT Gayming Awards, he argued KCD2's optional gay romance is "exactly how something like this should be done," and certainly not like all those games "rightfully called 'woke' these days."

Proving Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2's authenticity, Warhorse's biggest fan hikes through Czechia "by foot" to make 3D maps of the RPG's historical locations.

The GTA 6 soundtrack is already finding its way into fans Spotify playlists, with a lot of great songs dropping throughout the GTA 6 extended look. From classic '80s tunes that channel the Vice City vibes of Leonida, to more recent tracks from Miami artists, I've already been listening to so many of them on repeat since the gameplay deep dive dropped. So, if you find yourself trying to find a particular song that was featured in the latest look at GTA 6, then I'm here to help.

Below, you'll find the full GTA 6 songs list so far, with all of the tunes featured in the Extended Look's soundtrack in the order they appear, so you can put together the full playlist if you want to. Plus, if you're after a particular song that was featured, I've also included the timestamps from the video to help you find the track you're looking for. And further down, you can find the songs that were previously featured in GTA 6 trailer 1 and GTA 6 trailer 2, so you can have a complete GTA 6 song list to date.

If you're hungry for more, then here are all of the GTA 6 side activities we've identified, and what we know about how to steal cars in GTA 6.

GTA 6 Extended Look songs

• Pop Bottles - Birdman ft. Lil Wayne (0:08)
• Pound Town (and Tay Keith) - Sexyy Red (0:50)
• Skrilla - Kodak Black (1:46)
• Let Your Love Flow - The Bellamy Brothers (6:00)
• Love Bites - Def Leppard (6:43)
• People Are People - Depeche Mode (8:21)
• But I Think It's A Dream - Captain & Tennille (9:50)
• Cars and Girls - Prefab Sprout (10:42)
• Off the Grid - !!! (Chk Chk Chk) ft. Meah Pace (12:25)
• GTA 6 Theme Song - DRÆVEN (13:41)
• Devil Woman - Cliff Richard (16:49)
• Se Me Nota (Agarrame) - Chimbala x Omega (20:10)
• Against All Odds (Take a Look at Me Now) - Phil Collins (21:37)
• Mine O' Mine - Aluna & Jayda G (22:03)
• Elderbrook - Inner Light with Bob Moses (25:44)

GTA 6 trailer 1 and 2 songs

It's hard to believe how long ago trailer 1 dropped now, but the song that accompanied our very first look at GTA 6 is still memorable. Then, of course, trailer 2 landed to bring us a proper introduction to the leading characters Lucia and Jason, with another unforgettable tune. You can find both songs below:

• Love is a Long Road - Tom Petty (Trailer 1)
• Hot Together - The Pointer Sisters (Trailer 2)

For more, we've put together a list of the GTA 6 cars and GTA 6 weapons identified so far, along with the GTA 6 locations that make up Leonida.

© GamesRadar+. Not to be reproduced without permission.

I cannot imagine what it feels like to know that GTA 6 is actually about to drop for the developers making it. It's 13 years of work and anticipation, finally coming to fruition, and on the back of the Netflix preview, a number of Rockstar devs have expressed their emotions.

"What a day - everything looks incredible. Massive well done to everyone involved," Joe David, a senior mission designer at Rockstar, said on Twitter. His sentiment is widely shared across his colleagues.

"So proud to have been part of this journey! I'm so glad y'all got a preview of what you're gonna play!" Anoop Ravi Thomas, associate principal graphics programmer at Rockstar, posted. "So excited for people to finally see what we’ve been working on," Jacob Lloyd, a senior QA tester at the studio, says.

The feature on Netflix is an event for them as much as for anyone else, since they finally get to see public reactions and feel their audience's energy. And, I mean, knowing your game is already making history through doing a landmark pre-release must be amazing.

Imagine telling your family and friends, hey, the thing I worked on is being previewed on Netflix right now. I'm sure they all understand it's going to be the biggest game of the year anyway, but to have the world's largest streaming platform involved? It's a whole other level.

"It's a privilege to get to work with such immensely talented and great people on this game," Dan Willey, another of Rockstar's senior QA testers, posted on Twitter. "Beyond excited and proud of this extended look and especially proud of the motion capture and animation teams," Rhys Bassett, a motion capture animator at the studio, writes.

It's truly endearing to see everyone rally together on the back of Netflix's big reveal. These devs have earned their moment in the limelight, and it was nearly scuppered by the amount of leaks we've seen over the last couple of weeks. Well over a dozen clips made their way online, prompting legal action from Rockstar.

The Netflix special seems to have completely pushed those into irrelevance. I hope they all soak it in appropriately. After all, "this is Rockstar's magnum opus," as Bradley Stone, lead game tools programmer, says.

Rockstar is cautious about what to satirize in GTA 6: "Specific political issues or memes will date fast"

There are already plenty of confirmed GTA 6 side activities to look forward to, despite launch still being a few months away, and they cover a wide range of possibilities. To help you keep track of it all, we've rounded everything up here in this handy guide so you can check them all out.

That's right, thanks to the recent GTA 6 Extended Look, which showed off a bunch of gameplay, as well as some interviews breaking down exciting new features, the new game will have a ton of stuff to do alongside main missions as you take control of crime couple Jason and Lucia. A chunk of side activities in GTA 6 shouldn't be super surprising to players, especially since the GTA 6 map is massive, but if you want to discover all that Leonida has to offer then keep on reading below.

Got a particular tune stuck in your head from the Extended Look? Then check out the GTA 6 soundtrack revealed so far to find your earworm.

