GTA 6: Rockstar Gambles Big on Realism – Is It a Risk Worth Taking?

Scrabble together all the various nuggets of information released about Grand Theft Auto 6 since its big Netflix premiere, and you might spot a pattern emerging: Rockstar is going full, Red Dead Redemption 2-style realism with GTA 6. In fact it sounds like it’s going even further.

A New Level of Immersion

Forget the breezy, plug-and-play action of previous GTAs, where you could steal any car in sight and mow down crowds of bumbling NPCs with abandon. Forget the game you play half-blazed at 3am, or illicitly but easily aged 12, or simply on autopilot to casually unwind from everyday life. GTA 6 sounds like it’s shooting for real life itself. In fact it might actually be so real that at times it’s downright awkward.

Here are a few examples of this shift:

• The Wanted system is changing so you can no longer escape the police by simply driving fast and getting out of their mini-map radius. Now, you might need to change your hairstyle, outfit, vehicle, or even just get out of the car and run away on foot, finding shelter in the game’s vast network of back alleys.
• The new Criminal Profile system seemingly records your deeds, both cruel and kind, impacting how people react to you in the world. No more consequence-free rocket-launching your way out of trouble.
• You’ve also got your relationship to think about – details as small as whether you hold your door open for your partner will impact your relationship, which then impacts how the story unfolds. You can do crimes together or apart.
• On top of that, you’ve got your health to worry about, with your appearance and stats impacted by what you eat, whether you go to the gym, or whether you’re quaffing bougie smoothies from your safehouse fridge or smashing back the beers. The promise is a San Andreas-style system and then some.

And of course, there’s the question of whether you can actually steal that car in the first place. High-end parked vehicles are unyoinkable in the early game – unless you carjack an in-vehicle driver the old-school way – as they come with their own security systems, only bypassed with skills you gain as you progress through the game. They’ll also come with a GPS tracker for good measure, requiring you to drive extra fast to outrun its location capabilities. This tallies with the fact that driving itself, particularly at high speeds, will be “more challenging” in GTA 6, thanks to roads being denser and narrower, more accurately reflecting the real world of Miami and the wider Florida area.

So the overall picture is fairly clear already: GTA 6 is intentionally pushing for realism, and will by design come at the cost of the famous ease at which you can play it. Ease which, if I were to guess, has probably played an enormous part in its unprecedented success, particularly in how GTA consistently breaks out of ‘core gamer’ containment into the typically less patient mainstream.

It seems a gigantic risk. But it’s one I’m frankly delighted Rockstar is taking. For all the “do I also have to manage my bowel movements” comments I’ve seen, and for all I have genuine concerns about whether this might actually be fun (and don’t get me started on the seemingly RDR2-like controls), I am actually glad Rockstar is doing this.

This is, at its core, exactly what we’ve all been talking about for months or years: too many decision-makers have been playing it safe. And ultimately it’s been to their own detriment. Rockstar, here, has the privilege of making something that’s as close as any game has ever come to a guaranteed success. It has an unfathomably large budget. It has seemingly as long as it likes to make it. And with that unparalleled privilege it’s chosen to actually be ambitious. Not ambitious in the typical video game writing sense – read: a big and expensive map with nice graphics. Ambitious as in trying to do something that is not remotely easy.

It’s also perhaps less of a risk when you start to think about what’s truly taken off over the past few years: Elden Ring, Baldur’s Gate 3, even Animal Crossing: New Horizons. These are games that found their way onto the BBC, that your friend who doesn’t play games played, maybe even bought a Switch for during the pandemic. And crucially, these aren’t “casual” games, by most definitions. They’re games with deep, sometimes very deep mechanics, systems that require you to go out of your way, to fail, or to grasp at suspended meaning. The more I think it through the more I’m talking myself out of this being a risk at all. Difficulty and awkwardness can sell too, particular at a time where people increasingly yearn for friction, against the uncanny smoothness of modern digital life.

That said, making refuelling your car fun is still going to be very difficult. As is making me peg it through bins and backyards instead of driving a faux-Ferrari to escape the police. As is managing my Tamagotchi partner and being a not-that-evil baddie and manually scanning every car before I decide to nick it. Rockstar may or may not pull that off. But it could – just look at how good that big Netflix showcase was. And if any studio has an obligation to try, it’s this one.