The clipped-wing Dodo aeroplane, sporadically stealable from the rear runway of Francis International Airport, neatly embodies the Rockstar Games of 2001. Although Grand Theft Auto 3 will always be able to stand on its own merits as an uncommonly bleak videogame nasty that also shaped the whole sandbox crime genre, even in its day it felt somehow incomplete, as if its creator was reaching for something just beyond its grasp. Similarly, the Dodo can soar dozens of feet off the ground, but it quickly and inevitably reaches the limit of its engine power and slumps back down to earth. There is a sense of a living, reactive city in GTA 3, but at the same time it feels limited, locked off, as though you're never given full access to the dynamic urban reality it implies. On the scant few occasions that you can enter one of Liberty City's buildings, for example, there isn't anyone or anything in there, and you reach the end of the game with a sense that there is much more in Rockstar's crime series that remains to be explored.

In GTA: Vice City, released a mere 13 months after GTA 3, you are not constrained to the Dodo. From the seat of a helicopter, a seaplane or a fully outfitted Apache attack chopper, you can fly high and free. In just over a year, Rockstar's ability to build sprawling and explorable 3D cities appears to have come on leaps and bounds.

There are other telling mechanical additions. Expanding on the comparatively austere GTA 3, in Vice City you can ride motorbikes, buy property, change your clothes, and discover unmarked ambient side missions such as robbing a pharmacy or beating up gang members to earn the 'good citizen' cash bonus.

Rockstar's sunkissed, heat-vapour-saturated pastel caricature of Miami is a sight to behold, but, more importantly, you can explore its interiors too. Between the Malibu Club, the Pole Position, the shopping malls and the Pizza Stack restaurants – not to mention the various hotels, apartments and places of business that you acquire as you progress through the main story – this aptly named metropolis of iniquity is packed with places to go, NPCs to meet, and small but immersion-enhancing interactions. Today, we take all of this for granted. Customisable characters, optional sidequests and small, tertiary mechanics that help to boost verisimilitude have come to be regarded as the mere rudiments of the open-world genre. But way back in 2002 – especially on a console, and outside of the fantasy-RPG realm – a game where this amount of effort was put into pure worldbuilding, and where you could have a perfectly rewarding time simply basking in the atmosphere, still felt exceptional.

Nevertheless, two and a half decades on, some of the changes and enhancements made between GTA 3 and Vice City might sound superficial, or even faintly ridiculous. In the same way that you might chuckle at the size of the earliest mobile phones or recall with a certain irony the 'magic' of wireless Internet, it's funny to imagine a world where the ability to crouch in a Grand Theft Auto game, or to jump out of a moving car if it was on fire, felt like a novelty. Vice City emerged in an era when the conventions of the 3D open-world game – especially the 3D open-world crime game – were still far from codified, when the mechanical language of the subgenre was unfinished. Seen from that perspective, Rockstar's vision for the game starts to feel cavalier, like it's trying to tap X repeatedly to sprint before it can walk. There's no swimming, climbing walls or moving while crouching in Vice City, but there are celebrity voiceovers, a fully licensed soundtrack, and a recognisable representation of the mansion (and climactic shootout) from Scarface.

You might get the sense that presentation was more important to 2002 Rockstar than pragmatism, as though the studio was channelling its creative energy towards superficial goals (aping big-budget movies; showing off a pseudo-cinematic production quality) in lieu of honing or pushing the playing experience. Certainly, the driving, the shooting and the level designs that are supposed to form the game's centre remain largely unchanged from GTA 3. Or you could even go back to Grand Theft Auto, from 1997; the tasks that you receive in the top-down original version of Liberty City almost always involve driving somewhere, killing a bunch of people, picking something up and driving back, and that's also what you do for most of your time in Vice City. It looks gorgeous, and there's plenty to see and explore, but the game can be seen more as an incremental advance than a full-bodied sequel – understandable when you consider that it started life as a GTA 3 add-on.

However, the magic of Vice City – and of videogames in general – lies in more than mechanics, mission design or any other tangibles of the form. Even though Vice City may have fundamentally the same structure and systems as GTA 3, True Crime, Mafia and many comparable crime capers that emerged during the '00s, it nevertheless feels like the standout because of its aesthetic approach. The stinking, smoky, weather-beaten concrete brutalism of Liberty City – and the moral squalor that it symbolises – is replaced wholesale with sunshine, vibrancy and an airier, freer, much more feel-good tone.

Prior to Vice City, the sensory thrills of GTA had been rooted largely in depravity, the transgressive excitement that comes from simulating actions and behaviours that are too dark, immoral and illegal for you ever to consider in reality. They're by no means fully grown up, but in Vice City, Rockstar's virtual fantasies appear more mature. In addition to killing cops with rocket launchers, flinging cars off of ramps and driving a tank through traffic, you're encouraged, surreptitiously or otherwise, towards more plausible and contemplative pleasures. When you reminisce about Vice City today, alongside all the ultraviolence and automotive pyrotechnics, you're also likely to fondly recall the first time you went inside the Malibu Club, or the party mission aboard Colonel Cortez's yacht, or cruising down Ocean Beach in a convertible Stinger while listening to Broken Wings. With GTA 3, Rockstar succeeded in creating a 3D open playground; with Vice City, it started to develop and more finely shape what would eventually become its trademark – a rounded, reactive, and much more enveloping open world.

Vice City's landscape is more than a racing track, and you're invited to regard its citizenry as more than digital toys for you to smash up in variously creative ways. But while it is a broader and deeper game than GTA 3 – and also represents a crucial development in the history of open-world maps, and how they've become progressively larger – it is still very carefully contained. There are exceptions, but in the latter half of the game in particular, when you're set loose to purchase assets and front companies, the majority of the side missions feel as if they are still connected to the central spine of the narrative. It's up to you which businesses you want to buy and which of their accompanying mission chains you want to follow, but all of them are ultimately connected to Tommy Vercetti's core goal of constructing his criminal empire. Even today, this kind of design feels like a rarity. If there is a consistent problem with sandbox and open-world games, it's that they offer too much in the way of meaningless 'content', expecting you to be enthralled by completing banal sidequests in the name of sheer running time. But in Vice City – for the most part, at least – you have a reasonable understanding of why your character is doing the things he's doing. The effect is incomplete, and naturally primitive compared to much later games such as Cyberpunk 2077, but in Vice City you can see that Rockstar is trying to unify the free-flowing, player-driven open world with cogent, coherent storytelling.

This effort – to make the game feel simultaneously large and comprehensible, reactive to you as a player but nonetheless directed and choreographed by the designers, so that there is dramatic thrust behind everything you do – is ultimately reflected in the map itself, every part of which has its own identifying characteristic: the Ammu-Nation and helipad in Downtown, the multi-storey car park and hotels in Ocean Beach, the airport and the rocket-launcher pickup near Little Havana.

Rather than simply being big, Rockstar's interpretation of Miami is dense. Whether interactive or purely visual, each street contains a point of interest, and the missions are designed so that you're bound to visit every district. Again, it makes the game feel remarkably modern. If the open worlds of today struggle with one particular problem – that there's a lot more map than there are engaging or worthwhile things to do on it – Rockstar, as early as 2002, seems to have appreciated the value of details and meaningful minutiae over size.

Twenty-four years ago, Vice City's appeal might have laid in its new vehicles, its encompassing '80s soundtrack and its enormous cast of celebrity voices. One of the reasons we fell in love with it was because it felt 'bigger' than GTA 3, and perhaps any other game of the era. In hindsight, though, and in the context of more than two decades of sandbox and open-world giants, it's a pleasure to play because of how focused and contained it feels, and how for each inch of the experience there is the detectable authorial hand of its creator steering us along.

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!

This isn't a drill – Rockstar has shared some brand new GTA 6 footage, but it's probably not in the place you'd expect. The latest gameplay clip was showcased in the latest episode of South Park, and it's dog shit.

No, really. Around 20 seconds of footage begins with a dog pooping on the ground before a pedestrian picks it up. Enter protagonist Jason, who then throws something at the pedestrian, picks up the dog poop himself, and hits them around the face with it as they react in horror. It's not the feature I was anticipating or hoping for out of GTA 6, if I'm being honest, but it's very funny. Once again, Rockstar proves that no expense has been spared when it comes to the details in its upcoming blockbuster, huh?

Not only is this genuine footage – as confirmed by the "special thanks" to Rockstar Games in the episode's credits – but there's a neat nod to GTA 5's old marketing that veteran fans might recognize, too.

The woman excitedly narrating the footage in the episode – "You can throw things at the person with dog poop, and if they choose to fight back, you can pick up the dog poop and actually attack them with the dog poop," she gushes – was voiced by Tish Hicks. Hicks also narrated the GTA 5 Official Gameplay Video back in July 2013, so this isn't her first rodeo with Grand Theft Auto marketing, and the fact that she's been involved is genuinely really cool.

It's a big day for GTA 6 news – today also saw the publication of Edge magazine's big GTA 6 cover feature, which you can read here. We've learned plenty from it – Rockstar promises an RPG experience so deep that "you can have your life in the game," and reveals that the game "felt too fast" when the devs tried to run it like GTA 5 because of how much visual performance has improved in the last 13 years.

600,000 animations are the appetizer: Rockstar gave GTA 6 NPCs meticulous personality traits to control how they react to you, and now I get why we've been waiting 13 years.

GTA 6 will offer more of an RPG experience than any other game in the series, but Rockstar admits you don't want players to "reject" systems because there are too many of them.

Speaking with Edge, head of development Aaron Garbutt explains, "You can really make the game what you want it to be at the time, whether that's more of a roleplay experience where you're buying cigarettes and beer in the shop and going on the train for the day, or going to a club. You can have your life in the game."

But according to Rob Nelson, another head of development, there's a balance to strike: "You don't want to feel like you're foisting things on the player and then have them reject those things. It's more about trying to let people lean into the way they want to play."

He explains that Rockstar isn't aiming to simply add more and more activities to the player's roster as the game goes on, but to allow them to find their favorites and settle into a rhythm around that.

That even extends to spending a day not behind the wheel of a car, but in the embrace of Vice City's public transit system. Another lead dev, Phil Hooker, says that making sure the buses run on time and to the right place is a personal obsession, so much so that in the middle of playtesting he'll jump on a bus instead of driving to his next location, just to check that they work: "I've memorized all of the routes."

It sounds as though you'll really be able to delve into some deep RPG systems, so much so that you might go for hours without having to engage with the roleplaying systems that drive the game's core mechanics, like the Wanted system. The number of hours that seem like they could be lost to side content is a somewhat daunting prospect, given how substantial the main game is likely to be, but I suppose that, given that people are still out here investing time in GTA 5, perhaps that's no great surprise.

GTA 6 actors get advice from Grand Theft Auto veterans: "Listen to Rockstar" and "get ready".

In the process of tweaking GTA 6's open world to make it feel believable, Rockstar implemented GTA 5's timings only to find that "everything felt too fast" and that a change was needed to stick the landing.

That comes from a new interview featured in Edge magazine – on sale now, by the way – where several lead developers on the upcoming Grand Theft Auto game share how it all finally came together.

The earliest days of GTA 6 were more about place than plot. With most of Rockstar still working on Red Dead Redemption 2, the initial work on the project involved a small group traveling to Miami to get a better feel of what a return to Vice City would entail. While GTA 6's Bonnie-and-Clyde-style story would eventually come into focus, it wouldn't be before Rockstar applied lessons learned from building RDR2 to GTA 6.

Many of the lessons manifested in minor details that collectively paint a bigger picture that looks unlike GTA 5. While the roads of Los Santos are intentionally wider to make driving and turning easier, the roads of Vice City are narrower, as Rockstar North boss Rob Nelson wanted "a more believable size." The duration of day and night is also longer, giving you a greater window to get up to mischief under cover of night, if you so please.

The changes to GTA 6 compared to GTA 5 were also brought about by improvements in visual performance. For example, Rockstar tested GTA 6 using GTA 5's timings and found that "everything felt too fast" for a world that boasts the level of fidelity that Vice City can reach. The citizens who call Vice City home were equally problematic.

"As the resolution of the worlds goes up, I think there are things you can't get away with in the same way," Nelson explains. "If you want a pedestrian population to behave believably, and you can stand in front of them and produce an automatic shotgun out of nowhere and they don't react, then that doesn't work. That barely held in GTA 5, where you could literally produce one of those weapons in front of somebody and they would not react unless you aimed it at them. Only then would they run. To me, that was already showing its age in GTA 5 at that level of resolution."

Making GTA 6 was, then, equal parts evolving what worked in Red Dead Redemption 2 and being mindful of what's changed in the 13 years between GTA 5 and 6. A higher level of performance means that the ceiling has been raised, but as Rockstar has learned over the years, the floor has also been raised. GTA 6 is due to release on November 19.

Check out our Countdown to GTA 6 here as we explore the Rockstar games that got us here

GTA 6 is so detailed that Rockstar Games has created around 600,000 animations solely for the game's NPCs, ensuring that they feel more individual.

In a new interview with Edge magazine for issue 430, it's revealed that Rockstar assembled a full team in Los Angeles tasked with bringing GTA 6's NPCs to life in a way that'd make them feel more like real people with more unique characteristics, instead of solely relying on procedural systems to make crowds that simply serve to fill an empty space.

After art directing each one, around 600,000 animations were created, which is wild to think about – it sounds like the average player could be playing for years and not see all of them. Leonida's pedestrians all have personality traits, too, with factors such as their temperament, the player's behavior towards them, and their own levels of aggression influencing how they respond to different situations.

