We’ve got more Grand Theft Auto 6 details to chew on, and this time not from a vegetable. An interview in magazine Dazed has revealed a bunch of details about the design of GTA 6, including how character swapping between protagonists Jason and Lucia works.
We’ll get straight into it. Here are the most notable details from the interview:
1. Exercise and diet
Dazed says that food will affect Jason and Lucia’s weight, and “exercising visibly builds and tones their muscles.” Playing for long periods without sleeping will also impact their appearance.
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Rockstar has played around with these life sims systems in past games—most recently in Red Dead Redemption 2, where Arthur could gain or lose weight based on his diet. GTA hasn’t had systems this granular since 2004’s GTA: San Andreas, in which CJ could gain weight and lose it through working out.
2. Character swapping
The way GTA 6 handles multiple playable characters will differ from GTA 5. The Dazed preview notes that you can “choose to either play as a couple, or go off and cause chaos independently.” They described a scenario where you can cruise along the highway as Jason, then swap to Lucia in the passenger seat to “scroll on the in-game phone.”
That sounds, to me, like GTA 6 will have a dynamic ‘couple mode’ for open world roaming—in keeping with this being a love story—but missions themselves might be solo or together.
3. Rockstar’s team size
According to Dazed, Rockstar has massively expanded its team and resources to get all the details in GTA 6 right. The studio has more than doubled in size since Red Dead Redemption 2. It has an office in LA dedicated to the pedestrian NPCs that fill the open world. It also brought in over 50 real world street artists to help design the murals for GTA 6’s version of Wynwood, Miami’s outdoor art galleries, and there’s a team of actual race car drivers handling the vehicle physics.
4. Expect to see a variety of Florida Men
Per Dazed: “Players can expect encounters with virtual iterations of Florida Man, the cultural archetype-turned-meme known IRL for wrangling alligators, drunken antics, and literal grand theft auto.”
5. On music
Regarding GTA 6’s music, senior vice president of narrative Ruper Humphries told Dazed:
“We love Miami music, particularly Miami bass, going through to more recent Miami artists like Kodak Black and Sexyy Red. We were also really interested in how the hip-hop scene in Miami exists in house parties in Overtown, clubs like Booby Trap on the River, and then high-end places on South Beach where bottles can cost thousands of dollars. We needed characters who could take us through those worlds.”
6. Jason and Lucia’s backgrounds
The preview notes that Jason is ex-military and a drug runner. Lucia is an amateur fighter (as seen in trailers) fresh out of prison.
7. Choices
Dazed suggests that player choices or behavior will affect Jason and Lucia’s relationship in ways that “cut much deeper than Rockstar’s previous titles or ‘honour’ systems.”