GTA 6 side activities at a glance

• Water sports
• Scooter riding
• Basketball
• Diving and swimming
• Going to the gym
• VR
• Watching TV
• Car racing
• Carjacking
• Armed robberies
• Wrestling
• Dirtbiking
• Basejumping
• Clubbing
• Shooting range

The full GTA 6 side activities list

Water sports

There are a ton of water-based side activities waiting for us in GTA 6. From the Extended Look, we saw that there is Airboating in prime crocodile infested looking water. There is also jet skiing and kayaking in the ocean, so if you want a break away from land then there are plenty of options available for you.

Scooter riding

Yes, transport is primarily concerned with GTA 6 cars, but I did spot a bunch of characters riding scooters around the map in the Extended Look. More specifically, I saw e-scooters, meaning you can rent and charge them in your playthrough if you want to experience a more eco-friendly mode of transport. It's nice to have options, even as a criminal, right?

Basketball

In the Extended Look, we saw a short clip of Jason playing basketball in front of his beachfront safehouse. This likely means that we are getting a basketball mini-game, and I wouldn't put it past Rockstar to offer us multiple places to start shooting hoops as well. I'm personally hoping that we get confirmation of a 3v3 mode soon. So stay tuned.

Diving and swimming

Along with watersports, you will be able to swim in GTA 6 as well as scuba dive. In the Extended Look, we saw a character swimming in a wetsuit with manta rays. There were also dolphins in the trailer, so I'm betting that we will be diving with a whole host of sea animals come the game's release.

Going to the gym

One of the big features of GTA 6 is that what you eat will affect how Jason and Lucia look. So if you want to stay lean, you'll need to work out. The Extended Look showed Lucia hitting the weights, with you using button prompts to assist her. We haven't seen how we get to use the rest of the gym equipment just yet, but it will likely also be an interactive affair.

VR

This one shocked us, but the Extended Look did show a character using a VR headset in the window. The character did look like he was using VR for some... um, 'personal time'. Now, besides potentially using VR for porn, it isn't clear how we can interact with it just yet. But we do know that it exists in the game at least, so stay tuned for details.

Watching TV

In GTA 6, there are in-game shows and commercials that Jason or Lucia can watch with a cold drink in their hand. In the Extended Look, we saw a parody of an Arby's-looking commercial and a nature documentary as well. They were both super detailed, and honestly, I can't wait to channel surf to see what other offerings Rockstar has given us.

Car racing

Along with stealing cars, you will also get to race them in GTA 6. The Extended Look showed off a racing mini-game where we are on a dirt course driving laps next to other opponents. I'm still waiting for confirmation of how many race tracks there are, but for now we know that there is at least one to show off your driving skills.

Carjacking

This wouldn't be GTA without carjacking, so the ability and pastime to steal cars in GTA 6 is back. However, you will have to be more careful about doing this in the new game, as the world is more responsive and remembers more than previous titles. So make sure you cover your face and be smart about it!

Armed robberies

In GTA 6, you will be able to put on a mask and do a bunch of hits. In the Extended Look, we see Jason and Lucia holding up a liquor store and engaging in other armed robbery activities. So if you want to do some additional crime on the side, you are more than sorted, folks.

Wrestling

In GTA 6, you can engage in some hand-to-hand combat with some old-fashioned wrestling. In the Extended Look we see Jason getting tossed around a backyard ring, so if you need a break from shooting, you can help yourself to this side activity.

Dirtbiking

GTA 6 is all about the vehicles, so I paid close attention to all the ones on offer and spotted some dirt bikes in the Extended Look. In the teaser, we see a bunch of dirt bikes hitting a course in a race, which may also point towards big competitions being added as part of this side activity as well. Exciting times.

Basejumping

In the Extended Look, we see Lucia jumping into the air from the top of a tower and freefalling before you launch a parachute. This basically points to base-jumping being a side activity in the game, and I'm excited. Its inclusion means we will get to experience the Leonida skyline in multiple ways, and hopefully we get a fun mini-game related to it as well.

Clubbing

A GTA staple side activity returns as you can go to the club and dance the night away. Strip clubs are back, as well as making it rain on dancers with dollar bills. We only saw a few clubs in the GTA 6 trailers so far but I'm pretty positive that Leonida will be filled with them, so Jason and Lucia will have a grand old time.

Shooting range

In the Extended Look, we saw Lucia at a shooting range firing bullets at targets as they pop up from behind buildings. The mini-game looks like the perfect side activity for players needing to practice their reflexes and shooting skills with various GTA 6 weapons before any big jobs.

I'm still on the hunt for side activities, so look out for future updates to this page. In the meantime, we also have guides on the different GTA 6 versions that are available, as well as all of the GTA 6 locations that we have seen.

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Jason and Lucia are facing their toughest mission in GTA 6 so far: dinner with an older couple, Brian and Lori, at a rooftop restaurant with the unappetizing name of Effluvia. A job has come up that requires just one of them to step away, leaving the other to keep the conversation flowing between bowls of stuffed olives.

Jason turns to his partner. "I don't mind," he says. "If you wanted to…" But Lucia ignores his signals: "I'm gonna go." As she steps up to leave, Jason tilts toward her, halfway out of his seat. The subtext is clear: don't leave me here, with these people I barely know how to speak to.

Power couple

There's a lot of that in GTA 6, if Netflix's 26-minute reveal is anything to go by. There are plenty of noisy gunfights and screeching car tyres, but much of what we see of our two protagonists are the constant, quiet negotiations of life in partnership.

Early into the preview, Rockstar leans on the relatable clichés of heteronormative existence: a woman who clothes her boyfriend better than he could himself; a choice between two different dresses, which Jason fumbles; the restlessness of a man whose getting-ready routine is finished in five minutes flat, when faced with the intricate hair and makeup preparations expected of women.

But what follows is subtler and more powerful than that. Rockstar appears to understand that some of the most important conversations between couples happen in liminal spaces: the car on the way to the party; the elevator up to the rooftop bar. These are moments for team tactics - in which potential issues are raised, fears are voiced, and a shared approach is agreed upfront. Forget couple goals – these two have couple objectives, and they're being reassessed and renegotiated on the fly.