Rob Nelson, co-studio head at Rockstar North, says the process of creating all these NPCs involved asking: "Who’s going to be aggressive? How many people are going to go for a weapon? How many are going to test me?"

Over half a million NPC animations is an almost unfathomable level of detail, though – it's stuff like that that makes it understandable why there's been a 13-year gap between GTA 6 and GTA 5. It also helps explain its apparently enormous file size – according to PlayStation Store sleuth PlayStation Game Size on Twitter, Rockstar's behemoth clocks in at a whopping 210GB. You might want to start clearing some space now before we get to launch day.

Not even Rockstar heads know everything that's in GTA 6 because devs will just add stuff – which is also how Red Dead Redemption 2 got its absurd horse testicle physics.

My favorite part of every Grand Theft Auto game is discovering Rockstar's carefully curated music selection, and from what we've heard so far the GTA 6 soundtrack is fully packed with earworms. I'm a classic rock guy, and ever since the extended look dropped I've had Cliff Richard's Devil Woman playing on repeat. Despite the new wave of attention pointed at his music, however, Richard himself apparently still doesn't know what GTA 6 actually is.

"I was told this happened!" Richard recently told The Times (via IGN). "My nephew, who has two boys, said they came screaming to him, 'Dad, it’s Uncle Cliff!' They didn’t realise I could sing like that. The show is a game show, isn’t it, really? One of the biggest on TV?"

Richard was an influential figure in the early days of British rock and roll, and he's remained an active artist well into the '20s, though his popularity never reached the same global heights that it did in the UK. Still, getting a prominent spot in what's likely to be the biggest video game release of all time does wonders in reaching a new generation of fans, and Richard can appreciate that part of it, at least.

"People will no longer just say, 'Oh, Cliff Richard is from the past,'" he adds. "Because I am, but that past is what makes everything what it is today." Past or present, Devil Woman remains an absolute banger.

GTA 6 actors get advice from Grand Theft Auto veterans: "Listen to Rockstar" and "get ready"

The GTA 6 release is quickly approaching, and it's set to be one of the biggest video game releases of all time – so big, in fact, that analysts say nearly one in three gamers is looking to indulge in Rockstar's long-awaited sixth Grand Theft Auto entry.

That's a hefty figure… one that comes straight from global market research and consumer behavior advisor Circana, along with commentary from veteran analyst and company lead Mat Piscatella.

To be more precise, it's 29% – a good 29% of gamers in the United States, both on console and PC, intend to purchase GTA 6. This number marks Rockstar's game as the most-ever anticipated video game release in Circana's tracking history.

"Grand Theft Auto 6 represents a rare cultural and commercial moment for the video game industry," Piscatella writes. "Players have been waiting 13 years for a sequel to Grand Theft Auto 5, and demand is expected to extend beyond software sales to include consoles, accessories, and gaming subscriptions as consumers prepare for launch."

It's wild to think about, really. GTA 6 won't just sell a plethora of game copies, either. It'll also sell consoles.

"Many consumers who have yet to upgrade to a current-generation console may choose to purchase a PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series specifically to play the title," as Piscatella notes – and this applies to folks who otherwise game on PC, too, as Rockstar won't be releasing GTA 6 on computer storefronts just yet.

Put simply, it'll spur a whole lot of buying and consuming, both in the software and hardware department.

"As retailers prepare for Black Friday and holiday season demand, Grand Theft Auto 6 will be a major driver of software sales, hardware upgrades, and gaming-related tech purchases throughout the fourth quarter," Piscatella concludes. "Its anticipation and popularity reinforces the growing influence of video games on the broader entertainment and consumer technology markets." Boy, does it.

Interestingly, as huge and influential as GTA 6 evidently is, Piscatella recently said that devs shouldn't "fear" launching around Rockstar's behemoth, since many people "are going to want to play other things," too.

I suppose he's not wrong on that end either, though – there's The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake, for instance, and a handful of other nice November releases to look forward to.

But, admittedly, GTA 6 is the November release, as it stands now. Managing to draw nearly one in three gamers, whether primarily on console or PC, is no small feat, after all – especially when you consider how big the American market is in particular.

Former GTA 6 and Red Dead Redemption 2 designer says layoffs at Rockstar aren't the real danger – "The question is whether you can meet the expectations"

GTA 5 and San Andreas' leading men have given some advice to the new GTA 6 leads as the game is poised to change their lives forever.

In the pantheon of iconic gaming protagonists, there are many superpowered beings, creatures, chosen ones, and heroes. But GTA, as a series, has managed to create a number of gaming icons who are just guys. Sure, they can take a lot of damage, survive massive car crashes, and survive a blimp crash as long as Davey is in the vicinity, but for all intents and purposes they are just guys. And yet, you can't go a week without seeing CJ saying "Aw shit, here we go again." So the role of a GTA protagonist is a big space to fill, and one that our currently officially unknown (but fans have likely figured it out) leads of GTA 6 will have to learn firsthand in about a month's time.

Speaking to All Out Gaming at MCM Comic Con, Ned Luke, Shawn Fonteno, and Steven Ogg – GTA 5's Michael, Franklin, and Trevor, respectively – and Young Maylay – GTA San Andreas' Carl 'CJ' Johnson – were asked what their advice is for the upcoming duo of GTA leads. "Have fun," Luke says, while Maylay imparts, "get ready." Fonteno says, "just listen to Rockstar," adding, "they're going to lead you in the right direction," while taking a page out of his cousin's book, saying, "get ready" and that "it's a ride that they're going to be on for a while."

Maylay also warned the trio that "my game was 20 years ago. So when [GTA] 6 comes out, you guys will be in my position." He explains that everyone lining up to meet him at Comic Con are "the OG's," recalling, "You got the guys with the gray hair coming in saying, 'Hey, man, you're the guy CJ,'" Maylay adds, "you're going to grow with your fanbase."

However, despite the different generations of gamers having played different GTA entries, Maylay notes, "It's not like everything's gonna get shut down from you guys, because I wasn't shut down because of you guys."

GTA: Vice City's writing was "awful," Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser says, but acting icon Ray Liotta "made it sound good"

GTA 6 developers at Rockstar Games will begin the vote on the studio's proposed union right as the new Grand Theft Auto lets players start pre-loading the game on PS5 and Xbox Series X.

News of the impending Rockstar union vote comes from Aftermath, which shared a statement from the Independent Workers' union of Great Britain (IWGB), a labor union with widespread reach including a significant presence in games. IWGB has helped Rockstar developers organize their own studio union to bargain for benefits, rights, and protections.

The voting period will run from November 12 through November 26. GTA 6 launches Thursday, November 19, and pre-loading for the hotly anticipated game starts a week earlier. Rumors indicate GTA 6 is a 210GB download on PS5, so pre-loading ought to come in handy.

While the most-anticipated game of all time is devoured by millions players, many of the people who made it will be charting the future of their workplace. If the vote clears, Rockstar will officially be unionized, which would be a major step forward for the already humming labor push in the broader games industry. Just this month, D&D and Magic The Gathering developers unionized.

IWGB Game Workers shared Aftermath's story online. The agreement, if passed, will "grant workers a say over issues including pay and bonuses, overtime, redundancies, flexible working, and generative AI policies," the union reiterates.

"The terms of the recognition deal, agreed upon by workers and management, would give workers a say over topics including pay and bonuses, overtime, redundancies, flexible working arrangements, and generative AI policies," a press release reads (thanks, Rock Paper Shotgun).

Shanti Easton-Steel, a committee member for the Rockstar Game Workers Union, discussed what's being voted on: "When management choices are kept hidden, we can’t properly address issues like the gender pay gap, the uneven and ever-changing policies on overtime pay, or the concerns many co-workers hold around job security post-release."

"This is our moment to secure a window onto the decisions that shape our lives, and a seat at the table to improve them. I’m immensely proud of the games Rockstar gives its fans – I want to be equally proud of the voice Rockstar gives its staff," Easton-Steel adds.

This vote follows a messy and ongoing legal dispute over Rockstar staff, including many unionizing staff, who were fired for allegedly leaking "confidential information." Rockstar has repeatedly denied claims of union busting.

Rockstar also has a documented history of crunch, a term often used in game development to describe extended periods of heavy, often under-compensated, and quietly (or loudly) mandated overtime during production – the exact sort of thing that game unions have worked to prevent or control.

Rockstar devs allege crunch is so common at the GTA 6 studio that it's "built into" contracts and you have to "opt out" of it.

GTA 6 download size clocks in at 210GB on PS5, according to PlayStation Store sleuth PlayStation Game Size.

In a brief Twitter post, the PGS account, known for reasonably reliably sharing details on upcoming PlayStation games, notes the reported GTA 6 GB size.

Unsurprisingly, this would make GTA 6 significantly larger than GTA 5, which comes in at 105GB on PC. In fairness, GTA 5 did come out several empires ago; a more recent comparison would be Red Dead Redemption 2, which is 150GB on PC. There's also the question of GTA 5 versus GTA Online as storage hogs.

This figure is obviously unconfirmed, and it's also worth noting that download sizes and install sizes can differ, as can PS5 and Xbox Series X game file sizes, though only slightly. When we inevitably get a GTA 6 PC port, its impact on your drive may also be meaningfully different.

For example, the base PS5 sizes for GTA 5 and Red Dead Redemption 2 are actually closer to 100 - 110GB, with physical and digital versions reflecting different downloads.

As a reminder, GTA 6 pre-loading opens on November 12, a week ahead of the game's November 19 launch. If GTA 6 is actually in the range of 200GB or more, a lot of people will want to get that download started early. You'll assuredly still need to go through some sort of day-one update come November 19, but pre-loading can save you a lot of valuable time that could be spent playing GTA 6.

GTA 6 exclusive leads Edge 430 – check out the 16-page cover feature that includes interviews with Rockstar, bespoke screenshots, and more this week

The latest issue of Edge magazine is out this week, and it isn't one to miss for GTA 6 fans.

As part of Edge 430, the team has paid Rockstar a visit at its Edinburgh HQ to talk all things GTA 6. The issue's huge 16-page cover story features exclusive interviews and imagery detailing the most ambitious project in Rockstar’s history, wrapped up with a special gatefold cover showcasing artwork of lead characters Jason and Lucia.

Check out the sneak peek below:

The new issue of Edge magazine will go on sale October 29, but the good news doesn't stop there. To coincide with the release, the full feature will be released for you to read online for free right here on GamesRadar+. Just follow the link provided on the day.

Those of you in the UK can get a collector's edition for free, plus 13 issues of Edge at 38% off the newsstand price, by subscribing at the link. You'll need to be quick, though, as that's while stocks last.

Outside the UK, new annual subs will be sent a free digital edition of the complete special GTA 6 issue. If you're interested, you can subscribe here.

The GTA 6-led version of Edge is the latest slice of new information we're getting in the build-up to the long-awaited launch next month. That all truly kicked off with GTA 6's extended look on Netflix at the end of August, though we've had plenty since to tease what's on the way.

GTA 6 is due to release November 19, 2026.

It's no secret that the GTA 6 launch will likely prove one of the biggest video game releases, well, ever – but that doesn't mean other developers have to fear being overshadowed by the Rockstar behemoth in November.

Veteran analyst and Circana games lead Mat Piscatella seems to believe as much, anyway, telling GamesBeat that some devs' worries about launching near GTA 6 might be a tad "overblown," so to speak.

"The fear of many teams to put their game in the same window as GTA is completely overblown," he says. "GTA is going to be a massive game. Of course it is." But that doesn't mean that literally everyone cares about it.

It's going to be a huge cultural event, but not every one of the 49 million people who own a PS5 or an Xbox Series in the US is going to be interested in that," as Piscatella puts it. "There are a whole bunch of people who are going to want to play other things."

For example, "There's a whole Switch market that's going to want to play other things because they won't be able to play Grand Theft Auto." And, you know, PC.

That's why Piscatella advises devs who aren't aiming for the same target audience that GTA 6 is to not worry – like "any kind of cozy game or life sim or first-person shooter." There's more to gamers' interests than Rockstar, after all. "Just because Grand Theft Auto is there doesn't mean there isn't a potential market to address."

Heck, I'm proof myself. I'm not too big on GTA, but I'm looking forward to a lot of November releases.

There's The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake for one – but, alas, various other devs have also chosen to avoid next month as a potential launch window, as Piscatella predicted last year.

"Everyone's just scared," as the analyst says. "I guess I get it, but I just think it's completely overblown." Plus, it's, uh, "given GTA a completely wide-open window because everyone else moved," leaving it a bit bare in November release-wise, all things considered.

Piscatella concludes that "we'll see what happens, stating that he thinks "this is more fear than anything else." But, still, "We haven't seen a game this big in… literally 13 years!" It is one of those new games that everyone, fan or not, knows about, I suppose.

Former GTA 6 and Red Dead Redemption 2 designer says layoffs at Rockstar aren't the real danger – "The question is whether you can meet the expectations"

Ahead of GTA 6, Rockstar veteran Obbe Vermeij marked the 25-year anniversary of Grand Theft Auto 3 with a lengthy retrospective examining its difficult development.

GTA 3 was a pioneering open-world game and a landmark release for Rockstar, but in a recent Twitter post, Vermeij says, "For most of development, GTA 3 was in a sorry state."

Vermeij says "it crashed frequently, the frame rate was terrible and the map was full of holes. Only in the last six months did everything come together. For the longest time, it looked like the frame rate was going to be 20 fps. Only in the final months did we manage to hit 30."

