Grand Theft Auto 6 is mere weeks away, and we can now say that we’ll be playing it ‘next month’, which seems kind of wild. In the run-up to the game’s release, Rockstar Games has been running all over the place with marketing tactics, deep-dive interviews, and social campaigns, and in recent hours, a super-sized piece dropped that was ripe with information.
It’s a full, verbatim run-through of an earlier IGN interview with Rob Nelson of Rockstar North fame. In August, the good folks at IGN had Rob Nelson walk them through live GTA 6 gameplay, and they pulled out the highlights of that interview several weeks ago.
They’re back now, and they’ve published the entire thing, totaling tens of thousands of words, and it has revealed some new information about GTA 6.
Rockstar North Interview Published in Full
IGN’s team woke up today and decided to go HAM and post probably the longest Rockstar interview we’ve seen for GTA 6 to date. It’s a gargantuan, verbatim thing that features every scrap of the conversation they had with Rob Nelson, Head of Development and Co-Studio Head at Rockstar North.
He had the conn as IGN spectated, and as the demo unraveled, he gave up all kinds of information. Most of that information surfaced in recent weeks, but the verbatim interview script revealed a little more juice earlier today.
Folks were quick to jump on the tastier bits, like the revelation that you can switch from controlling Lucia to manipulating Jason, only to find him butt-naked in the shower. Or the tidbit that Lucia can stumble upon a weird side mission with a lawyer who inhabits a dumpster, and part of that mission can see Lucia quite literally leap into the dumpster with him.
What shone through brighter than anything in the interview was the concept of just how alive Leonida will be in Grand Theft Auto 6.
There were remarks made by Nelson about conversations with passengers during taxi rides, or passive car rides where you can let AI control one of the dynamic duo, while you sit back and listen to the radio, chilling out.
Folks on the streets react very dynamically to your presence, recognizing if you’re stalking them, hanging around too close to their conversation, or generally behaving irregularly. The diversity of how situations unfold is immensely deep in GTA 6, Nelson explained, and the same scenario can unfold in several ways, depending on how you act.
The ‘power play’ mechanics run deeper than ever, and you’re no longer the alpha in Grand Theft Auto. Given the nature of the setting, pedestrians might have a concealed carry and will be more capable with it than you might think, potentially trying to stop your crime in progress, or they might just run off and wail on some other NPC without warning.
GTA 6’s dynamic unraveling also works in terms of the relationship between Lucia and Jason. If you’re out wandering the streets of Leonida together, one might suggest an activity to the other, or might even run away unprompted to start something, leaning into the realms of autonomy.
They’re independent entities, and that was detailed further by Nelson in the IGN interview:
We are very excited about some of what we have going on now in the open world with how it reacts to you and the systems we have working together.
We have a lot of emergent, natural-feeling stuff happening pretty often now as you roam around the world. That was truly emergent for me when we drove past that car park and Jason suggested we do that job – I hadn’t actually heard that dialogue from him myself yet. And it worked – I was going to a pawn shop, then Jason said, ‘Should we go do this?’ as we drove by and I changed my mind.
We’ve already heard about how Jason and Lucia’s relationship will evolve and drive much of the narrative in GTA 6, but some folks have concerns about how ‘boring’ it might be to maintain that relationship, when all they want is action. But Nelson said that chemistry has been a huge part of the game’s development, as well as ensuring these characters can stand apart when needed:
Everyone involved worked at that pretty hard. I think we’ve got enough reaction within our team internally to where they feel great as individuals and together.
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Crime and Punishment
Grand Theft Auto would be nothing without a crime-focused gameplay loop. I mean, the clue is in the name. It could have been called ‘Murder’ or ‘Aiding and Abetting,’ and it would have the same outcome. I doubt it would have sold so well if it were called something else, though.
Murder: San Andreas. Arson: Vice City. Burglary: The Lost and Damned.
As Rob Nelson walked IGN through the demo, he made multiple mentions of how crime works in GTA 6.
For instance, something as simple as jacking a car is now a more convoluted, complex thing, and that’s because of the age we live in. There are more anti-theft measures to consider, and more sophisticated cars have more intelligent barriers to overcome.
You might even successfully bust open a car, only to have the police alerted by some kind of tracker system. Even driving a certain way in a car with a ‘black box’ might alert law enforcement.