There are multiple points where Lucia reads Jason's discomfort in his body language, and pushes him to unpack what he's feeling. "Sometimes I'm just more comfortable when I have to use a gun," he admits. As many couples will attest, what you often need from your other half as you charge into the fray of a social event is simply a brief motivational speech – a pep-talk in ten words or less – and Lucia understands that too.

"Relationships are about communication, Jay," Lucia teases him with a laugh as he weaves between Vice City traffic. But it's not really a joke. There are two pairs of hands on this steering wheel, and each has the capacity to drive the other into the Bay. The gangster story may heighten the consequences of Lucia and Jason's decisions – a long jail sentence, or a bullet to the back of the head – but this joint responsibility is really the stuff of all serious relationships.

When Jason asks, "How do you wanna play it?", it's an acknowledgement that she has placed her life in his hands, and vice-city versa. Honoring that commitment means being open to discussion – the kind of private negotiations that all couples have as they find their way forward.

Rockstar has said that it'll be up to the player to decide how hard they lean into Jason and Lucia's romance over the course of the game. But it's clear that main missions will tug at their bond for dramatic effect. In a riff on Die Hard, Lucia is caught in a hostage situation while Jason plays the poltergeist upstairs, sending DIY bombs down the lift shaft.

The intermingled fear and relief is visible on Lucia's face as she hears Jason's voice crackling through the walkie-talkie – a dramatic irony the player gets to appreciate while the hostage-takers remain clueless. They don't realize they're dealing with a pincer movement from a pair of linked killers, who've developed a near-telepathic connection over countless evenings slumped together in front of the television.

Inevitably, that united front will break down, more overtly than it does in Effluvia. It's simply impossible that Rockstar won't pull that lever somewhere in GTA 6's second or third act. But even so, it's clear that this series is going to feel very different as a two-hander. GTA 5 had three protagonists, but they were tied by circumstance, greed and unfinished business. There was no way that Trevor, Michael, and Franklin made sense as a trio once the balaclavas came off.

By contrast, Jason and Lucia have chosen to tie their fates together – at least initially – and that means neither is a loose cannon in fake-Florida. Instead they're a pair of nunchucks, holding each other steady and reeling each other in as they fight to survive criminal existence. Thematically, if not mechanically, that's another kind of GTA entirely.

Rockstar is at pains to show that GTA 6 will host the kind of freedoms previous entries in the series have offered – base-jumping, motocross, swampy hovercraft rides. But my gut feeling is that this iteration will feel a little less free when its protagonists are apart. They are two halves, and must snap back together to be whole. Yet the consequent connection – to the characters, the story, the world – will be worth it. Every romantic relationship is a bet and a trade-off, and I'll bet on this one.

Our GTA 6 guide details everything you need to know about the story, gameplay, and world so far, while our Countdown to GTA 6 is packed with features covering the iconic series' past, present, and future!

We've finally had a lengthy look at GTA 6 gameplay for the first time during the Grand Theft Auto 6 extended look showcase. It's been a long time coming, as earlier trailers just set the game's (impeccable) mood with glimpses of the returning Vice City and wider Leonida state. Now, we've had big, uninterrupted chunks of gameplay showing criminal couple Jason and Lucia playing through missions, intercut with sizzle reels of side-activities.

GTA 6 is recognizably an evolution of earlier GTA games, but there are plenty of tweaks to familiar mechanics that are going to be transformative for the moment-to-moment experience. Similarly, fully new features alter how we think about our place in this criminal sandbox completely. Whether that's how integral Jason and Lucia's partnership feels through every sequence, or how the iconic Wanted system has had a serious overhaul, there's plenty to dig into as the Countdown to GTA 6 continues.

Read on to join me as I break down the 8 biggest gameplay features that will forever change how we play Grand Theft Auto going forward.

8. Two is better than three

On paper, having just two protagonists in Jason and Lucia might seem like a step down from GTA 5's Michael, Trevor, and Frankin trio. In fact, Rockstar Games did consider upping that to four for GTA 6. But, the choice to focus down is a smart one. What's striking about the couple from our extended look gameplay is how tightly they feed back into one another. They're constantly chatting back and forth about their criminal schemes, and when gunfire breaks out they smartly cover one another no matter who you're controlling.

One sequence has Lucia playing wheelman in a car chase as Jason shoots out the window; another has the pair fighting off enemies invading a millionaire's party, Jason shooting armed foes upstairs while Lucia has to use her fists down below, constantly trading off. Crucially, when apart, it feels a bit wrong – these two characters operate as a pair, and that's constantly felt in the gameplay design.

7. The Wanted system finally gets a detailed overhaul

Yeah, I love the arcade-like-rush of wreaking havoc and trying to survive maximum Wanted as much as the next person. But, with how detailed GTA worlds feel now, the system has started to feel a bit simplistic, creating some dissonance. That all changes in GTA 6, which is keeping the thrill of being Wanted while also adding more nuance to how it feels to escape, evade, and, ultimately, be profiled by Leonida state's boys in blue.

You'll need more than a quick spray paint on your car to throw off the cops. The six-star Wanted system escalates based on what you do, and how you make your escape, with the police force being able to track your face, clothes, and car as they hunt you down. In the gameplay showcase, we see Lucia have to torch a ride before swapping to a van, then carefully move through the city to avoid the still active sirens and Wanted meter (which turns from white to red). It's the kind of detail we saw in GTA 5's heists, now seemingly transitioned into a reactive system across the world. Even outside of being Wanted, every crime you commit will end up building up Jason and Lucia's criminal profile that defines their modus operandi – though there are still secrets around how this element will work.