This sort of late assembly is pretty common in game development, particularly among large teams who may have siloed disciplines handling projects of larger scope. In the messy intersection of art and technology, the heart of a game may be hard to see until it's relatively close to release. For example, Bethesda boss Todd Howard said in 2023 that it took seven years for Starfield to become something that's actually fun to play.

Vermeij notes that the beginning of GTA 3 was messy, too. Rockstar North, then operating as DMA Design, had just been snapped up by Take-Two Interactive, "and a satellite office had opened in Edinburgh. Space Station Silicon Valley for the N64 had been finished in 1998, but there was no new project lined up. Leslie Benzies and Aaron Garbut started working on GTA 3. Unprompted. Meanwhile, the original GTA 1 and GTA 2 team had started work on GTA 2.5, set in Miami. It was called 2.5 because it used the 2.5D (isometric) perspective."

What would have been GTA 2.5 was canned in 2000, that Dundee office closed, and GTA 3 was finally officially greenlit by Take-Two and Rockstar, Vermeij adds. "Everything was written from scratch," he explains. "Only two people worked on both GTA 2 and GTA 3, and no code or art from GTA 2 was reused."

"The way we worked was organic. People would come up with ideas for missions and we'd just try them. If they were fun, they were in. The story was secondary. In fact, the opening plot involving Catalina trying to kill Claude was added well into development."

Back when GTA teams were still pretty small (and downright tiny by today's standards), Vermeij says, "Working on GTA 3 was a lot of fun. Every day there was something new going in. A new mission, radio station, car, pedestrian, building or whatever. The game was growing at an incredible rate. Other than the multiplayer mode we did some work on, I can’t remember a lot of wastage."

Contrast this with GTA 6, which Rockstar admits stalled during development due to conflicting, evolving, or unclear creative visions. GTA 6 hasn't actually been in full production for all of the 13 years since GTA 5, but it did eat up incomparably more labor hours than Rockstar's original breakout hits. With its new development pipeline now stress-tested, studio leadership says future games won't be as difficult or time-consuming to make as GTA 6.

Vermeij also touches on the studio's reputation for crunch – something Rockstar leadership and staff have worked to tackle out in the open in recent years. At least on GTA 3, Vermeij says, "Although everybody worked hard, I don't remember many people doing crazy hours. On the rare occasions I was in over the weekend, there were usually only one or two others. Even during crunch time, most people left the office around 9 or 10 in the evening. I always thought it was better to work eight focused hours than spend your life in the office."

What did all that work get them? Pre-release anxiety. GTA wasn't always the unstoppable hit-maker it is today, and GTA 3 presented a major and risky shift in gameplay. "Although we liked the game," Vermeij says, "it wasn't at all clear that it would be a hit. GTA 3 had a disappointing showing at E3 in May 2001. Most people weren't interested, and those who were thought it was too violent. It had an OK launch, but sales never tapered off."

"The thing I remember most is the camaraderie," he concludes. "In a small team, everybody relies on each other and everybody has a lot of input. Most of us were young and had only recently moved to Edinburgh. We went to the pub together. It felt like a group of friends who happened to be working on a project together."

Nowadays, Rockstar has thousands of devs on its payroll, with a studio larger than post-DMA Rockstar North purely dedicated to NPCs in GTA 6. Edinburgh is gonna need a bigger pub.

Rockstar is "at least 10 years ahead" of other games with GTA 6's NPC crowd technology, says dev behind 007: First Light's incredible crowds

Redundancies and restructuring have become sad themes of the industry of late. Just this week, BioWare was closed by EA, amid Xbox laying off 3,200 jobs across the entire division. One place that seems safer is Rockstar, which is gearing up to release the mammoth GTA 6, and at least one ex-dev there believes it's in better shape than most.

"I never heard the question of, we need to see if we need to downsize, or if we can afford it. Rockstar can afford it," Jérémy Hartvick, an open-world designer on Red Dead Redemption 2 and GTA 6 who left Rockstar in 2020, tells the Kiwi Talkz podcast.

"The question is whether you can meet the expectations, and if you don't, then you might not last," he explains. "But otherwise it's not a question of money."

I should hope so, considering the kind of money-spinners Grand Theft Auto 5 and Red Dead Redemption 2 have proven to be. Both have shifted copies non-stop since launch, the former literally charted in the top five digital games for the PS5 in Europe in September of this year.

That's without getting into GTA Online and Red Dead Online, each with large, dedicated communities who provide yet more revenue through glorious microtransactions. There's no shortage of money flowing through Rockstar. For his own exit, Hartvick points towards a personal situation that required him to be closer to home, since he's from continental Europe and was living in Scotland to work at Rockstar North's Edinburgh office, and the intense amount of labour.

"The quantity of work made it more difficult to be present there," he says about his family. While he helped launch Red Dead Redemption 2, GTA 6 was still years away at that point - eight years, in hindsight - creating a situation where he wondered if he fancied that marathon, or something else.

It bears repeating, despite the job security through funding, Rockstar's currently in the middle of an employment tribunal after suddenly letting a number of staff go last year for allegedly spurious reasons. At the end of the day, it's still a corporation, just like EA, Activision, and any other major publisher.

GTA 6 could cost the US economy $1 billion due to an estimated 1.5 million workers calling in sick, economist says

Grand Theft Auto is not a roleplaying game. Even with its sprawling open world and all the painstaking technical details that have gone into protagonists Lucia and Jason's story, GTA 6 will never be among those we call the best RPGs. Some systems in the latest entry might hew close, but the way Jason and Lucia evolve are closer to being a sim than an RPG proper. More than that, there's a fundamental difference between how Rockstar and developers like CD Projekt Red view their respective games.

After adding full mod support to The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – Remastered, the Polish developer surprised Cyberpunk 2077 fans by announcing a similar built-in client to the Night City adventure. Patch 2.5 comes with all the bells and whistles that speak to a truly flexible, personalized RPG experience – and it's the furthest thing away from what Rockstar has said about GTA 6 so far.

Yours, mine, ours

Patch 2.5, in its broadest strokes, is an RPG replayer's ultimate fantasy. Delivered in co-development with Virtuos Studios, the update brings new clothing items as well as long-awaited cyberware customization (courtesy of new NPC vendors called Glamdocs), and the opportunity to finally dual-wield any pistol or revolver combination.

There's also some "cozy" new missions to engage with as V learns more about the founding of Night City, and of course, plenty of connective tissue between the video game and Netflix's new season of spin-off anime Cyberpunk: Edgerunners. Top it off with full mod support, and I can fully understand why CDPR skipped straight past a patch 2.4 update; This really is a two-in-one deal.

Speaking on the latest Redstreams, associate game director Pawel Sasko sounded incredibly enthusiastic about what this patch means for replayability. The team is fully supportive of fans getting creative to make their next playthrough more unique than ever. CDPR even welcomes story mods among the plethora of ways you can reshape the experience to suit your needs, something Rockstar has reiterated its vocal opposition to in its recent fair use reminder.

It's an outlier in that regard. A healthy modding community and a robust customization system are the hallmarks of almost every successful game or franchise of the last two decades. Cyberpunk 2077 (and The Witcher 3, by extension) is following the example set out by Skyrim, Baldur's Gate 3, Mass Effect, The Sims 4 (until recently), and countless others. It's a surefire way to keep players engaged and interested in a title long past its release year, offering countless ways to experience the same story through brand new eyes. But it seems that Rockstar thinks the Grand Theft Auto name is more than enough to justify bucking this particular trend.

Forgive the ice-cold take, but fostering a strong sense of community should be paramount to every game developer. When I see RPG developers like CDPR and Larian Studios going out of their way to not only engage with their communities but deliver long-awaited quality-of-life additions, it makes me look more critically at those who refuse to. Respect should go both ways. If Rockstar wants to keep its legions of loyal followers, why not adapt to their needs instead of give them a hiding before the game is even out?

Lone wolves

Then again, Rockstar is no stranger to doing things differently. Where some devs embrace the changing tides that dictate our ever-shortening attention spans, Rockstar can just buy the ocean from under Poseidon. After all, it ended up acquiring GTA Online mod developer FiveM, a team it once threatened with legal action, in order to at least profit off of its roleplaying servers.

This is a team that plays by very different rules, so if you're hoping that Rockstar might slacken its leash on modding once GTA 6 has been out for some time, I wouldn't hold my breath.

GTA 6 isn't an RPG, as any genre purist will rush to tell you. Neither in its format nor in the attitude with which it was created. Rockstar is selling a product, not a community – and that's fine by me. But, I wonder how many will agree when it's time for the next iteration of GTA Online to get the GTA 6 treatment.

While GTA 5's mode has always been an outlier, online communities in 2026 than they were in 2013. In the meantime, I'll take hot pink mantis blades, dual-wielding Jackie's golden pistols, and having cats in all of V's Night City apartments before Rockstar's precious new baby. Call me when Jason gets a gorilla arms mod (and don't tell Mommy on me).

Check out these games like GTA if you just can't wait for GTA 6!

Dreamcast is rarely thought of as the start of anything. It was the full stop on Sega's reign as a hardware company, the console that died as PlayStation 2 thrived. But it was also, Rockstar says, the birthplace of the era's defining PlayStation game. You know, the one your mum heard was about killing prostitutes: Grand Theft Auto 3.

The story goes like this: GTA's developer, DMA Design, had just opened a new office in Edinburgh after a decade in Dundee. Change crackled in the air. The '90s were ending, and all around DMA the game industry was transitioning to three dimensions. The young team behind an early 3D game named Body Harvest believed they were ready to do the same with GTA.

Yet the studio's old guard was unconvinced. The team had already experimented with tilting the camera a little in GTA 2, but weren't sure it was possible to go further. A simulated city, navigated at breakneck speeds in whatever direction the player chose? Surely not in 3D.

"We had a bit of pushback from them," recalls Rockstar North co-studio head and art director Aaron Garbut. "So we did a tech demo of a city environment on the Dreamcast with cars driving around and characters walking the streets. We got it working over a period of weeks to the point where you could steal a car and drive it about, then we got it in front of Sam."

Sam Houser was the executive producer of Take-Two's new publishing label in New York, which had rather audaciously named itself Rockstar Games. He'd been a backer of GTA since its earliest days, egging its team on as they embraced player criminality and transgression. Now he was more than keen for the series to take its next revolutionary step.

"Sam has always been the voice of the player," Garbut says. "He has always encouraged us to go further, to take risks, to make every game our best yet and never to settle. He has also given us the support, the room, and the flexibility we've needed over the years to get things where they need to be. He's still that person for the team now."

The GTA 3 team were galvanised by the Dreamcast demo, basic though it was. It became a source of inspiration and a focal point for their ambitions. "We knew what we were doing in 3D and were young, arrogant, and naïve enough to feel like it was easy and exciting," Garbut says. "We just knew how far we could take things. We could see the impact of an urban environment in 3D and were filled with ideas first and foremost about how we could bring it alive. That was our initial focus – building the toys and playset, making a world that functioned as well as we could make it, a living, breathing city."

From the previous games came the premise: the arresting idea of being an antihero, a criminal who worked for even worse criminals. GTA had always had multiple mission-givers, albeit at the other end of a phone. And its developers had already invented Wanted levels, not to mention their antidote, the Pay And Spray shop. The formula was there.

Electric dreams

But the GTA 3 team consciously rejected the arcade-like elements that had come before – in particular, the running point total for destruction that Garbut describes as "pinball scoring". In an immersive 3D world, those abstract touches no longer seemed to fit. Conversely, DMA leaned into the natural sense of cinema and emotional connection that came with a 3D camera. "We didn't really approach it like a sequel," Garbut says. "We weren't slavishly looking at how the earlier GTAs had done things. We worked in broad strokes and without referring too much to them."

Some of GTA 3's greatest development challenges were the fundamentals we take for granted in open worlds today. As Garbut points out, DMA didn't have any contemporaries working with densely populated urban environments.

"The density was the difference," he says. "There were simpler games – driving games set in urban worlds but without too much interaction – that were designed to traverse at speed." Though Garbut doesn't name any, 1999's Driver springs to mind.

"Then there were denser games like Zelda that did amazing things but spread it out or split it across empty spaces and denser dungeons," he continues. "We didn't split things into nice manageable, loadable chunks, we didn't spread it out with empty areas, we didn't design it to only work at speed or to explore in detail on foot in small areas. We were trying to offer it all in one experience, and to make it feel as alive as possible."

Chop shop

Players of the time were gobsmacked by the way GTA 3's world was constantly streamed into being, just outside their vision. Well, except for the rare occasions when a wall only appeared in time to tear the bonnet from their Banshee. It's a system that Garbut clearly remains deeply proud of, all these years later.

"The art team broke the world apart by hand in the best way to squeeze all we could into memory while getting it off the drive fast enough," he says. "The code team built an elegant streaming system and we got as granular as writing the files to the DVD in specific orders to keep areas of the world together physically on the disk. It's a testament to the talent and ingenuity of the team that we made this work."

The decision represented a huge risk, but in the end the results spoke for themselves – Liberty City rendered at great distances, across moody bays and packed urban thoroughfares, and did so seamlessly, without long loading screens. "Getting it right effectively removed a lot of limitations for scale and detail," Garbut says. "We could build what we wanted as long as the area around the player would fit in memory and we could get it off the DVD drive fast enough."

If GTA 3 was a living world, then DMA Design was the hospital crash team tasked with keeping it breathing, against the odds. "You have to ensure the system can cope with a random pileup round the corner exploding at the same time you are also trying to run an intense mission," Garbut says. "It's all about managing the chaos and the competing systems rather than just focussing on what you see. Keeping the world alive and allowing real interaction with it is one of the big challenges with open world games."

