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You can also download a 14.2GB 4K copy of the video
If you want to watch the GTA 6 official gameplay reveal without Netflix, it’s up on YouTube now. But if you want to really study it, you can now download a 4K video file direct from Rockstar. (Or at least, when it starts working you can; I can’t get the download to start, presumably because of demand.)
The full GTA 6 gameplay reveal is live on YouTube now
The six hour Netflix exclusive is up! You can watch the full video on YouTube.
The internet is fixating on this weird backflip
Sometimes the social media hives get hung up on visual details that ultimately don’t warrant the intense scrutiny they get—I’m thinking back to that one blowup over Spider-Man puddles—but this backflip is a bit weird, isn’t it?
It just doesn’t look natural, which wouldn’t stand out if Rockstar’s whole thing these days weren’t ultra-naturalistic characters. There’s quite a bit of chatter about it on X. I suppose genuine acrobatics can sometimes look uncanny, too.
What was Zelnick talking about when he said we’d understand the Netflix deal?
Tyler Wilde
Ahead of the reveal, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick told Bloomberg that “there’s reasoning” behind the decision to debut the video on Netflix and that we’d “understand more” after we saw it.
What was he talking about? It was just a montage of scenes from the game; there was no particular reason it needed to be on Netflix.
Because of some technical weirdness when I tried to capture stills, I briefly thought that maybe an announcement related to cloud streaming was incoming, but that was just a live blog stress-induced hallucination which I’ve taken back.
So what was Zelnick getting at, I wonder?
One thing I didn’t care for
If today’s reveal is any indication, we’re in more of Rockstar’s samey mission design. You can read my whole reaction here, but here’s where I’m coming from:
“In the first mission we see Jason and Lucia doing a drug deal for Boobie Ike, and I bet you can guess what happens: The pair exchange some uneasy words with the buyer, then the deal goes wrong when the cops show up. Our heroes shoot their way out of the building. A mission shown off later in the video takes place further in the story: Jason and Lucia are more established, taking on a job as security detail for some corpo bigwig. There’s some walking, some talking, a speech about a company’s new US headquarters, then the party is interrupted by professional killers with guns. The pair shoot their way out of the building.”
It’s all a bit familiar as someone who loves Rockstar’s worlds, but struggles to actually replay its stories. Gameplay-wise, they can get a bit bland.
Details from the IGN preview
Tyler Wilde
IGN was invited to Rockstar North for a look at GTA 6 before the reveal. “The scope of what I saw is even more colossal than I was prepared for,” says previewer Rachel Weber.
One interesting detail from the article regards Jason and Lucia’s relationship. You can choose to nurture it, but you don’t have to—they won’t break up, though.
“They will remain partners in crime,” co-studio head Rob Nelson told IGN. “You will always have the benefit of working together and having each other’s back—whether they’re romantically close or not doesn’t change that. They will still work together. It’s really about what you want for them, their story, and how it plays out. Whether you’ve nurtured the relationship or not will definitely have a bearing on how their story plays out.”
Some other details from the preview:
- Jason and Lucia have a “Criminal Profile” on top of their Wanted Level, which is described as similar to Red Dead Redemption 2’s Honor system
- The safehouses in GTA 6 are “probably closer to the camps in RDR2 than they are to safehouses in any GTA game before in terms of how interactive they are and how much they feel like your home,” Nelson says
- You’ll need special tools to steal certain cars
- The streets are “narrower and more realistic in terms of scale,” Nelson says, making driving recklessly trickier
- There’s a greater variety of NPC reactions to your antics: They won’t necessarily just cower when a gun is pulled, and you now have the option to greet or taunt them, as we’ve seen in the leaks
The map is apparently twice as big as GTA 5’s
That’s according to a YouTuber TGG, who was invited to Rockstar North before the reveal.
“The map is twice the size of GTA 5’s map,” TGC says. “Three times the size of Red Dead Redemption 2’s map. Vice City itself is twice the size of Los Santos, and Vice City and its surroundings suburbs is 11 times bigger than Los Santos and its surroundings.”
Nothing to say about GTA Online
I didn’t expect Rockstar to mention GTA Online in this video, but it still feels worth noting that it didn’t. GTA 6 is a singleplayer experience at launch, and there’s been no substantial comment yet on what’s going on with GTA Online. Perhaps we’ll learn more whenever Rockstar announces the PC version.
The studio acquired the team that made the popular GTA 6 roleplaying mod FiveM, and it surely has big plans for multiplayer adventures in Vice City.
The reveal closes with a bloodbath at a party
The final few minutes of the reveal show a condensed edit of a full mission in which Jason and Lucia are tasked with “babysitting” a big media executive, Andrés de León of Megamundo, playing security detail at a party.
The couple meets Andrés at the airport and drives him to Megamundo’s new US headquarters for the party. Despite protests from his COO, Andrés hides away in a conference room to do blow with his friends.
As with the drug deal, things go tits up, and armed goons invade the party. Jason and Lucia have split up for this; we see Jason’s perspective for most of it, and text messages between Jason and Lucia appear floating in space next to them as they chat during cutscenes.
It’s a little unclear where the line is between cutscene and gameplay at some points. We briefly take control of Lucia, but then she’s attacked, and suddenly we’re Jason again.
There’s more gun combat here, and with the caveat that this is obviously carefully staged gameplay footage, it looks nice. Jason uses a bit of bullet time for the final kills, and then we cut back to Lucia fighting her way out of the predicament we last saw. I get the impression that our point-of-view isn’t going to be up to us whenever the mission storytelling demands it.