6. Role-playing decisions affect your physique and well-being

GTA 6's RPG-style simulation elements pull from the promises of GTA: San Andreas and Red Dead Redemption 2, but with more nuance – like the aforementioned criminal profiles. Jason and Lucia will be able to get up to a mind-boggling number of activities across Leonida and Vice City, many of which will directly affect their physique, and potentially even their mood with one another. In one gameplay clip, we see the pair connected with a heart, but with angry emoji underneath them – a couple's spat, perhaps? – as Lucia basejumps and Jason shares a cold beer with the boys.

There's a physical element to this. Jason smoking cigars or munching on potato chips can have consequences, with it confirmed you will be able to get a little chubby (I've tested this in real life and it works). Likewise, we see Lucia lifting weights at a gym, and then beating the stuffing out of people on the street with just her fists. Another sequence playing as Jason allows us to press a button to hold hands with Lucia. Let's stay on her good side, maybe.

5. Detailed animations aren't just for show, but affect violence and thievery

Early in the extended look gameplay trailer I see Jason sling a bag of drugs over his shoulder as he and Lucia end up in the middle of a brutal police raid on a drug lab. It's a gorgeous animation that appears to happen in real-time, him slickly slipping it on. We saw similar details in Red Dead Redemption 2. But, importantly, moments like this aren't just for show in GTA 6, they permeate the entire gameplay showcase in ways that are important to gameplay.

Jason's mission to deliver these goods isn't a one-off. Bags of loot are scattered through the gameplay clips we've seen. The presence of actual goods to steal existing physically in the world is key. We see one sequence where Lucia is carrying so much she must use a shotgun one-handed, with a fantastic reload animation to match. In another, Lucia draws a pistol but holds it behind her back as she enters a store she's about to rob to avoid drawing alarm. Then, running out, with bags in tow, she leaps onto Jason's motorbike for the pair to make their escape. I love how this level of detail isn't just Rockstar Games showing off, but seems integral to play.

4. Extra layers to vehicle security makes hotwiring more nuanced

There's an odd moment in the GTA 6 gameplay showcase where Jason uses a slim jim to open a car window with a short QTE in order to successfully steal it. GTA fans like myself have suddenly realized how long we've taken the single-press car theft of earlier entries for granted. I have some reservations about this change, but I have to admit the more detailed security presents some interesting mechanical wrinkles that might be a lot of fun to play around with, making the streets of Leonida more immersive. After all, in the clip, Jason can still choose to smash the window if he chooses, so in some cases it may be a risk/reward choice depending on how brazen you can afford to be.

In GTA 6, Jason and Lucia will need to acquire specific tools in order to get into cars with different types of security. Nabbing an unsecured car will still be easy, but being forced to consider your next move when looking to quickly grab some wheels adds a brief tactical edge that could end up being more engaging than not having to think about it. The pair will have to make do with the tools they have when small-time, making the journey to bigger jobs with bigger scores something you actually feel while playing.

3. Car chases feel faster, dangerous, and crucially more grounded than ever

When behind the wheel, as well, I think I've taken GTA's car chases for granted in earlier games. While I can't say for sure until I play for myself, the driving model looks to be seriously improved from the last game even when cruising. And, when a car chase kicks off, either being hunted by the police or rival criminals, the tight camera really conveys a sense of speed. Whether driving yourself, or leaning out of the car to pop shots at pursuers, there's an electric sense of energy while the scale remains believable. Streets seem narrower and more real, so you'll need to actually be a solid wheelman if you want that responsibility.

Beyond criminal acts, we've gotten a glimpse at plenty of racing side-activities that seems to be a solid excuse to spotlight Rockstar Game's improvements in vehicle handling, as well as more leisurely pursuits like gliding through swamps on a boat. Moving through Leonida promises to be a serious treat.

2. Jason and Lucia's slick combat is a huge upgrade

Both gunplay and melee seem to be massively improved in GTA 6, much like its driving model. While both Jason and Lucia can do either, the gameplay showcase so far seems to position Jason as the gun expert with Lucia more of a bruiser. Whether these are specializations just for the showcase or something you can customize remains to be seen, but with how detailed roleplay aspects seem to be I wouldn't be surprised if that remains in your hands.

During a shootout in a dark office building at night, Jason takes cover in the shadows as he slickly pops out to deliver headshots (with killcams, naturally). Like in Max Payne 3, Red Dead Redemption, or Michael in GTA 5, he can slow time temporarily to aim focus shots – with the addition of highlighting enemy vulnerability points with red and yellow overlays. Lucia, meanwhile, stabs a man in the eye with her high heels in a QTE, but we also see her pumping iron at a gym and then fistfighting enemies, so she can handle herself well enough when not having to cover Jason with guns of her own.

1. Leonida is absolutely massive, and it can just as deadly as Jason and Lucia

Rockstar Games sandbox open world is big. Who would have guessed? But, I don't think I was prepared for both the sheer scale and density we've seen of GTA 6's Leonida so far. This is already looking so much bigger than GTA 5's Los Santos, and makes GTA: Vice City feel tiny in comparison (which is the last time we visited the Florida-inspired state). GTA 6's map is three times bigger than Red Dead Redemption 2's. A massive amount of side-activities reward exploration – kayaking, basketball, diving, clubbing, and way more (we counted 17 distinct activities in the gameplay showcase alone).

While Jason and Lucia seem more than capable of handling their journey through Leonida's criminal underbelly, they're far from overpowered – this is a world that can bite back. Outside of the police, robbing stores and gas stations will see citizens take the law into their own hands, and another sequence has the pair confronted by an angry woman with hammers (who also intrigued in the game's very first reveal). There's every chance this world could chew you up and spit you out, which makes the criminal fantasy all the more tantalizing to meet and master.

Our GTA 6 guide details everything you need to know about the story, gameplay, and world so far! Or, check out our best GTA games list for what to play while you wait!