New car smell

The making of GTA 3 established the methodology that Rockstar North, as the developer is known now, still uses today. The studio always begins with the place and then, once it's fit to live in, moves up one layer to the toys. In GTA 3's case, the toys were the cars – the aspect of the game players would spend more time with than anything else.

"Seeing the world come alive through these vehicles, that's when I remember starting to feel things come together," Garbut says. "Every so often a build comes along with a feature you've been discussing or planning forever – it's normally rough and only there when you squint a bit. But it's there. Everything shifts, the world you had been working in changes and now this new thing has made it better or worse. On some projects at some points, it feels like that happens every day. GTA 3 could be like that."

With the addition of cars, GTA 3 changed overwhelmingly for the better. The team imbued their vehicles with physics that were both buoyant and dramatic, making even downtime in Liberty City gripping.

"This was a long time ago so seeing cars behave physically was not the norm," Garbut says. "I remember spending a good few hours skidding the car around and watching its suspension bounce on kerbs. Seeing that in our world, then seeing the variation in tuning with trucks, sports cars, and the like, it was inspiring. We had the toys we needed."

Garbut evidently adores the process of making games, and in particular these moments of punctuation that spark ever more extraordinary feats – the single flaming car which triggers a cascade of explosions that eventually ends in the downing of a police helicopter.

"The work of one team changes, motivates, and pushes the next team to take it and run with it," he says. "It's a lovely whirlwind of creativity."

For Garbut's art team, the sprawling 3D city was a canvas on which to paint their vision of New York. This city wasn't the real-life home of Rockstar's producers in the US, but a semi-fictional place pieced together from afar.

"At this point I'd only been there a couple of times," Garbut says. "There was no internet in the studio at first, there was no Google Maps. I just had a little box of 35mm photos a couple of us had taken on a trip there."

Old York

Instead, DMA's reference material came from old films and television. Liberty City mimicked not the glamour but the gloomy mundanity of urban life – soggy streets, grey concrete, dark water, and litter. It was an approach that played to the strengths of PS2's limited fidelity, capturing mood rather than detail.

"We wanted to lean into the grime, the rain, the weather," Garbut says. "We had also made a call to add a dynamic weather system and time of day, and this helped leverage that. It felt right for the kind of story we had, the kind of characters we had, and the way we felt New York had to be from growing up watching it on screen."

It seems very likely that the whole GTA series owes its cartoonish satire – the warped prism through which it has long viewed America – to this literal and critical distance. While success has brought LA and New York within easy reach of Rockstar North's developers, the studio has carefully cultivated its unique perspective in Edinburgh.

"Right from GTA 3 our focus was always on creating the impression of the place we were building over the reality," Garbut says. "Back then there was far less connection in the world digitally – the sheer volume of content and accessibility these days has blurred the line so much that I don't really feel like a cultural outsider in the same way any more, but what it did I think was force us to rely on the US we knew from television and film. It was more about an exaggerated impression, the feeling of the place. It gave us more choices and more control in some ways, and I think it served us well."

Rockstar's storytelling has come a long way since the release of GTA 3, to the point where writer Dan Houser's departure last year felt like a serious blow to the company. But even Liberty City's Scorsese-style drama, while broad and daft, served an important purpose.

"It's quite simple compared to how we work these days," Garbut says. "It's lacking any real refinement, but there's a charm to it and a consistency. I'm proud of what it did. It let us figure out a lot of things, it taught us what we could do better and with Vice City we were already on the path to do that. There were certain choices – a silent main character, for example – that we moved away from quickly, but we have always been good I think at re-evaluating and moving forward."

Concrete tower

The story of Claude and Catalina was a blueprint. So, Garbut says, was GTA 3 as a whole. There's little in GTA Online today that can't somehow be traced back to this strange, grey game. Its foundations were so firm, in fact, that its sequel was released to critical acclaim just one year later. You might argue that Vice City is the most successful reskin of all time, though that description does a disservice to the power with which Garbut's art team evoked the '80s, using pitch-perfect costumes and coloured lighting.

"We are building on the path we started on GTA 3," he says. "We are building on that game and evolving it every day, to this day. We carry all that experience and expertise, the stuff that is impossible to replicate that is down to working together forever, to knowing the people you work with and what they know, what each person brings and how to get the best from them."

Long before Rockstar North was a household name, Garbut went to art college. There he studied fine art, and learned that drawing, painting and sculpting was all about 'roughing it in' – getting the basic structure right so that the artist can refine over the top. He sees GTA 3 in those terms.

"The 'squint a bit and it looks kind of finished' sort of idea," he says. "It's how I've always approached both building our game worlds and the games themselves. GTA 3 was as resolved as we could make it at the time, but for today's standards it's simple and rough. Things have come so incredibly far, the detail and depth and sophistication, the interplay of the complex systems we build these days. Squint a bit, though, and it's still the foundation we have built on and I love it for that."

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!

An economist reckons the long-awaited launch of GTA 6 could cost the US economy $1 billion due to an estimated 1.5 million workers taking the day off sick.

That comes from the International Business Times, which reports that an economics professor at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona offers a simple reason for his academic projection – notably not an official forecast. People need time to play Rockstar's long-awaited opus when it launches on November 19, and work is simply in the way. People have waited 13 years for GTA 6, so why waste time working when you can get stuck into it?

So what's behind the math? The short answer is that the average yearly output of a US worker is $70,000, so take that and the 1.5 million absences, and you get a short-term productive dip of around 2%.

Digging in further, the economics expert reckons that men aged 18 to 30 will make up the majority of workers pulling a sicky – and that the technology sector will be the hardest hit. Apparently, that part should come as little surprise, as it closely resembles the age and occupation of people who took time off to play GTA 5.

Furthermore, we can expect an impact on people who do turn up to work, as the need to talk about GTA 6 and stay up late to play it may reduce their performance.

Does any of this mean anything? Not really. The report goes on to say that even if this were to happen, the money lost from people not working will be made up by what Take-Two and Rockstar Games make from, you guessed it, releasing GTA 6.

Still, an amusing stat, and not one that various companies aren't seemingly ready for. We've now had a few cases of companies announcing they're shutting down when GTA 6 comes out because workers would likely call in sick anyway. Won't anyone think of the economy?

A fundamental Red Dead Redemption 2 system provided the basis for how GTA 6's NPCs work - but it was nearly cut because of an ambitious Rockstar studio head.

One of the most prominent members of the PS5 hacking scene claims to have created an exploit that'll work even on the latest 14.10 console firmware. With the release of GTA 6 looming and PS5 exploits coming out at a feverish pace, the question now is how long Sony and Rockstar will be able to prevent the long-awaited crime game from being pirated. It won't be possible with the current exploits, but given how quickly they're now coming, it feels almost inevitable.

Longtime PS5 hacker Gezine recently posted a clip on Twitter which demonstrates access to the console's debug menu on firmware version 14.10. The implication is that Gezine has discovered a new type of exploit that can jailbreak PS5s on current firmware, but the hacker has not released this method to the public.

Like other console makers, Sony typically requires players to install the latest firmware in order to be able to play new games. It's a key roadblock discouraging players from modding their consoles, since you need to keep updating to the latest firmware in order to play the latest releases, and that new system software will include back-end fixes correcting previously publicized jailbreak exploits.

We don't yet know what firmware the GTA 6 will require, but it's possible that it'll be 14.10 – which likely means that soon, it'll be possible to play GTA 6 and keep your jailbreak intact. It's also possible that another firmware version will be released before or alongside the game, but unless Sony is able to discover how this specific exploit was created, it'll likely remain in place until the jailbreak is released publicly.

While there are plenty of legitimate, legal reasons to jailbreak a game console – PS2 emulators with support for original discs are one notable example – the elephant in the room here, of course, is that many people want jailbroken PS5s that can play pirated copies of GTA 6. This, however, is the part that's not yet certain.

"Old way to dump executables does not seem to work at 14.xx," Gezine reports. In other words, there's no way to pirate games, GTA 6 or not, on the current firmware. Further piracy will likely require a new exploit for the console's hypervisor, a security measure which hackers have cracked in the past, but which has been secured as of the latest system software.

Sony is clearly keen to make sure these exploits stay under the radar and are quickly patched. HackerOne, a platform where companies can offer bounties to hackers reporting major security exploits to software companies, shows that PlayStation recently paid out a $50,000 bounty to a user who pointed out a major bug.

The nature of that bug has not yet been disclosed, but you can be sure that Sony will do everything it can to prevent anything from disrupting sales of GTA 6 next month. Even if that means offering mountains of cash to the hackers continuing to break the PS5 apart.

Unofficial PS5 pirate store with over 1,600 games taken down before being immediately replaced by a clone, with Pandora's box open following recent jailbreak.

You're probably aware by now that GTA 6 is indeed eligible for The Game Awards. Rockstar is getting the game out exactly one day before the deadline. It's safe to say the open-world crime adventure is a hefty favorite for several categories, but odds are against it beating Clair Obscur: Expedition 33's sweep from last year.

Sandfall's JRPG-inspired fantasy took home nine statues, across 13 nominations in total. Big numbers, and a benchmark most can only dream of. The new Grand Theft Auto can feasibly reach the same amount of nominations, making a tie possible, but I'll be honest - it's an uphill battle.

There are a bunch we can expect to see GTA 6 in. Game of the Year, Best Game Direction, Best Narrative, sound, visuals, and performance are all fair game. Those account for seven categories.

Then there's Games for Impact, championing releases with clear, forward-thinking ideas at their core. In theory, GTA 6 can be part of that lineup. Best Action and Best Action-Adventure are both possible, but I'd expect one or the other. We'll probably see GTA 6 pull a Clair Obscur by getting one of these and Game of the Year.

Obviously, Best Independent Game and Best Debut Indie Game are out. Clair Obscur may have managed to squeeze into these, but I think partnering with an entire city and its NBA team rules out Rockstar's sequel.

Out of all the other categories, that leaves Best Community Support, Innovation in Accessibility, and Players' Voice. It's difficult to say what Rockstar's odds are for any of them. The first depends on the post-launch community launch, the second is all about what's available in-game, and I can see players rallying for the third, if even just for the meme.

On supporting the playerbase, GTA 6 is up against Wardogs, Arc Raiders, and whatever other big live-service game you care to mention, and even Clair Obscur, because anything that's been updated regularly is possible. Baldur's Gate 3 took it last year, for instance.

I wouldn't count on GTA 6 tying Clair Obscur to be quite honest, but I wouldn't count out eating my lunch on that either. This is why I'm not a gambling man. Anyway, Silent Hill: Townfall for Game of the Year, just for the Scottish representation.

Not even Rockstar heads know everything that's in GTA 6 because devs will just add stuff – which is also how Red Dead Redemption 2 got its absurd horse testicle physics

GTA 6 features an advanced take on Red Dead Redemption 2's beloved NPC interaction system, though we might not have got it at all if one of Rockstar's leads hadn't changed their mind on sharing it with everyone else.

That comes from Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier, who has posted a YouTube video after visiting Rockstar to see GTA 6. During that visit, Schreier mentions a conversation with Rockstar North boss Rob Nelson, in which he says that vice president of animation Mark Tennant came up with a prototype of Red Dead 2 Redemption 2's advanced NPC tech way back in 2014 or 2015.

The way it worked was simple – instead of pressing a button to point a gun at an NPC and have them react, you could press the same button to choose to greet or antagonize them.

While the idea is simple to explain, the execution is complex. As such, when Tennant showed the prototype to another technical lead at Rockstar, Phil Hooker, he didn't want the system shown to Nelson initially. As Schreier explains, Nelson is known as the guy who "wants to do the world" – even if it leads to a lot of extra work for the team.

Despite the concern, Nelson was eventually shown the prototype and was blown away. "This is incredible," Nelson reportedly said in reaction. "This will revolutionize the way our games and our worlds work."

Amusingly, it sounds like Hooker was proven right. Implementing the system did prove to be a lot of work for Rockstar, though you'd argue it was absolutely worth it. Not only is Red Dead Redemption 2's NPC system well-loved, but we're getting an evolved version of it in GTA 6.

We initially got an inkling that would be the case during a GTA 6 leak, though Rockstar's latest media rounds have further fleshed out the details.

"The NPC interaction system is one that is returning and evolved from Red Dead Redemption 2," Nelson confirmed to IGN. "In the past we’ve had systems where you can speak to NPCs. In RDR1 and GTA 5, there were basic systems for interacting, but the interactions were very simple.

"But with Red Dead Redemption 2, we were finally able to incorporate the ability to interact with NPCs as a more fleshed-out system. Traditionally, L2 was a binary action that immediately aimed your gun at someone or locked onto them for combat. But as the resolution has increased, the experiences we create have had to evolve alongside that – the fidelity of them, how you can exist in them, and what you can do in them."

While we need to wait and see what this means in full, the hint Nelson leaves us with comes down to the various ways NPCs can react to you in GTA 6's world. For example, it's normal for people to gather and chatter, though their behavior will influence how they feel about you eavesdropping. While some might be more inquisitive, others, to put it mildly, won't appreciate it at all.

"While we pushed this sort of interaction with NPCs as far as we could for Red Dead Redemption 2, with GTA 6 we are taking it much further," Nelson teases.

To think, this might be something we didn't get at all if someone at Rockstar had been put off by how much work it would entail.

