Everything We Learned About ‘GTA 6’ From The First Trailer

Monday night was just a bit chaotic, as after a low quality, Bitcoin watermark-stamped Grand Theft Auto 6 trailer leaked online, Rockstar decided to throw its 9 AM debut time out the window and just put the GTA 6 trailer live right then (after nuking everyone sharing the leak instantaneously).

The result is a 90 second trailer that honestly, blew away my expectations, as high as they were. It goes way more into the setting and vibe than even the first GTA 5 trailer, and there’s a ton we can learn about the characters and world just from this short spot. At least pretending we haven’t heard any leaks over the years on some points. Here’s everything I think we can extract from the trailer:

Lucia – We have met our first lead. The trailer introduces us to Lucia, who will apparently start the game fresh out of prison, but return to a life of crime after whatever she was convicted of in the first place (what, did you think we’d be playing as a reformed criminal?). She’s only in a few snippets of the trailer compared to the larger world as a whole, but we already get a clear sense of the Bonnie and Clyde vibe her story will have, as we see her romance with Jason and her robbery of a store to close out the spot.

Jason – If you watched just this trailer and had heard nothing else about the game, you might think it only starred Lucia, GTA’s first female protagonist. But all leaks and reporting indicate that like GTA 5, GTA 6 will have multiple protagonists and Jason is her counterpart. The “Clyde” half, as it were. My guess is that we will see a second spot focused more on his character down the road rather than him begin a background character like he was here.

Vice City, Leonida – While we have known for a time we were going back to Vice City, we are branching out deeper into the state of “Leonida,” where Rockstar has taken the game to go “full Florida” in parody form. Well, according to many, even Florida residents, aspects of the insanity shown here are not parody. The Florida Man meme is a meme for a reason, after all. There’s a mix of street culture, redneck partying and luxury yachting to cover all aspects of the region, and that produces some hilarious, outrageous scenes just in this trailer alone.

Character Modeling – “Having good graphics” was obviously on everyone’s bingo card for GTA 6, ten years after GTA 5, but I don’t think anyone was expecting the character models here to look this good. Yes, Lucia as the main lead looks great, but the other characters featured are often close to uncanny valley realistic. If this does translate across the game, it’s going to be wild. Not that we haven’t seen realistic characters in games before, but on a game of this scale? I don’t think so.

Body Types – Past character modeling, we have a focus on a number of different body types as seen all across the trailer, particularly highlighted in the brief beach scene. Muscular, overweight, hyper-skinny, hourglass, but all done in a way that doesn’t feel like someone’s just moving around a character slider. It makes me wonder just what the character creator is going to look like. And on top of all that, to join some of those body types we apparently have uh, twerk physics. That was a lot more twerking that I would have imagined in a 90 second first trailer for GTA 6, at least three different instances. But I’m not even kidding, having twerking physics for character models is legitimately impressive!

Time Period – This is modern day, or about as close to it as you get, given the dev time on the game. Some players have seen cars in the trailer that are from GTA 5 (don’t complain about that, come on) and of course there is the overall framing of the trailer which heavily relies on things like Instagram Live and TikTok to show off the craziest parts of the area. It’s unknown how that might be integrated into actual gameplay, but it seems like it could be an aspect somehow.

No PC at Launch – We learned this from the press release, not the trailer, but it’s important all the same. Like most Rockstar games, GTA 6 will not release on PC right away, and instead will be out on PS5 and Xbox Series X/S first. PC will no doubt come later, but they have not changed their pattern here.

Release Window – They said 2025, but that’s significant in its own right. It will miss the holiday rush, but if it sticks to Take Two’s stated next fiscal year projection, that may mean it comes out between January and March in 2025, the first quarter of that year, rather than later. Barring a delay, of course.

There’s probably more and I’ll keep digging through the finer details, but yeah, wild stuff from even a short spot. More than I would have figured. Now we wait for more news, but it’s likely going to be a while for that.

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