The long, sometimes exhilarating, often exhausting road to GTA 6 has given us more twists and turns than the crime series' most memorable mission scripts. Now, just under three months from launch, it's finally within touching distance. We've now finally seen the bumper GTA 6 extended look showcase on Netflix. And we can now finally temper the omnipresent background noise and fix our gaze on November 19.

At least a little bit. Blocking out the external rabble, of course, has been a mission unto itself for literal years now. But if we take everything shown off during the 26-and-a-half-minute gameplay demonstration in isolation, powering through the next several weeks will be its own reward.

A sight to behold

Because, quite simply, GTA 6 in practice looks excellent. As I write this, in the immediate aftermath of one single watch-through of the larger-than-life mix of free-flowing gameplay, seamlessly transitioned cutscenes and staged set-pieces all captured on PS5, I'm fully aware I haven't taken everything in. Like you, I'll rewatch, again and again (on Netflix and latterly YouTube) and will then leave the subsequent, and inevitably enthralling, Easter egg hunt to the intrepid internet sleuths whose weird, wonderful and ever-meticulous discoveries will forever inspire. What I'll attempt to do right now is instead place this moment in time.

GTA 6 is huge. It's huge in spirit, in character and in detail; assertions that can now all be confidently made following a showcase that encompasses a botched drug deal, a post-bank robbery police chase and a millionaire's brutally ambushed party. My notes during these breakneck segments include: 'distinguishable arm hair', 'lifelike cellulite', 'brows slick with sweat', 'so many characters on screen' – scrawled shorthand that underlines how credible everything on show really is.

Between those set-pieces, flashes of domestic life outline thoughtful everyday exchanges between dual protagonists Lucia and Jason, and, better still, hint at just how big this world is.

There's a moment during the Extended Look where the pair leave their apartment, hop into a banged up-looking convertible and pull out of a car park into a busy thoroughfare. In that moment, Depeche Mode's 'People Are People' plays from the radio as the car's canvas roof retracts, and while it's not quite as iconic Tommy Vercetti revving up a scooter to the sound of 'Billy Jean' in the original Vice City, it's a stark reminder that we have a whole new Grand Theft Auto world with whole new possibilities to explore – for the first time in 13 years, no less.

This sense of scale and freedom is accentuated by snippets of Jason and Lucia shooting hoops, gliding through the Everglades, canoeing, swimming, tearing up nightclubs and rallying around Nascar circuits. Oh, and robbing a lot of commercial establishments at gunpoint. Switching characters prompts the familiar aerial zoom-in zoom-out system adopted by GTA 5 – and copied by the likes of Marvel's Spider-Man 2 – and duck-and-cover shootouts feel like GTA Online dialled up to 11. Which is, surely, the exact desired effect.

What I'm more enthralled by at this point, though, is the sophisticated interplay between the game's protagonists. Sure, this is but a snapshot of their relationship, but while GTA 5's trifecta of social class-spanning antiheroes are good fun, they're hardly what you'd describe as three-dimensional. GTA 4's Niko Bellic, in fact, was more well-rounded than Michael, Franklin, and Trevor, but I already want to learn more about Jason and Lucia as individuals and how they will operate as a team.

That longing for more will be my overarching feeling from hereon, but it's also one that's defined, and perhaps pervaded, GTA 6's path to this point in broader terms. I won't spend too much time addressing the most recent leaks but I do believe they're worth acknowledging in the wider context of the game's imminent release. Full disclosure: I was aware of them. I caught glimpses as they popped up on social media feeds and instant messaging chats over the last several days, but endeavored to by and large abstain knowing this Netflix offering was just around the corner.

I went into 'An Extended Look' relatively fresh, then, with wide eyes and an open mind. The latter, I can confirm, has since been assuredly blown. Because while it's been clear for some time the next venture of Rockstar's blockbuster open-world crime simulator series will be a generational tone-setter – something the leaks have inadvertently helped support – seeing it in motion, polished, pretty and, crucially, agonizingly close pre-release, is remarkable all the same. The leaks, then, are but another anecdote in what is surely one of the most intriguing game development stories in the history of video games, warts and all.

The recent leaks have been less than ideal. The source code leaks a few years back were less than ideal. News of the alleged union-busting practices behind the scenes on the road to release was less than ideal. But the very fact a video game gameplay preview has debuted on Netflix at all (albeit following on YouTube hours later) is a huge moment for video games.

Granted, this is a rich-in-resources series whose ads for previous online updates have dominated billboards in Times Square, and the 'coming soon' trailers that precede Marvel movies in cinema theatres, but this level of pre-release prestige is nevertheless worthy of admiration. These moments are transcendental, pushing video games firmly into the mainstream with a zeitgeist status that is, for me, up there with Fortnite's mid-pandemic Travis Scott concert, or going back a wee bit further, Lara Croft chugging Lucozade in British television adverts 30 years ago. The fact that my 76-year-old mother texted me 10 minutes after the showcase trailer dropped asking "have you seen the new GTA 6 on Netflix?" speaks volumes.

Love is a long, long road, crooned Tom Petty on the soundtrack of the first GTA 6 trailer at the very end of 2023. Now, closing in on one thousand days later with 281.4 million YouTube views in the bag since, the end of that road is now well within sight. How many times the latest GTA 6 Extended Look showcase will be viewed between now and November 19 remains to be seen, but enjoy this moment for everything it is: sometimes exhilarating, often exhausting; but also historic, both in Grand Theft Auto terms and the grand pantheon of video games more generally.

Our GTA 6 guide details everything you need to know about the story, gameplay, and world so far, while our Countdown to GTA 6 is packed with features covering the iconic series' past, present, and future!

The big Netflix preview of GTA 6 has come and gone, finally giving us a substantive look at the epic sandbox in motion. Among the various technical details provided by Rockstar, we now know the standard framerate of the epic release, at launch at the very least.