Not even Rockstar heads know everything that's in GTA 6 because devs will just add stuff – which is also how Red Dead Redemption 2 got its absurd horse testicle physics.

GTA 6 was made by an army of thousands of game developers who had to be coordinated by Rockstar Games, but some of the studio's best work is the result of individuals using the independence afforded to them to enact the kind of chaotic goodness that would make a tabletop dungeon master smirk. Case in point: horse scrotums in Red Dead Redemption 2.

The buried details of GTA 6's mammoth production line are examined in a new video from Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier, who paused to share some information from a recent Rockstar visit that couldn't fit into a prior written report.

Rockstar North art director Aaron Garbut looks at the scope and granularity that Rockstar has to balance. "There's no one person that has this whole thing in their head," he says.

Schreier, seemingly sharing his own thoughts and no longer quoting Garbut, adds, "Grand Theft Auto 6 is a humongous game, like Rockstar's previous games, and I imagine that not even the top developers of this company know every single thing that's in the game."

This is important context because it directly connects to something that Garbut singles out: the kind of unhinged perfectionism and attention to detail that gets you video game horses with testicles that convincingly shrink based on the temperature.

Herein lies the thin but magical boundary between disorganized development and meaningful autonomy. It's not that the studio heads, discipline leads, direct reports, and overarching producers at Rockstar don't know what's in GTA 6, or that designers are regularly going rogue with no oversight. All of those roles exist precisely because no one person can know and be accountable for everything in this game. But under that structured network, there's still space for designers, artists, and others to have agency and make individual contributions in their corner.

"Garbut actually brought this up," Schreier says of the famous Red Dead 2 horses. "That was not something that was on some big list of features to make. It was not something that an art director told an artist. 'All right, we got to get those horse testicles in here. Better put in nights and weekends so you can get these horse testicles in here.' That was something that people or a person, on their own, autonomously, decided, 'I'm going to do this because I think it's a really cool detail and I have enough time to work on it.'"

Games like GTA 6 are partly the result of a lot of little things done well many times over within, and in service of, broader creative frameworks. Allowing space for surprises to manifest is how a lot of the magic happens in some of the most beloved games of all time, and this highlights one way that mismanaged or unhealthy development cycles actively hurt games (on top of, more importantly, people).

Great ideas that might've been found or implemented may never happen because people don't have the space, or the headspace, for them. If simply getting a game shipped is a buzzer-beating nightmare, refining and indulging in it gets that much harder. (Red Dead Redemption 2's development was notoriously filled with crunch periods, though some employees publicly pushed back on crunch accusations in 2018.)

We're still talking about the horses in Red Dead Redemption 2 because they reflect that game's extreme commitment to authenticity, zoology, and wonderfully unnecessary content. If those horse testicles were less realistic, nobody would care. But, demonstrably, the work of whoever is tragically not listed as Testicle Designer in the game's credits did improve the game and people's perception of it. Because after you find one of those little surprises, you start to look for more details, more fingerprints from individual developers making their mark despite being one of hundreds or thousands. The AAA games that actually justify their excess are full of stuff like this, and it sounds like GTA 6 will be too.

"For GTA to stay relevant it had to reinvent itself": Grand Theft Auto 4 got much darker because San Andreas took the "pop energy as far as it could go," says Rockstar's Dan Houser.

Dan Houser – former writer and creative director of the Grand Theft Auto series – says GTA 4 was so tonally different from what came before because Rockstar Games felt that doing the same old thing risked obsolescence.

GTA was riding high going into the Xbox 360 and PS3 era, with the trilogy of GTA 3, Vice City, and San Andreas all releasing to mass acclaim, selling millions, and becoming some of the most influential and beloved games of the era. San Andreas, in particular, felt like the natural culmination of the style established in GTA 3, so the idea of that continuing on more powerful hardware was certainly exciting. However, GTA 4 turned out to be a somber story, with a more realistic world and a far darker tone overall.

Speaking to IGN, Houser explains, "There was a belief that San Andreas had taken that kind of 'pop' energy as far as it could go." Given that San Andreas was so "massive" and "successful," Houser notes "that for GTA to stay relevant it had to reinvent itself."

While GTA 4 isn't quite as popular as the two games that surround it, Houser points out "it felt cohesive. The game, the art direction, the moody lighting, the nature of the missions, they all felt tonally consistent."

He notes that with the darker take on the series "we found a level of tonal consistency that we'd not had in the previous games," even if that could be seen as a risk given the success of the PS2 games.

Houser recalls that with Rockstar, "I think there was more [of] a perception that the risk was the opposite," he explains. "The risk was if you don't reinvent yourselves and don't do something new and fresh, you're going to become obsolete." GTA 5 then did become a bit more lighthearted and silly compared to 4 and proved to be a juggernaut both in sales and popularity, but Rockstar's more somber tone in hindsight feels somewhat like a precursor to the Red Dead Redemption games, so really I think both takes were for the best.

GTA: Vice City's writing was "awful," Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser says, but acting icon Ray Liotta "made it sound good"

Rockstar Games' co-founder and former lead writer Dan Houser doesn't think his writing in GTA: Vice City was the best, but he reckons acting legend Ray Liotta is what really made the classic game's script shine.

Grand Theft Auto is no stranger to celebrity talent nowadays - just take a look at GTA 6's star-studded soundtrack - but Ray Liotta playing the main protagonist of GTA: Vice City was a big deal more than two decades ago.

In an interview with IGN, Houser was asked about what it was like working with the iconic Something Wild and Goodfellas actor, who gave a voice to Tommy Vercetti. "My writing's awful, and he [Ray Liotta] made it sound good [in Vice City]," Houser says.

"All good actors do that. The actor finds things that are not on the page. Acting is an unusual art form, but it is an art form. And when you see someone who's good at it, they're much better than someone who's just ok at it. When they're ok, they get what's in my head, on the character side. The best actors go a whole level above that, and he definitely did that," he adds.

Houser also describes how the seemingly random collaboration came about. Rockstar supposedly called Liotta's agent and offered "a chunk of money" for about four days worth of work. "We met him for dinner the night before and then did two days with them in New York," Houser explains. A couple of months later, Houser returned to LA closer to the game's full release to record more lines with him. "The first day he turned up and didn't seem into it, and the next day he came in and did about five hours and completely finished everything."

"He was fantastic at doing it," Houser continues. "I mean he brought a level of authenticity to Tommy that I think we'd have struggled with anyone else to find."

Rockstar wins without doing anything as Cyberleek retreats after meme coin crashes – GTA 6 leaker says "the leeks stop here" as if the game's not out in a month

There's a decent chance you've never noticed it, but most of Rockstar's titles – including the likes of Grand Theft Auto 4 and 5 and the Red Dead Redemption games – have a subtle but persistent graphical bug. Based on the early trailers and gameplay footage, it looked like GTA 6 would be no exception, but the game's most recent trailer shows no evidence of the issue at all.

The problem? Animation stutter. Both character animations and camera movements are sometimes unevenly paced, leading to a herky-jerky effect that can give these games an unintentional appearance of stop motion. If you notice it, it might seem like the game is dropping frames, but the real problem seems to be tied to the underlying RAGE engine that's been powering Rockstar's games since the GTA 4 days.

According to Digital Foundry, this issue has also been present in every GTA 6 trailer released up until this point, including the extended gameplay look. Except, that is, for the recently released launch trailer, which is completely clear of any apparent animation stutter. That's despite the fact that it uses extensive panning camera shots, where the stutter is typically most obvious.

It's possible that this trailer simply featured a curated selection of scenes without the animation stutter, but given that Rockstar made no effort to hide this issue in previous previews, that seems unlikely. The devs have, after all, made clear that they're still tweaking things up until the very last minute.

Could the stutter finally be fixed after decades of it plaguing the developer's games? I guess we'll find out in one month's time.

Still figuring out where to pre-order GTA 6? You know where to click.

Now that GTA 6 is a mere month away, Rockstar Games is upping its marketing to maximum velocity – which, of course, means driving around in Grand Theft Auto-inspired cars around Miami (in other words, Vice City).

Yes, you read that right. Folks in Florida have caught wind of some, erm, very obviously GTA-coded supercars. They're hard to miss, honestly, considering their colors. Just have a look over at Reddit, where you'll find an amusing clip of them all at a gas station in Miami, you know, just casually fillin' up the tank.

There's a Manana, Buccaneer, Tempesta, Cheetah, Coquette D10, and Emerus, as the fan behind the video posts.

And, just in case you're worried that it's generative AI, folks point out this isn't the only clip showcasing the colorful vehicles taking over the streets of Miami.

A separate thread confirms as much, with the cars seen driving around Florida, led by a Vice City Police Department car. It's entertaining to just sit back and which, if I do say so myself – especially with all the "normal" non-GTA 6 traffic proceeding around them as normal.

This might just be the most unique form of advertising Rockstar has employed yet… even when you pit it against all the wild "hints" fans spent months – no, years – theorizing about.

There's just something about seeing all the fleshed out, patterned GTA 6 cars cruisin' around real-life Vice City that you can't beat, I suppose, and I'm clearly not alone in thinking so. The replies see fans having fun with the whole thing, as they should.

One reads, "Man, they just handed their marketing director a blank cheque and told them to have fun, didn't they?" Another jests, "Is this the multimillion dollar advertisement campaign?" Further down, somebody simply declares, "Man, this is so sick."

So, there you have it. If you're a game developer hoping to advertise your next big title, just send out a bunch of fancy (extremely expensive) cars, I guess.

Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake doesn't even rate against GTA 6 and Call of Duty Modern Warfare 4 as the "biggest games of the year," Activision exec says

We might be getting GTA 6 in November, but that doesn't necessarily mean the game is finished. In fact, games of that scale are never really done; they're just shoved into the world and updated in real time. Rockstar isn't shy about this, openly admitting that alterations are still underway on the blockbuster release.

This comes from Jason Schreier of Bloomberg, who put together a report on the huge release. In a YouTube video expanding on his reporting, he mentioned that leadership told him there weren't any major reasons the game kept getting delayed; it simply wasn't ready yet. All the disparate parts weren't coalescing the way anyone wanted, and so on.

He provides a quote from Phil Hooker, Rockstar's director of technology, to support this point. "The game is never completely settled," Hooker says.

"We never have an exact blueprint," he continues. "Even within the last few months, we've changed things."

That may sound somewhat drastic, but it's very normal in the industry, even outside releases of the scale of a new Grand Theft Auto. Devs are frequently tinkering and making adjustments right up to launch day, and then immediately thereafter, hence Day One patches and the like.

Modern games are living documents, and with the sheer amount going on in GTA 6, I can only imagine all the minute adjustments happening right now. The 13-year gap since the last one has created unprecedented attention and expectation. Rockstar has claimed literal drones have floated around the studio's windows, hoping to catch a glimpse of Leonida.

We'll all get to see it in motion come November 19, good, bad, or indifferent. I'm sure it'll have been worth the wait.

After avoiding GTA 5 for 13 years, Trevor actor says he's excited for GTA 6 and might even stream it

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake is generating a massive amount of buzz, but given the proximity of its November 5 release date to the launch of GTA 6. it's difficult not to compare the games. But according to Tyler Bahl, Activision's chief marketing officer, GTA and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 make up the real one-two punch of 2026.

"Well, no offense to Zelda, but I think these are the two biggest games of the year," Bahl tells The Game Business. There's no denying that GTA 6 is the biggest game of the year, but how do Zelda and Call of Duty compare?

Mat Piscatella of analyst group Circana notes that purchase intent for Modern Warfare 4 is sitting around 15%, meaning that the group figures about 15% of console and PC players in the US intend to pick up the game. For the Ocarina of Time remake, purchase intent is 10.4%, but remember – that's across all PC and console players, and the game is a Switch 2 exclusive.

"On a per potential player rate, the intent on Ocarina is far higher," Piscatella says.

Call of Duty remains a juggernaut, but it's one whose stature has certainly diminished over the years, and new releases don't carry the same weight they once did. Purchase intent on Modern Warfare 4 is down from Black Ops 7 last year, which in turn was considered enough of a disappointment to completely derail Xbox's Game Pass strategy.

So yes, Call of Duty is likely going to be bigger than Zelda. But if Modern Warfare 4 and Ocarina of Time are heavyweight boxers, then GTA 6 is Godzilla – a monster so massive that every other game is an ant by comparison. It doesn't matter if you're a little bigger than the other guy when you're both facing down a literal behemoth.

Even so, Bahl sees GTA 6's launch as a potential positive for Call of Duty. "I think, in a lot of ways, more people coming into the dashboards, more people taking the dust off their Xbox or PlayStation and starting to play again and loading up that experience is going to be more eyeballs for us," he says.

These are the best Call of Duty games.

I'm not a gambling man. But if I were, this year's Game of the Year winner at The Game Awards has a clear favorite. The cut-off for eligibility across all categories at the 2026 event has been announced, and it gives just enough time for GTA 6 to slide in.

Per official criteria from The Game Awards, the cutoff is Friday, November 20. Any and all candidates for the trophies must be publicly available for purchase by then. When does GTA 6 arrive? November 19.

That's convenient, isn't it? The rules around the awards have been etched in stone for years now, and it's probably a stretch to say Rockstar aimed to get the new Grand Theft Auto in time to definitely qualify, but it'll likely have been seen as a worthwhile bonus.

The Game Awards gets a lot of eyes within the industry. It has helped bolster a proper awards circuit that elevated the likes of Baldur's Gate 3 and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 while they were cleaning up sales wise.