More details and reactions to come, but as we continue to process what we’ve seen, how are you feeling about the reveal? Is it worth breaking out a console for (or buying one for way too much money if, like me, you don’t have one) or are you going to watch from the sidelines for now?
There are recreational activities for days
There’s a clip of Jason shooting hoops (which we’ve seen in the leaks), plus lots of other recreational activities: scuba diving, fishing, jet skiing, kayaking, dirt bike riding, base jumping from a tower, street racing, dancing at a club, making it rain in a strip club.
A few details we’ve noticed
- Lucia dodges a punch at one point, and we briefly see Jason wrestling in a makeshift ring, suggesting more complex melee combat than we’re used to
- Jason and Lucia appear in disguise during an interrogation, and claim to be tourists. Later we a montage of simple disguises. In the leaks, we saw that police have multiple ways to ID you, appearance being one.
- The couple are offered a job, but only for one of them, and Lucia accepts. Already expected, but confirms that some jobs will be for one character only.
- During a mission, Jason climbs into the backseat while Lucia drives, and then shoots at pursuing cops through the window. It’s unclear how much of what we’re seeing is bespoke to the specific mission, and how much can be done at will.
- Lucia sets a car on fire to destroy evidence.
- The player hot swaps from Lucia parachuting off a tower to Jason hanging out with a friend, mid-conversation. The camera pans across the city during the transition.
Lucia seems fun, Jason’s a bit boring so far
(Image credit: Rockstar)
After the shootout, we cut to a moment in Jason and Lucia’s domestic life. Jason’s personality, so far, seems to be “doofus with a deep voice.” Lucia’s a bit more fun.
The portrayal of Jason and Lucia as a relatable couple—Jason in this scene tries to hurry Lucia’s outfit picking along—juxtaposes a little strangely with the GTA universe’s goofiness. While Lucia’s changing, Jason flips on the TV and we see a couple parody ads, like the one below advertising a 30,000 calorie sandwich made by slaughtering a prairie’s worth of animals.
We open with a drug pickup gone wrong
We’ve gone straight into gameplay with no preamble, which is nice. The reveal opens with Jason and Lucia arriving at a drug distributor for a pickup. Naturally, things go wrong: This kingpin has been betrayed by his partner, and police are incoming. A shootout follows.
The player is controlling Jason, and we see them use a dynamic cover system. A computer-controlled Lucia follows suit and takes cover, interestingly. It looks to me like a lot of custom, mission-specific scripting rather than a dynamic system, especially as the couple chats back and forth mid-action. There’s a nice fluidity to the animations. At one point we see a slow-mo kill cam after Jason takes out one of the corrupt cops—very Max Payne.
We’re 30 minutes away
It’s almost time. The anticipation for this big reveal has perhaps been dulled by the leaks that preceded it, but I still find myself quite curious to see what Rockstar is going to show.
So far, we’ve gotten the impression that GTA 6 is going to be something of a hybrid between previous GTAs and Red Dead Redemption 2, and that may manifest in deeper ways than we’ve seen from the infamous vegetable’s clips.
I don’t expect to hear much, or possibly anything, about GTA Online, but even if it’s omitted, the fact of its omission will be notable. Rockstar surely has big plans for its future, but given how closely GTA Online (and its roleplaying community in particular) is associated with PC gaming, I wonder if those plans will be withheld until the studio is ready to talk about the PC version of GTA 6 itself.
There are also rumblings about user generated content being a focus, and but I’m unsure if that will have anything to do with the singeplayer game—we’ll see!
The GTA 6 reveal is ‘rousing’ and ‘violent’
That’s according to the descriptors Netflix has chosen for the reveal. According to the Netflix mobile app, the video will be 26 minutes long.
I still think it’s quite poor form for Rockstar to make fans subscribe to Netflix to see the reveal of a game they’ve probably already preordered. Yes, we can all just wait six hours for it to be posted on YouTube (and realistically, it’ll be ripped from Netflix well before that), but it’s the principle of the thing.
PC Gamer’s Andrea Shearon has reminded me that Hannibal is on Netflix—the brilliant NBC show with Mads Mikkelsen—so I guess that’s what I’ll be doing with the renewed subscription I didn’t want.
What we’ve learned from the leaks
Tyler Wilde
Ahead of the official GTA 6 reveal, someone who goes by “Cyberleek” has been releasing gameplay clips that apparently come from a build of the game they have continuous access to.
I assume there’s a control room somewhere in which suited lawyers are pointing at giant maps and saying “enhance,” but Rockstar hasn’t tracked down the leaker yet, and in the meantime, we’ve learned a lot about GTA 6’s gameplay.
Here are some of the big details, with the caveat that we can’t be sure exactly how recent Cyberleek’s build is:
- There appears to be a morality system, a la Red Dead Redemption 2: During a particularly violent action by the player, a devil icon with a minus symbol appears
- Cars have gas meters, but refuelling looks easy (drive into a gas station, press a button)
- Another RDR2 similarity, we see at one point that Jason has the option to “greet” or “taunt” NPCs he encounters
- Your identity as it relates to police APBs is represented by three icons, which we’ve deduced probably refer to your clothing, face/hair, and car
- The wanted level now goes to six stars, one more than it used to
- There’s a stamina meter, and at one point we see Jason struggle with a driver during a carjacking, depleting the meter
- Full nudity: At one point the leaker wanders into a nudist party, and Rockstar withholds nothing