The footage shown, captured on the PlayStation 5 version, ran at 30fps, and Rockstar has since confirmed this will be how the game releases come November. GTA 6 will have this framerate on PS5 and Xbox Series X, and there likely won't be a specific performance mode to begin with.

Rob Nelson, co-studio head and head of development of Rockstar North, told Portuguese outlet Flow Games that further options may be added in the future. However, for the time being, the crime playground is 30fps.

Nothing was specified for the PlayStation 5 Pro, but from what's been said and shown, I wouldn't count on anything beyond what you'll be playing on the standard model and Xbox Series X. For the launch period, at the very least - more versatility will likely be added later, once Rockstar finally gets this thing out of its offices and into people's hands.

Though, it's worth remembering, frame-rate upgrades aren't generally a priority within the Scottish studio. Red Dead Redemption 2 doesn't have a 60fps upgrade, for instance, and GTA 5 only got it for the current generation, after the game had been out for literal years.

If it happens - and it's a big if - it probably won't be until the PS6 and new Xbox arrive. Yay for pushing you to buy new hardware in order to optimize your games! Look, after 13 years, let's just be glad the thing is coming out and functional.

GTA 6 wanted system goes up to 6 stars and lets police track your face, your clothes, and your car

Rockstar Games has reportedly shut down the idea that GTA 6 will feature microtransactions or use generative AI during its development.

On the Kinda Funny Gamecast, hosts Andy Cortez and Greg Miller share that they asked Rob Nelson – co-studio head at Rockstar North – whether there will be microtransactions in the game and whether generative AI was used during the development of GTA 6, with Nelson reportedly simply saying "no."

I have no doubts about the lack of generative AI used during development, but the lack of microtransactions is certainly interesting. It was revealed that GTA Online makes a staggering amount of almost $8 million per week, and that's undoubtedly thanks to Shark Card microtransactions for sale. It looks unlikely that GTA 6 Online will be available at launch, but this could imply that whatever the GTA 6 edition of GTA Online is could be a separate thing entirely.

We know for sure that GTA Online is on the way, thanks to court proceedings, but Rockstar has remained silent about what the GTA 6 edition of the Online mode will look like – not that it's been very talkative about the base game either, mind you. Although a later launch for an online mode isn't out of the ordinary for Rockstar, given that GTA 5 had a two-week wait before GTA Online launched, while Red Dead Redemption 2's Online mode launched in beta form a month later, with its full launch around a year and a half after launch.

I very much have my doubts we'll see a GTA 6 Online that doesn't feature microtransactions in some way, or a battle pass, or any other number of ways to monetize it for the next decade and a half. But at least we know it's not in the base game.

How long is GTA 6? About 80 hours, according to one Rockstar dev's playthrough.

If you've never been to the US, it might surprise you that the country isn't entirely made up of people in stars-and-stripes bikinis riding Harleys and twerking atop moving vehicles, alligators being fished from swimming pools, and grandmas dual-wielding sledgehammers. There's a lot of that stuff for sure, especially in Miami, Florida, which the GTA 6 setting Vice City is based on, but life in the country as a whole is a lot more nuanced and, frankly, less entertaining in general. That's why GTA is explicitly a satire, and a carefully considered one according to Rockstar North co-studio head Rob Nelson.

"I think there's always stuff to satirize," Nelson tells IGN following GTA 6's deep-dive from Netflix. "As long as humans are humans, other humans will figure out ways to satirize what we do."

The stereotypes you see on TV, in movies, and playing games absolutely do exist here in the US, but they're usually local to different parts of the country. You'll see a very different episode of South Park, for example, if Trey Parker and Matt Stone are satirizing Portland, Oregon, compared to if they're making fun of Stigler, Oklahoma. Rockstar is picky about the parts of American life it pokes fun at, not only because of the intensely divided political and social climate enveloping the country, but because development cycles outlast a lot of topics that would otherwise be fun to satirize.

"For us, because we work on such a long development cycle, we have to not jump on stuff and instead choose our angle of approach carefully and decide what things are going to be a bit more timeless," Nelson says. "We're not a TV show coming out every week or every month. We have to be careful that what we're choosing to satirize is not going to feel dated in a weird way.

"I think those broader things are OK to satirize, but very specific political issues or memes will date fast. Even the way our characters speak we think about it a lot, so that they're not using extremely contemporary slang. Even though our characters are a certain age, they need to feel somewhat timeless."

GTA 6's hand-crafted NPCs have over 600,000 animations compared to only 55,000 animations in GTA 5

The level of visual detail in GTA 6 is staggering already, but there's going to be even more going on when you start interacting with all the NPC pedestrians that fill the world.

According to The New York Times, Rockstar said GTA 6 has well over 600,000 NPC animations compared to GTA 5's 55,000 and Red Dead Redemption 2's 300,000.

Judging from the recent GTA 6 extended look on Netflix, this will mean everyone you meet will move and react in different ways unique to them. And the only way Rockstar was able to pull this off was by dedicating an entire office in LA just to NPCs.

The goal was to make the world feel more bespoke and realistic. You won't be driving past crowds that mimic the same behavior as the people chilling on the beach. Everyone will have their own personality that will direct what they do—which might even include firing back at you if you threaten them.

Rockstar gave an example of an NPC dropping an object and immediately ignoring it in GTA 5. In GTA 6, NPCs will remember that kind of stuff because they're all hand-crafted rather than procedurally generated.

Co-studio head at Rockstar North Aaron Garbut explained how NPCs you encounter will materially exist in the world. "Every room in the game, somebody thought about this," he said. "Who's sitting where, what they're drinking, the marks that are left on the table. The pictures on the wall will have people that are in that room, with their tattoos on their arms and their family behind them. The whole thing has been made, and build, and photographed, and placed in this random room in a random building in a huge city, in a world."