Given the amount of time and investment, I'm certain Take-Two and Rockstar would like GTA 6 to be topping every sales chart for months on end and racking up all the trophies and statues it can manage.

Looking at the field right now, Saros, Slay the Spire 2, and Resident Evil: Requiem are likely to be nominated from what's already out. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake is probably the one to watch for GTA 6, but who knows.

As I say, I don't gamble. But the fact Grand Theft Auto 6 will be in the mix definitely tilts the odds.

As if you needed another reminder of why GTA 6 took so long, it has a realistic sweat system that makes Jason and Lucia perspire based on how hard they dance

The GTA 6 launch trailer is here, formally ushering in the next era of Grand Theft Auto after more than a decade post-GTA 5.

Rockstar shared the new trailer earlier today, "featuring the debut of 'Flower in a Hurricane' from original score composers Justice feat. Tame Impala, SZA, and King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard," and confirming that this song will appear on the official GTA 6 soundtrack album.

The short trailer sees the dual protagonists, Jason and Lucia, open up about their struggles. Jason notably sports long hair for much of the trailer; in the opening seconds, he discusses the obstacles he's faced after a less-than-glamorous military departure. Lucia is seen sporting a monitoring anklet during an intimate shower scene, and at one point wonders, "Are we gonna be OK" amid a storm of crime.

Rockstar was in a very helicopter mood with this trailer. One helicopter crashes behind an assault rifle-toting Jason, Lucia rides another through the streets with a grenade launcher in hand, and in a third sequence a chopper is shown carrying a chained load of (presumably stolen) cargo through the city like a wrecking ball, shattering a row of windows on another building. A once-again short-haired Jason emerges from a helicopter in the next shot, only to cut to him and Lucia jumping off a roof into some sort of hotel pool.

"Jason and Lucia have always known the deck is stacked against them," reads the video description. "But when an easy score goes wrong, they find themselves on the darkest side of the sunniest place in America, in the middle of a criminal conspiracy stretching across the state of Leonida — forced to rely on each other more than ever if they want to make it out alive."

The early response from Grand Theft Auto fans is unsurprisingly enormous, with millions piling into Rockstar's accounts across social media. The trailer crossed 1 million views on YouTube in about half an hour, if you can trust overwhelmed metrics. In the comments, GTA 6 hopefuls express disbelief at finally having a launch trailer in their hands. "I thought I would never live this moment," reads one top comment.

"We are really at the finish line!!!" says another fan.

Grand Theft Auto 6 is out November 19 on PS5 and Xbox Series X. The launch trailer was captured on PS5, with a clear PlayStation marketing push bookending it.

As if you needed another reminder of why GTA 6 took so long, it has a realistic sweat system that makes Jason and Lucia perspire based on how hard they dance.

Steven Ogg, the actor best known for playing Trevor in GTA 5, spent many years pretending the game didn't exist, but 13 years later, he's fully embracing his role in making it so special. For a few weeks now, Ogg has been participating in a series of GTA 5 livestreams hosted by his co-star, Michael actor Ned Luke, and in the latest episode, Ogg not only acknowledges GTA 6's existence – he expresses vague excitement for the sequel and even floats the idea of streaming it alongside Luke. Progress.

This is a huge flip from February 2025, when Ogg denied the common perception that he "hates" GTA but maintained that he wouldn't be playing GTA 6. It seems Ogg has had a change of heart, as he sounds much more enthusiastic about Rockstar's upcoming behemoth these days.

"We should also do this with the new one, when the GTA 6 comes out," Ogg tells Luke, immediately reminding everyone he doesn't play games by referring to it as the GTA 6. "Because, obviously, it's gonna be so fucking different, and talking about the animation, and... it'd be kind of fun."

Luke definitely agrees with Ogg's idea, telling him he plans to finish his playthrough of GTA 5 before GTA 6 comes out on November 19, clearing the way for a smooth transition into streaming the next game. In a fascinating exchange, Ogg asks Luke if he's "in touch with... them," seemingly referring to Rockstar, and Luke, seemingly caught off guard, pauses before saying "no," and laughing nervously as Ogg spins around in his chair mischievously. "You're like one of the guys at the Comic-Cons, man" Luke says. "Well, I can tell you but then I'd have to kill you."

Ogg then continues about his interest in GTA 6, saying he's "curious about the actors .. and the game itself, those characters, versus this, GTA 5, which obviously I learn more and more about over the 12 years."

Admittedly, it's unclear from Ogg's tone and general vagueness of speech whether he's genuinely excited for GTA 6 or if he's just shooting the shit with an old friend and colleague, but either way, this is a huge step forward from when he was seemingly ignoring the series' existence altogether.

GTA 6 took 13 years, but GTA 7 won't – Rockstar says "the tools and the team we've built during this project will allow us to do things more quickly" in the future

Jason and Lucia are going to work up a sweat in Grand Theft Auto 6 – literally. Among the many detailed systems Rockstar built for the game is one that sees realistic sweat gather on characters' bodies depending on how much effort they're exerting in physical activities. No wonder GTA 6 has taken so long to make.

Earlier today, Bloomberg's Jason Schreier published an extended report on GTA 6's development, confirming that it was once meant to feature a more extensive open world spread across North and South America. While the scale of the project was eventually reined in, it's still a game being built at a level of detail rarely seen even in the biggest AAA games. That's partly why there have been so many delays – to the chagrin of Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick. The sweat system is one such example.

"They told me that they have a specific system in the game that will make it so Lucia, Jason, or whoever will exert different amounts of sweat depending on how much effort they're putting in," Schreier says in a YouTube video published alongside the report. "If they're dancing extra hard in the nightclub, they will sweat more than if they are not, which I think shows you the level of detail they're putting into this game."

Video game sweat was once a regular indicator of technological development. With each new console generation, another NBA 2K game would arrive with athletes dripping ever more realistically. Game characters sweating? Now that's the future. That's next-gen.

I'm not sure sweat alone is going to be a selling point for GTA 6, but the sum of all those detailed gameplay and world systems – the weight gain mechanic, the weather, even that robustly detailed iguana – is intended to give us one of the most immersive and believable open-world sandboxes ever created. That's a high bar for any dev to meet, but Rockstar seems comfortable enough with that level of expectation.

Rockstar still won't reveal the cost of GTA 6 development, but it's definitely not the previously rumored $1.5 billion.

GTA 6 has suffered its fair share of leaks now, with 25 minutes of new gameplay having gone live last week – and it hasn't been easy for Rockstar Games, to say the least.

Artist Aaron Garbut tells Bloomberg as much during a recent interview, describing leaks as a line crossed – a look into something personal, and unprepared for the public. "It feels like somebody's wading through your dirty washing," he says. "It's like they're inside your head."

That makes sense, honestly… and that first major GTA 6 leak in 2022 was when this awful feeling really started to hit the developers.

"You see your early work out there," Garbut describes. "Nobody's ever supposed to see that. It's really weirdly invasive. And so it's quite hard to deal with on an emotional level."

I can only imagine myself – and it certainly doesn't help that the leaks haven't slowed down at all, really, despite Rockstar taking legal action against folks responsible for them in the past. The cryptocurrency-fueled GTA 6 leak (leaks, more like) from "Cyberleek" comes to mind.

That whole debacle was supposedly spurred by demands for digital rights, more physical copies, and such, with claims to be "raising funds for a secret project" (via crypto, of course) – but it's now apparently dead after the leaker behind it saw their meme coin crash and fall some $20 million short of their market cap goal.

They set the goal as a precursor to leaking the entirety of GTA 6, supposedly… even though the full game is, uh, out next month.

So, will we see any more GTA 6 leaks come to light? I'd wager we won't, considering the November 19 release date and all, but who knows – Rockstar's cookin' up one heck of a massive game, and there's bound to be quite a lot that we've not seen out of it yet.
I'm not sure it would count as "dirty washing" at this point, either, seeing as it's so, so close to launch. I'd say it likely qualifies as clean and then some.

GTA 6 took 13 years, but GTA 7 won't – Rockstar says "the tools and the team we've built during this project will allow us to do things more quickly" in the future

Rockstar Games still won't reveal just how much GTA 6 has cost to develop, but one person involved has shot down the idea that the game has a $1.5 billion budget.

Given the 13-year wait for GTA 6, it's probably safe to assume that Rockstar and Take-Two have spent a lot of money on the project. The game has been worked on in one way or another since at least the mid 2010s, with Rockstar North co-studio head Rob Nelson confirming the studio was working on a version of the game dubbed "Project Americas" – which would've seen the story take place across both North and South America – back in 2015 before the studio shifted focus to work on Red Dead Redemption 2.

Rockstar and Take-Two have kept quiet on just how much the game has and will cost to develop, but a popular guess came from analyst Michael Pachter, who estimated that development costs would exceed $1.5 billion last year, which has since become a popular assumption online.

Speaking to Bloomberg's Jason Schrier, Rockstar Games' head of publishing, Jennifer Kolbe, was asked about the game's budget. While no concrete answer was given, Schrier notes that she shot down the rumor that the game would surpass $1.5 billion. Granted, that doesn't mean the game's budget won't be one of the largest in gaming history – I'd be surprised if it wasn't – but until the actual number is shared, we won't know for sure.

That being said, GTA 6 is likely going to be a massive release, with everyone expecting it to be one of the biggest game launches of all time – if not the biggest – after 13 years of feverish hype. Given that co-studio head Aaron Garbut said the game doesn't compromise on detail or scale, I'd wager that Rockstar is confident it'll recoup whatever it spent on GTA 6 pretty quickly.

Rockstar vowed GTA 6 wouldn't be finished "by crunching" after Red Dead Redemption 2's tough development, says publishing lead: "I think we did things differently, and I'm proud of that"

GTA 6 leaker Cyberleek has once again called it quits after their meme coin not only failed to meet the $30 million market cap goal meant to trigger the release of a purportedly playable build of the game, but flamed out entirely.

In a series of posts to their website later shared online, Cyberleek insists that the coin crash wasn't their fault. Rather, somebody else dumped their coin stock, "everyone else sold, and CL was blamed for the crowd's dump."

"The token was always a donation, never an investment," the meme coin merchant argues. "No returns promised, none implied. Rugpull talk comes from people who never opened the chain. Mostly YouTubers. Do not trust them. They have no idea what they are talking about."

Instead, you should trust the anonymous architect of a double-crash crypto grift explicitly designed to profit off of stolen property by siphoning transaction fees.

With profits dry, Cyberleek's coincidentally decided not to release details or footage of GTA 6's ending either. "It was considered," they say. "It would punish [GTA 6 publisher] Take-Two greatly – but ruin the experience for the gamers, who did nothing wrong."

"Take-Two was punished enough," the leaker decides. So, "the ending stays unpublished." To prove that they actually have all of this material, Cyberleek points to the latest batch of leaked footage, which allegedly came "from the final missions, out of context, revealing nothing."

Seemingly looking to fend off investigations into their identity or actions against their accounts, Cyberleek claims to have a "dead man's switch" ready to unleash "story spoilers" – which, to me, seems like a paper tiger so thin you could see your hand through it.

"The 30M was not reached, so no build," the leaker says with a harumph. "Sad, the negativity – and how few believe anything real is behind this," they add, again blaming "influencers" for tarnishing the reputation of their scam. "The leeks stop here. For now," they conclude.

GTA 6 now has a wealth of proper footage out in the wild, Rockstar is actively discussing the game's development with the press, and the game is finally out next month. Between the nose-wrinkling crypto grift and general leak fatigue, everyone seems tired of this whole song and dance. To quote one reply to a thread sharing Cyberleek's messages: "I'm so tired of this cornball bro."

GTA 6 took 13 years, but GTA 7 won't – Rockstar says "the tools and the team we've built during this project will allow us to do things more quickly" in the future.

After Red Dead Redemption 2's crunchy development, Rockstar decided "'we're not doing it again like this'" for GTA 6, the studio's head of publishing says, and she's "proud" that the studio changed things for its latest title.

In an interview with Bloomberg, head of publishing Jennifer Kolbe says that the development of Red Dead Redemption 2 was "a real moment for Rockstar to look at itself," even before the company began receiving backlash over reports of crunch for the staffers bringing the 2018 action adventure to life.

"We all looked at each other and said, 'We're not doing it again like this,'" Kolbe says, explaining that she and other fellow leads at Rockstar promised at the time that GTA 6 would be handled differently.

"I said, 'We're not going to finish this game by crunching,'" she continues. This involved Rockstar introducing new policies that would offer paid time off to make up for extra hours they'd worked, and sometimes offer workers more pay. Kolbe admits, "It's not been perfect," but even so, "It's certainly better than Red Dead 2 was."

She knows that if she were to declare that Rockstar hasn't crunched on GTA 6, "someone is going to say, 'I did,'" and that's not something she wants to "get into arguments" over. However, she concludes: "I think we did things differently, and I'm proud of that."

While Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick also previously indicated that GTA 6 was delayed to avoid crunch, that didn't stop some employees from alleging back in July that crunch is so common at the studio that it's "built into" contracts, and that they have to "opt out" of it. But, if Kolbe is to be believed, this is at least a better setup than the devs had for Red Dead Redemption 2.

GTA 6 was delayed for years after Rockstar scaled back "Project Americas," which would have been set across North and South America.

The two GTA 6 delays might have been frustrating for you, but they were definitely worse for Strauss Zelnick, CEO of the game's publisher, Take-Two Interactive, who reportedly asked the unfortunate Rockstar dev who told him about them if they were "kidding."