It’s not so easy to get away from the police now, thanks to surveillance and the transmission of data. What you wear, how your hair is styled, who you’re travelling with, what you’re driving – all of that builds a picture of you as a felon, and the more severe your crime, the more you need to do to reduce the chance of being caught.
That’s not especially new, but Nelson’s verbatim comments shed more light on the concept:
Changing your hair will change your appearance, but the police will still know what you are wearing, so it’s not great if I am standing out in the open.
If you get three stars in the city, it can sometimes be challenging to get away in a vehicle, unless it’s a very fast vehicle or a sports bike. Your best option is usually to do this – get off the streets and get on foot into the alleys.
Now we have heat, and they’ve seen me wearing this; this [outfit] is compromised. But if you take it off, you should be okay. Again, as long as you try not to draw too much attention to yourself, you should be fine.
That focus on technology naturally runs into other areas of our real world, and into one specifically – social media. We always thought that social media and the sharing of content would run rampant in GTA 6, and that’s what earlier trailers led us to believe. But Nelson’s comments suggested that we might be more of a passive participant in that world, as a means of staying hidden from those pesky law enforcement agents:
We have Snapmatic. You have people that you follow and you can also just browse it.
[You can’t post on it] because you’re a couple on the run. You just lurk.
Taking on something like a heist is also dynamic in GTA 6. Like in GTA 5, you can approach one objective from multiple angles, and that extends to robbing a store, for instance. You can blow the safe up with explosives to get in and out faster, but you draw more attention and potentially spoil your take. Alternatively, you can interrogate the staff or find a safe code, which takes longer but maximizes your gains.
If you take too long, you’ll get outside to find the place surrounded by the police, which presents another dynamic in terms of how you escape them through the streets of Leonida and beyond.
Nelson mentioned that simply separating can reduce the weight of the police force chasing you, as it drives them to split their attention, effectively halving those pursuing you:
The police are searching in this area so we have heat now. So, this is a risk. We could wait for it to die down, change our outfits, or split Jason and Lucia up. There’s a lot of smart things we could do, but I’m not really doing them.
I was just being a total idiot. I should have just yelled at Lucia to take off, and that would’ve taken some heat off.
If you decide to shoot it out with your enemies, you’ll find that’s another multi-layered thing. As we’ve seen in some footage, such as the extended gameplay reveal, enemies can be incapacitated with shots to their extremities, or, like in Red Dead Redemption 2, you can blast their weapons out of their hands, causing them to flee to cover or seek another weapon from the ground.
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The Ultimate Exploration
Nelson stressed to IGN that they were seeing a ‘tiny, tiny slice’ of the city, which we know is utterly gargantuan. In the shots and sequences we’ve seen thus far, it’s clear that this world is staggering and sprawling, made up of multiple biomes around the absolutely enormous city hub.
That scope and scale facilitate an impossible number of ways to explore and enjoy the world. When talking about the base campaign, Nelson compared it to Red Dead Redemption 2’s replayability:
It makes me so happy to hear that people play Red Dead Redemption 2 multiple times. I believe that GTA 6 is built for that as well.
There’s a whole lot of stuff that you discover emergently that we’re not necessarily directing you to through objectives or blips or icons on a map as well. If you take a bit of time and explore, you will be rewarded – a lot. It’s a big map, a very big map. This is where we started from – Jason’s little house.
We are always trying to find that balance between freedom and storytelling.
To that end, missions can be approached from several angles, multiple playstyles are accommodated, and what might seem like a linear location can be escaped from or accessed in various ways. It’s only in the most rigid, scripted scenes that you don’t have too much say over how something unfolds.
There are dense stories to unravel, a huge roster of characters to get to know, and more activities than you could handle to master. At the end of the day, Rockstar Games and Rockstar North want players to connect on a transcendent level with Grand Theft Auto 6, the culmination of more than a decade of development.
Jason and Lucia as characters have rich backstories that we sometimes explicitly talk about and sometimes just allude to. I think there is enough detail there if you want to pay attention, but we also have purposely left them with some room for interpretation so that hopefully the connection can be enhanced between the player and these characters.
That is maybe as important as it has ever been for these characters in particular because I think for this story to work for you, for you to buy into this relationship, you have to be able to connect with them in some way. Hopefully a good number of people will feel like they can do that.
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Grant has been gaming for 30+ years and in the industry for 10+. You'll probably find him playing a post-apocalyptic game or an extraction shooter somewhere.
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