All of this has me eager to pull an AnyAustin and follow NPCs around when the full game is out in November. I'm sure the main story will have its thrills, but I need to know what life is like in Leonida as the people who actually live there, not some shmuck like me who just showed up to cause some chaos.

The GTA 6 map is 3 times bigger than Red Dead Redemption 2's

GTA 6 aims to offer you plenty of freedom in getting up to various criminal shenanigans, but it's also built to tell a grounded story about two – presumably – sympathetic figures in Jason and Lucia. It seems Rockstar plans to address that the same way it did in Red Dead Redemption 2, as that game's honor system has evolved into GTA 6's criminal profile.

"This is a story about a couple on the run. We have tried to make the systems and the design support our narrative when and wherever possible," Rockstar North co-studio head Rob Nelson tells IGN. "Meaning, if you hit and run, commit a crime and run, get into trouble and move on before the cops get there, and you don’t start shooting people, don't start escalating – which you absolutely can do if you want to – but if you don't, you're generally going to be fine."

In Red Dead Redemption 2, the honor system tracks all kinds of minor actions, from doing chores around camp to killing animals without skinning them, and those actions slowly add up to a score that determines your overall moral alignment. The honor score affects things like shop discounts, but it can also give you different cutscenes and bits of dialog in key parts of the story.

Rockstar hasn't spelled out what the consequences will be for managing your criminal profile in GTA 6 one way or another – I imagine it's trying to preserve that as a surprise for when the game actually launches. But it sounds like, if you choose to constantly escalate the violence, the game will start pushing back.

"If you're doing things on mission that you are required to do – or you’re robbing places, or somebody comes and messes with you and you have to deal with them by smacking them down or whatever – that’s all fair game," Nelson says. "It's when you go beyond what is necessary on a consistent basis, or you do completely unnecessary stuff consistently, that you may start to sway your criminal profile in a certain direction."

That plays into an effort to ensure you're not as "overpowered" in GTA 6 as in previous games. "You are still powerful and capable," Nelson says, "but you are not the only one capable of violence or the only one with weapons or the only crazy person out there. It makes the world far more unpredictable and interesting."

Check out everything you might've missed from the GTA 6 extended look.

Anyone who knows anything about anything knows GTA 6 is going to be a huge game. It's likely the most expensive video game ever made and is expected to be the biggest launch in entertainment history, but until now it wasn't known exactly how big it is, in terms of map size. Well, we have a rough estimate now, and it's even more expansive than anyone could have predicted.

Accompanying today's GTA 6 extended look from Netflix is a write-up from the New York Times (paywalled) in which, for the first time, Rockstar gives a pretty definitive confirmation of the game's map size: it's three times bigger than the one in Red Dead Redemption 2, folks.

If you've played Red Dead Redemption 2 for any length of time, you'll know its map feels nearly limitless and surprisingly dense for its size. To imagine something three times that size, and presumably with Rockstar's level of attention to detail, is genuinely daunting.

Of course, there are much bigger video game maps that exist already if we're talking pure square mileage – No Man's Sky and The Elder Scrolls 2: Daggerfall come to mind immediately – but they're built by procedural generation with tons of empty space in between major hubs, whereas GTA 6's map, taking place in a satirized and fictional version of Miami, Florida, looks incredibly dense and packed with things to do and systems to interact with.

Rockstar North co-studio head Rob Nelson has said the game feels like "a whole other world" with "a whole lot of stuff that you discover emergently that we're not necessarily directing you to through objectives or blips or icons on a map as well," adding that, "If you take a bit of time and explore you will be rewarded – a lot."

GTA 6 sounds like it's going to consume me, frankly, because I'm the type of open-world game enjoyer who needs to explore every nook and cranny to feel like I'm really getting my money's worth, so to say.

That said, Nelson's playthrough of the main campaign took him about 80 hours, which isn't too bad. It sounds like if you stick to the critical path you can beat the game in a somewhat reasonable amount of time, at least when we're talking about open-world games.

Rockstar considered giving GTA 6 four protagonists before deciding it would suck: "We worried about diluting the amount of player time with each"

You probably could've guessed this part: GTA 6 will bring back the series' wanted system. You'll still build up stars as police try to take you down ever more aggressively, but Rockstar's making some notable tweaks to the system in order to encourage players to play in different ways.

"The wanted system in GTA 6 requires that someone witness the crime, or an alarm needs to be set off for it to be reported to the law," Rockstar North co-studio head Rob Nelson tells IGN. "One star is not going to be too difficult to get away from. You can see with these little icons on-screen, the police know what we're driving, so we should just jump out of the vehicle. They also know we're a couple. You could split up, and that will also help lower the police’s perception of you."

We see this demonstrated in the GTA 6 extended look, where a story mission has Jason and Lucia driving a client away from a group of very persistent cops. Here, we see that the wanted level can go up to six stars – GTA 5 had previously been capped at five stars.

Just below that, we see four icons representing how much the police recognize about Jason and Lucia: their clothes, their faces, their car, and the fact that they're together. Later in the mission, they break direct contact with the cops, turning four white wanted stars into four red ones, presumably indicating that the police are still hunting you but are not in active pursuit. They swap vehicles, removing the car icon from the screen, and watch a cop car that doesn't recognize the new vehicle roll right on by.

"We put a lot of work into how you can navigate the world, trying to make everything as smooth as possible to really encourage this type of gameplay where you are running and getting out of the car, jumping and climbing fences," Nelson says. "If you get three stars in the city, it can sometimes be challenging to get away in a vehicle, unless it's a very fast vehicle or a sports bike. Your best option is usually to do this – get off the streets and get on foot into the alleys."

How long is GTA 6? About 80 hours, according to one Rockstar dev's playthrough.

Netflix held up surprisingly well when the GTA 6 Extended Look dropped earlier today. Twitch, however, took a nosedive about an hour after, robbing everyone of the frame-by-frame analysis from their favorite streamers.