Speaking to Bloomberg, Rockstar's head of publishing, Jennifer Kolbe, said she had to call up Zelnick twice - once when GTA 6 was delayed out of Fall 2025 to a May 2026 date, and then again to say that it needed a second delay, this time from May to November. The second time, Zelnick struggled to take the news.

"I think he said, 'You're kidding. Please tell me you're kidding'," Kolbe says of her second call with Zelnick. Thankfully, the Take-Two CEO was pretty understanding in the end: "Once we talked through why, he got it. And I think we are really lucky that he is as reasonable as he is, because a lot of people would say 'you just better figure out how to ship it'. And we have been really, really lucky that we have not found ourselves in that place, because that happens to a lot of teams, and we've all played those games. It's not great."

We've definitely seen the results of games that are pushed too early - Cyberpunk 2077 springs immediately to mind, in spite of its redemption arc, but many others have launched too soon and never gathered the momentum they needed to thrive. Granted, in this case, Zelnick is in the enviable position of having the biggest launch of the decade waiting in the wings, meaning the extra year of investment in GTA 6 will probably amount to little more than a rounding error in its eventual bottom line.

GTA 6 took 13 years, but GTA 7 won't – Rockstar says "the tools and the team we've built during this project will allow us to do things more quickly" in the future.

Rockstar North co-studio head and GTA 6 lead developer Rob Nelson explains that the open-world game has taken so long to come out, in part, due to a scrapped version dubbed "Project Americas."

I don't know if anyone really noticed, but Rockstar Games has taken quite a while to follow up GTA 5 and release GTA 6. While we've had the massive Red Dead Redemption 2 in the meantime, the 13-year wait for GTA 6 has made fans quite feverish to play the next game in Rockstar's iconic crime series. Many assumed Rockstar was working on a rotation of GTA and Red Dead games, as GTA 6 was only confirmed to be in development in 2022. However, the first plans for GTA 6 began not too long after the last entry was released.

Speaking to Bloomberg, Nelson confirmed that in 2015 a number of Rockstar staffers flew to Miami on their first research trip for GTA 6. At that time, the game was code-named "Project Americas," with the aim of featuring parts of North and South America on its map. Rather than every studio working on one title, the plan was for Rockstar North to develop GTA 6 concurrently with Rockstar San Diego's development of Red Dead Redemption 2.

However, as the scale of Red Dead Redemption 2 grew, Nelson realized the game required Rockstar's involvement at large, meaning that GTA 6 had to be pushed back for several years to get its western epic across the finish line. However, this meant that when GTA 6 finally did release, things the team built would "pay off when we get to the game."

Nelson confirmed that while Rockstar typically works on multiple games across its many studios, the bulk of the company's staff across the 11 Rockstar studios are now working on one project at a time.

GTA 6 is coming to PC in just a few months according to new report, with Rockstar moving much faster than it did with GTA 5 and Red Dead Redemption 2

Although GTA 6 has taken a whopping 13 years to come to fruition following Grand Theft Auto 5, Rockstar promises that shouldn't be the case with GTA 7 or any other future projects, as it's got everything it needs to get 'em out more quickly.

Phil Hooker, technical director at Rockstar, tells Bloomberg as much during a new interview, explaining that the foundation developers have built while creating GTA 6 – an entry that's arriving over a decade after predecessor GTA 5 launched back in 2013 – will help them work more efficiently on any future projects, like Grand Theft Auto 7.

They've got a solid team, engine, and "tools" to use, after all, as Hooker says.

"The engine, the tools and the team we've built during this project will allow us to do things more quickly," he describes. "I feel confident that we can build on top of this and go more sideways than upwards to build more compelling content."

Artist Aaron Garbut agrees, chiming in, "We foundationally changed a lot of stuff on this project – but now it's done, and we're not going to rip it apart." And, honestly, why would they?

There's no telling what "things" Rockstar will do "more quickly," whether that's GTA 7 or a smaller spin-off like Vice City, which was created in under a year after GTA 3 itself, but it's good news regardless.

The wait between Grand Theft Auto games has been a gruelling one, to say the least, marred by widespread layoffs and delays, so hearing that we might not have to witness another like it comes as a welcome report.

Here's hoping this all rings true and GTA 7 – or whatever Rockstar has up its sleeve after GTA 6 – arrives in under a decade, or perhaps even five years… but I might be jumping the gun, considering how huge the new Grand Theft Auto seems.

GTA 6 is coming to PC in just a few months according to new report, with Rockstar moving much faster than it did with GTA 5 and Red Dead Redemption 2

Reports have emerged that the PC release of GTA 6 could arrive much sooner than Rockstar Games' typical PC release schedule would suggest, with it reportedly set to drop before the end of March 2027.

A GTA 6 PC port is inevitable, obviously, but Rockstar has typically made PC players wait for its biggest games to come to PC. GTA 5 took 19 months to arrive on PC after its original Xbox 360 and PS3 release back in September 2013 (although it also had PS4 and Xbox One ports in the meantime), while Red Dead Redemption 2 took just over a year to come to PC – and neither beats the 14 years it took for Red Dead Redemption to leave consoles. So naturally, many expect we won't see GTA 6 on PC until November 2027 at the earliest, but reports suggest Rockstar could be breaking its trend.

According to four sources speaking to GamesBeat, Rockstar is reportedly planning to release GTA 6 on PC in the first quarter of 2027, which would be significantly earlier than a typical Rockstar release schedule.

Last month, Strauss Zelnick, CEO of Take-Two, the owner of Rockstar, was asked whether the shortage of PS5 Pro consoles following the GTA 6 Extended Look had prompted any changes to the PC release strategy. While Zelnick didn't confirm anything outright, he did say that "the PC platform is becoming more and more important to our company over time."

If these rumors are true, I'd imagine we won't hear anything about the GTA PC port until after GTA 6 releases on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S. Everyone is expecting GTA 6 to be the biggest launch of all time, and I'd wager Rockstar doesn't want to lose out on any potential buyers who are happy to wait an extra four months. Not to mention, a lot of people very likely double-dipped on GTA 5 and Red Dead Redemption 2 after they got ported to PC.

Despite new GTA 6 leaks, Cyberleek's cryptocurrency remains over $20 million short of its goal amid threats to release Rockstar's next game early

One of Rockstar's narrative leads says that GTA 6's Vice City setting is the ideal place to check in on a popular recurring theme within Grand Theft Auto: T he American Dream.

Rockstar has made its approach to real-world influences quite clear of late. The team behind GTA 6 will comment on wider trends that won't go out of date when the game ships, which is also why more specific events or people prove riskier.

One topic that Rockstar's senior vice president of narrative name-checked, though, is the American Dream and how it looks and feels today compared to years gone by.

"Some would say the American Dream collapsed a long time ago," Humphries tells Love Magazine in its latest edition, now on sale. "With GTA 4 we told an immigrant's story that was supposed to be a kind of hollow commentary on the illusion of America as a land of opportunity, and then we sort of doubled down on that with the cynicism of GTA 5."

Considering that GTA 5 released in 2013, where does that leave us as we near the end of 2026? For Humphries, the dream is diluted into something less grand, yet it still remains out of reach for many.

"Maybe the American Dream is more modest now," he muses. "It's a house for your family and your loans are paid off instead of wild success – but maybe today, that is just as out of reach for the average person.

"Miami and Southern Florida are a particular front line for this battle between astronomical wealth and unbounded ambition, creating a pressure cooker for all kinds of insanity."

It's easy to see what might be shaping Humphries' thinking. The cost of living is rising while keeping employment feels shaky. You can see this in the gaming industry itself, where layoffs remain rampant as the cost of developing games continues to surge.

A misplaced sense of optimism that the spending highs of COVID-19 certainly didn't get this off to a good start, though a willingness to spend has further dwindled thanks to the likes of AI and tariffs making most things you come across costlier than ever. And no doubt, the pinch is being felt in the US.

So yeah, to Humphries' point, I suppose being a homeowner with little debt to worry about does feel like a dream right now.

Rockstar has a whole team of GTA 6 writers dedicated to pedestrian dialogue: "There are no shortcuts when it comes to building a world like this"

GTA 6 is evidently still suffering from quite significant leaks left, right, and center, with 25 minutes of new gameplay going live last week – but I'm not sure Rockstar is currently worrying about the whole of its latest Grand Theft Auto entry going live early.

Following the cryptocurrency-fueled GTA 6 leak that was supposedly spurred by demands for digital rights, more physical copies, and such, with claims to be "raising funds for a secret project" (via crypto, of course), things went silent… for a bit, anyway.

The leaker behind it, as well as its associated crypto coin, Cyberleek, returned with more footage on October 8, though, and threats to release the entirety of GTA 6 over the weekend.

As per said threats, Cyberleek once again demanded "physical disks and a public apology," stating that the full build of the game would go live once their cryptocurrency market cap hits $30 million.

The thing is, however, that doesn't currently look like it's happening. A quick look at the coin's standing on OpenSea shows it's been steadily dropping from a peak of $7.6 million yesterday. Right now, it's at only $2.7 million.

While it appears to perhaps be trending slightly upward again, it did so (very minimally) a few times while on its way down from that $7.6 million figure, too – so I'm not sure it's enough to prove the coin is heading toward the number Cyberleek is hoping for.

As per their own message, again, the cryptocurrency needs to reach $30 million before "the build goes out, full story mode, played to the end, credits and all."

So, will that happen? Although I'm not sure, I'm also not certain it really matters. Something tells me Cyberleek will resurface with some sort of new leak regardless to keep its crypto coin (and name) relevant in the public eye, which has happened now a couple of times.

When that might be – should it even happen – remains a mystery, as does whether or not Cyberleek will successfully avoid the wrath of Rockstar Games.

Rockstar has a whole team of GTA 6 writers dedicated to pedestrian dialogue: "There are no shortcuts when it comes to building a world like this"

Rockstar Games created an entire team dedicated to what some might consider "background noise" for GTA 6.

The tidbit comes from GTA 6 developers who recently spoke to Love magazine about the open-world epic. Rockstar's senior vice president of narrative, Rupert Humphries, says there's "an amazing team of writers and creatives" focused on creating the "'background noise' that makes the city and the world come to life."

According to Humphries, that includes a "specific team of pedestrian dialogue writers in LA and then a team of advertising and comedy writers across New York, LA, and London." He adds: "It's a team from all sorts of backgrounds and walks of life, but we all share a sense of humor and a desire to have a bit of fun with the ridiculousness of humans and the media and advertising. And none of us see it as background! It's all part of the tapestry of the game and creates the experience of living in this wild world."

Open world writing director, James Horton, says the studio apparently "dreamed a lot bigger this time around," building entire teams for details that might be after thoughts in other open-world games.

"There are no shortcuts when it comes to building a world like this: it's a question of giving the right people the resources they need to build something that's not only vast and varied as a whole, but where every part rings true no matter how small it is, or how closely you look at it," Horton explains. "It needs to wash over you when you're sprinting down the busiest street in the city, hearing snatches of a hundred different conversations as you go; and it needs to be totally convincing if you decide to stop and pay close attention to any one of those conversations."

Horton even argues that, in some ways, there's "no background" in GTA 6. The difference between "background" and "foreground" simply depends on whatever the player is paying attention to at any given moment. Focus on a random NPC, and you might find a character with their own interesting inner life. "No one you meet is an extra; they're not only full characters, everyone you meet is the main character in their own story," Horton continues.

GTA 6 radio stations revealed, Rockstar says "for the first time" in Grand Theft Auto history there are also in-game podcasts

The notorious GTA 6 leaker known only by their online moniker Cyberleek is back with a new threat. Should their memecoin's market cap hit $30 million, Cyberleek says they'll release a start-to-finish playable build of Rockstar Games' long-awaited open worlder.

Cyberleek's threat, posted to their website and reposted elsewhere online, also gives parent company Take-Two an ultimatum of sorts. The leaker says Take-Two can make this whole fiasco go away by printing physical GTA 6 discs and issuing a public apology.

"Here's the deal, nice and clean. CYBERLEEK hits 30 million marketcap, the build goes out — full story mode, played to the end, credits and all," the leaker writes on their website. "Don't believe it has full story mode? Ask for what you want to see, and it gets provided. Take-Two gets one way out: physical disks and a public apology. They can take it at any moment. Or they can gamble that CL is bluffing. Everyone knows which one they'll pick."

This isn't the first time Cyberleek's made demands around physical games. An older manifesto railed against practices such as digital pre-orders, "fake" single-player DLC and code-in-a-box physical editions - though game preservation group Stop Killing Games disagreed with the leaker's methods: "Using illegal means to make a point is unacceptable to us and does nothing to protect our right to keep using what we paid for."

The latest drama comes days after Cyberleek released roughly 24-minutes of new GTA 6 footage showing everything from a first-person mode to a nude Jason and in-game racing events. An even more recent leak supposedly features gameplay from a topless Lucia's perspective.

GTA 6's history with leakage goes back years, though the Cyberleek saga only kicked off in earnest earlier this summer when the hacker - or hacking group - shed light on the game's map well before its Netflix blowout. Many thought the drama would've ended when Cyberleek squeezed $250,000 out of their crypto scheme before going radio silent for weeks.

Rockstar previously addressed the leaks and called them "heartbreaking for our team," while warning that any leaked footage might contain spoilers.

GTA 6 shows Jason nude, and fans are wondering if Rockstar will go full Red Dead Redemption 2: "Those horse balls physics gotta go somewhere"

A former Naughty Dog veteran who worked on The Last of Us and Uncharted 4 is more excited about the idea of shorter games rather than "monolithic" blockbusters like GTA 6 or The Elder Scrolls 6.