Twitch didn't specify what exactly caused the issues, but acknowledged them in a post on X: "We are aware of issues impacting several areas of our site. Our teams are working to resolve these."

Instead of a page full of stream thumbnails, the Twitch homepage threw up an error saying something went wrong. You could view the Browse page to look through all the categories, but individual streams had permanent black screens.

Chat continued to work, which made the whole thing extra bizarre as people who presumably already had the stream loaded before the outage talked amongst each other like nothing happened.

Around 30 minutes after everything crashed, Twitch pages started to intermittently load again despite the status page reporting major outages for many of the main systems, including web, chat, and video. Not every steam immediately came back up though, and I imagine things will be spotty for the next hour or so as everything gets completely resolved.

I'm sure it wasn't pleasant for anyone trying to get a peek at the GTA 6 Extended Look without a Netflix subscription. Even though Rockstar plans to host it on its YouTube channel later today, the only way to see the gameplay was to watch someone else watch it or scour the internet for someone brave enough to upload the entire thing.

Given that GTA 6 is the topic of the most popular streams on Twitch today, Amazon is probably not particularly happy that it stumbled today of all days. I'll be curious to see how it holds up when GTA 6 is out in the wild and everyone and their mother will want to hit the go live button to share the experience.

How long is GTA 6? About 80 hours, according to one Rockstar dev's playthrough

Since its last Grand Theft Auto game featured three playable protagonists, Rockstar wondered if its next one should offer the same, or better – four playable protagonists. But the developer seems to have quickly decided that would be an awful fate for GTA 6.

Co-studio head Rob Nelson explains to IGN, "After doing GTA 5, we talked about different ideas of – do we do more characters? How do we follow up three characters? Is it four characters now? But we worried about diluting the amount of player time with each and therefore player connection with those characters."

Finally, "we decided to step in this direction of two characters in a relationship," says Nelson. The GTA 6 extended look that premiered on Netflix gave us a better understanding of that relationship, the sometimes tense partnership between criminals Lucia and Jason – who are impossible to break up, even if you try. The two are soulmates in breaking the law... though, depending on how you play, they may not be perfectly suited to each other in other parts of life.

It depends on how much you engage with GTA 6's romance, which Rockstar seems eager for players to experience. Nelson says, "Chemistry is a notoriously hard thing to do in any sort of entertainment. Either the characters and the actors that embody them have it – or they don't. Everyone involved worked at that pretty hard. I think we've got it.

"I think we've got enough reaction within our team internally to where [Lucia and Jason] feel great as individuals and together," the studio lead says.

That last point is important – there's time in GTA 6 for getting to know both Lucia and Jason as people, not only as a romantic unit. With as many as four protagonists, you'd be juggling an unforgiving social calendar.

Nelson says, "As the narrative unfolds, we're quite conscious to try and make sure that players have enough time with each character." Good thing Lucia and Jason aren't part of a throuple.

Like Red Dead Redemption 2, GTA 6 is "a whole other world" where "there's a whole lot of stuff that you discover emergently."

A playthrough of GTA 6 could last you around 80 hours, if one Rockstar developer's fairly recent playthrough is any indication

Rockstar North co-studio head Rob Nelson spoke to the New York Times about the making of GTA 6. One key detail is casually slipped into the report: Nelson played through GTA 6 in February 2026, and it took him 80 hours.

Nelson's run evidently covered the main story and "some optional goals with narrative ramifications," the New York Times explains. Focusing more on side content would surely grow that playtime considerably, with Rockstar promising greater depth and detail than any of its previous games.

Staggeringly, Rockstar says GTA 6's map is three times larger than Red Dead Redemption 2, already regarded as one of the most ambitious open-world games of all time.

"I hope that there will be people that want to get up, have a cup of coffee, shower, get dressed, go out for a little exercise," Nelson says, digging into the activities and routines available to protagonists Jason and Lucia.

"Here I am eating an apple, opening the fridge and drinking a smoothie," he says. "So this will increase my health temporarily for a while, allowing people to sort of role-play.”

If you do get invested in this personalization and micro behaviors, GTA 6 may well last you hundreds of hours at base, before even getting into post-launch updates and online content. We can only speculate on the true depth of the game, but the GTA 6 extended look live reveal and the ensuing information salvo – like NPC interactions also going considerably further than Red Dead Redemption 2 – points to a considerably richer game.

GTA 6 players won't be as "overpowered" as previous games: "You are not the only one capable of violence."

GTA 6 finally got its big (and official) extended look on Netflix today, giving fans their most indulgent preview yet of Rockstar's upcoming open-world behemoth. A bunch of different locations, gameplay systems, and characters were showcased, previewing what's sure to be a sprawling adventure jam-packed with unintended interactions, moving the benchmark for open world interactivity even further than what Red Dead Redemption 2 achieved back in 2018.

According to Rockstar North co-studio head Rob Nelson, you'd do well to explore every inch of GTA 6's huge map. "There is a whole other world in Red Dead Redemption 2, yes. GTA 6 is very much like that," Nelson tells IGN. "There's a whole lot of stuff that you discover emergently that we're not necessarily directing you to through objectives or blips or icons on a map as well. If you take a bit of time and explore you will be rewarded – a lot.

"It's a big map, a very big map."

It being the most expensive game ever made, GTA 6 is expected to push boundaries in pretty much every way, from emergent gameplay to raw visuals to systems interactivity. In fact, Nelson says it's so expansive that no one at Rockstar has yet to really experience the whole thing, less than three months to launch. "The game is so big, I don't know that there's anybody on the team that knows all of it."

GTA 6 launches on PS5 and Xbox Series X on November 19.

Rockstar lead says GTA 6 takes NPC interactions "much further" than Red Dead Redemption 2, and its system is "returning and evolved"