Matt Radford was a visual effects artist on some of Naughty Dog's biggest hits before opening his own studio called 5th Corner, and he recently spoke about the merits of shorter games in an interview with Kiwi Talkz (embedded below).

"I'm 38 years old," Radford says. "And I think that there's also something intimidating to me about a GTA 6 or, you know, another Elder Scrolls. I, personally, am really looking for shorter experiences that are focused [and] that I have a great time with. That excites me probably more."

Part of his reasoning is the time available to him and other players. A game that runs for upwards of 50 hours can be a huge time sink that's simply not feasible for a huge portion of people to complete, while shorter campaigns can be enjoyed in a weekend or two.

"Even The Last of Us 2, I thought, was so long… I really loved those earlier Uncharted games when they were like 6 to 8 hours," he adds.

The other part of the equation is the ballooning budgets of video game development. Modern AAA games can cost over $200 or $300 million to produce, but those costs might be able to come down if studios focused on tighter experiences.

"GTA 6 is gonna be awesome, I'm sure," he continues. "And I think collectively as an industry we want it to succeed. No gamer will be happy if it failed because it would not be a good sign for the business."

GTA 6 shows Jason nude, and fans are wondering if Rockstar will go full Red Dead Redemption 2: "Those horse balls physics gotta go somewhere"

The original driving system in Grand Theft Auto was led by veteran programmer Pat Kerr, who's credited as saving the game's cars by Rockstar veteran Obbe Vermeij. Some 30 years later, Kerr's revisited that pioneering vehicle tech in a new demo you can play for yourself.

"In the early days of GTA1 development, the driving just wasn’t fun," Vermeij recalls. "Then Pat Kerr, who is handy with physics but wasn’t even on the team, dropped in some driving code that fixed it. He’s now published a playable demo using those same ideas. It’s remarkable how much it feels like GTA1—especially the handbrake (space)."

That demo, recreated in JavaScript, shows a "slightly prettier, 'remastered' form, for anyone who is interested in seeing or playing" the bones of Grand Theft Auto. With GTA 6 promising fabulously detailed and simulated cars ripping through the streets of fictional Florida, things have obviously changed quite a bit, but this is where the series' titular auto component got started.

"One weekend in late August 1996, I wrote a 2D physics simulation which later became the basis of the vehicle system in the eventually popular game 'Grand Theft Auto' aka 'GTA,'" Kerr says casually, stressing that this work is independent and not associated with Rockstar, Take-Two, or GTA.

"At the core of the system is a simple classical 2D rigid body dynamics simulation," Kerr explains. "From what I can tell, this approach was not yet common in games at the time (with some notable exceptions), and most game vehicles were done using basic high-school ‘point physics’ (F = ma), with any rotational component being handled by various wonky 'hacks.' Using proper rigid-body physics (including torques) handles rotation more coherently.

"On top of that core, I then added a 'novel' vehicle simulation layer, based on a simple, approximate, and technically incorrect model of how tyres behave. It was basically a semi-educated guess on my part and, although I knew it wasn't really physically accurate, it nevertheless seemed to be 'good enough' for my purposes at the time."

Here's my somewhat simpler analysis of this driving system demo: I like the way turning feels. More seriously, the movement arm attached to your vehicle is a helpful way to visualize what's happening physically when turns impact your acceleration, and the red trail indicating the bite of your tires on turns or handbrake maneuvers likewise helps demonstrate these effects. If you played a lot of the original GTA (which, as a reminder, looks like this), this will probably feel familiar.

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

The GTA 6 Wanted Levels have received a significant overhaul, meaning they won't just be conveying how much trouble you're in with the law by the number of stars you've racked up. The stars will also take on different appearances in GTA 6, so you can tell if the local police are simply investigating a crime or have your details and are actively hunting you down. Add in the new Heat system that reveals exactly what information the cops have and there's a lot to take in, so let me explain how that and the Wanted Levels in GTA 6 will work.

We've also got details of the GTA 6 side activities you can take part in, plus the radio stations and songs revealed so far from the GTA 6 soundtrack.

GTA 6 Wanted Level explained

The GTA 6 Wanted Level meter has been increased to six stars, allowing for great nuances between the different measures of threat from the cops, so don't expect them to come after you guns blazing as soon as you get your initial star. For the first time in the series, these wanted stars will also take on different appearances to indicate various statuses, and by cross-referencing footage from the Extended Look with preview coverage I believe they mean the following:

1. Black and White Stars: The cops are investigating a crime but don't know who you are, so avoid drawing attention to yourself and you can slip away.
2. Gray Stars: The cops are investigating a crime and know information about who you are, based on the Heat icons underneath (see below) so are actively searching for you.
3. White Stars: The cops are actively pursuing you and have you in sight.
4. Red Stars: You have evaded the cops, but they still have information on you based on the Heat icons (see below) so you need to lose those before they identify you again.

At higher star Wanted Levels it looks like your minimap becomes obscured with red and blue flashing lights, so you can't use it to track the movements of any cops around you. Instead, you'll need to use your eyes to spot any police threats and lay low to avoid them.

GTA 6 Heat system explained

In addition to your Wanted Level stars, the GTA 6 Heat system uses a selection of red icons displayed in the top-right corner of the screen to indicate what clues the cops are using to track you down, supplied by eye witnesses to your actions or from the police's own observations. We've seen six of these so far, which I've marked above as follows:

1. Security camera footage
2. Accomplice
3. Clothing
4. Face
5. Weapon
6. Vehicle

Losing the cops will be harder the more of these Heat markers you have active, so where possible you should take preventative actions such as wearing a mask or face covering and avoiding or taking out security cameras. Once they're there, actions such as hiding weapons or changing clothes will lose that Heat, and the effect appears to be instant – after the car chase escape in the Extended Look, the red Vehicle Heat icon disappears the moment Lucia steps out of Raul's car.

If you have the Accomplice Heat marker, you can lose it by splitting up Jason and Lucia to go their separate ways. However, if either one of them gets caught during this time then you still get Busted by the cops, so you can't sacrifice your partner in order to make a quick escape yourself.

© GamesRadar+. Not to be reproduced without permission.

There are many lingering questions about GTA 6, and a significant amount of them center around Jason's nude body. After it was confirmed we get to see the protagonist in his birthday suit, the collective audience for Rockstar's upcoming crime sandbox have been pondering the finer details of his naked self – and making a few memes.

It all stems from a preview by IGN that notes they got to see Jason fully unclothed for a shower scene. The moment was used to demonstrate how you can flip perspectives between Jason and Lucia at will for differing points of view of the same scenes.

People gravitated toward this, prompting the outlet to run another piece mentioning that no, they hadn't seen anything more risqué than Jason's torso. The kind of discreet camera-work you'd expect in Hollywood was employed here to keep everything a little more safe for work. I mean, this was a professional preview event, what would you expect?

But still, inquiring minds have started to ponder, specifically about if Rockstar could be reusing a certain bit of tech from Red Dead Redemption 2. "I wonder if Jason's balls shrink when the water is cold like the RDR2 horse balls," asks GTA GFX on Twitter.

Or, as a Redditor puts it: "Those horse balls physics gotta go somewhere." I mean, if it happens in one game, why not the other?

"Rockstar really said, 'If we’re building the most immersive open world ever, we're committing to everything,'" another account says. Being with the characters during truly intimate moments like this is pretty immersive. Another leak does contain a significant amount of fully nude Jason, in all his glory.

But there's no guarantee of whether that'll make it into the released game. There are a lot of jokes about what we'll see below Jason's waistline, but I'd have to concur with some others – full-frontal is probably unlikely for either hero.

It's rare enough we see it in film or television, and I can only imagine the headache it'd cause when seeking certification. That doesn't mean it definitively won't be included, I just wouldn't expect it, or at least much of it if there's any. But we'll find out for real in just over one month.

GTA 6 radio stations revealed, Rockstar says "for the first time" in Grand Theft Auto history there are also in-game podcasts.

With GTA 6 just over a month away from launch, Rockstar has finally started teasing what we can expect from the best part of every Grand Theft Auto game: the radio stations. The studio has revealed a handful of genre-focused stations covering major artists from across the years, and on top of the proper GTA 6 soundtrack, we're also getting a series first in the form of in-game podcasts.

You can preview six of the stations in two minute bursts right now, offering a chance to hear a bit of the DJs and brief samplers of the relevant music. There's Cocotea FM, focused on modern Latin music; Back Country Radio, which covers classic outlaw country; Afro Bank FM, offering a wide array of African music; The Chamber 106.6, blasting classic metal; Flash FM, which runs modern pop music; and Dirty South Classics, which will hit your old-school rap and hip-hop needs.

These aren't all the stations in the game – the announcement also confirms classic rock and talk radio options – but even this small selection proves that Rockstar is once again going all-out for the soundtrack. Loretta Lynn, Pantera, and Charli XCX all in the same game? That's a premium selection, right there.

"Plus, for the first time ever, Grand Theft Auto VI introduces a series of on-demand podcasts for Jason and Lucia to experience beyond Leonida's terrestrial radio," Rockstar adds, "with both radio and podcasts available to listen to in vehicles and on foot through newly introduced headphones and earbuds connected to their smartphones."

In-game podcasts are hardly a new idea – you can find examples at least as far back as Metal Gear Solid 4 – but it's notable that they're appearing in GTA for the first time here. Admittedly, it's likely not all that different from the talk radio that's been in the series for years, but it is a fun acknowledgement of just how much listening habits have changed since GTA 5 launched back in 2013.

I'm not being facetious when I call the radio stations the best part of GTA. I've always loved fake radio banter in games going back to my time playing Streets of SimCity, and Rockstar's talent for music curation has always been impeccable. So many of my memories of playing San Andreas or GTA 4 are tied to specific moments cruising through the world with particular songs blaring over the car radio in the background, and I'm looking forward to making some new ones in GTA 6.

Check out our guide to all the GTA 6 cars we know about so far if you want to know what you'll be cruisin' in.

GTA 6 leaker Cyberleek has allegedly posted more footage of the game online, with story spoilers apparently included in the latest batch.

Earlier this year, clips of GTA 6 started circulating online ahead of Rockstar's big extended Netflix reveal from a leaker referring to themselves as Cyberleek. This featured a ton of gameplay footage, a leak of the game's apparent map, and some story moments like a four-minute clip of Lucia's prologue in-game, dropping the first batch of story spoilers. Naturally, Take-Two and Rockstar took action against the leaks, but they still persisted, until the leaker seemingly disappeared with about $250,000 in crypto earnings, going silent in late August.

However, it seems the leaker has returned, as Rockstar community member and dataminer TexFunz2 reports on Twitter that "Cyberleek has released 367 MB worth of GTA 6 leaked footage," which is 25 minutes long and "contains new footage and new cutscenes." And while they didn't drop any story details or anything, TexFunz2's only commentary on the footage says: "Yes. You can play as Jason with his ding dong exposed."

Since this was posted, the footage has since been shared on social media by users, confirming the details outlined by TexFunz2. This includes cutscenes, in-game racing events, and a ton of naked Jason gameplay. It also shows first-person gameplay, which had featured in GTA 5 upon its PS4 and Xbox One releases, but a mode hadn't been confirmed by Rockstar for GTA 6, with some who saw the game reporting that one wouldn't be included at launch.

Presumably this footage will soon be taken down by Take-Two and Rockstar, but it does mean spoilers are now out there. So basically, if you don't want any spoilers for GTA 6, I'd probably start muting some terms on social media right about now, because this could be the start of a new string of leaks.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 lead wants GTA 6 to open the door to charging more for games.

In GTA 6, Rockstar Games has made a "very conscious effort to open things up where possible" in its missions, giving players multiple routes and ways to tackle the tasks laid out in front of them "without compromising the quality of the experience."

That's according to Rockstar North co-studio lead Rob Nelson, who spoke to IGN earlier this year about the "balance between freedom and storytelling" in an interview that's now been published in full.

"It is a challenge and sometimes when you are trying to create a specific or hopefully compelling narrative, the narrative aspect does need to take precedence at times – at least for us it does," Nelson explains.

"To move the narrative forward in a believable way, you have to hit these beats, and so in those cases we have to kind of guide the experience. But with this game we have made a very conscious effort to open things up where possible, without compromising the quality of the experience," he continues.

Nelson refers to the first mission seen in the GTA 6 Extended Look which premiered on Netflix, noting: "Where they're in the tower block trying to get out – there are multiple routes out of that tower block." Similarly, he adds, "the mission where they meet Raul and he gets in the back of the car – the first bit is on rails because you, the player as Jason, are shooting and Lucia's driving, but then you switch and you're driving. There is an optimal route that you're told to get out, but if you don't follow it, you can still get out – the mission is essentially a police chase."

And those missions are just examples. Nelson explains that Rockstar ultimately didn't want any mission that uses the game's systems, like the wanted system, to feel at odds with how those mechanics work when you're simply exploring Leonida. "Anything where a mission can become systemic and it's a wanted level or robbery system – we try to make it so that it doesn't feel inconsistent with how the game works in the open world," he says.

If this goes as deep as it sounds, there's no doubt we're going to be seeing all sorts of weird ways to progress through GTA 6's story next month. Considering that Nelson also says that, like Red Dead Redemption 2, he believes GTA 6 is also "built for" fans replaying the game multiple times, it sounds like Rockstar expects this story to keep us entertained for a long time to come.

With sex in GTA 6, studio boss suggests Rockstar doesn't want another Hot Coffee moment: "It has to be done right."