GTA 6 Extended Look: every detail, feature and discovery

For most of GTA VI's public life, Rockstar has communicated through tightly edited trailers, screenshots and carefully chosen descriptions. On 27 August it did something fundamentally different: twenty-six minutes of in-game PlayStation 5 footage, with the HUD visible and sustained gameplay taking centre stage.

What follows separates what Rockstar explicitly states from what the footage directly demonstrates. Where a detail remains uncertain, we leave it open rather than turn an interpretation into a fact.

The presentation is a twenty-six-minute gameplay showcase rather than a conventional cinematic trailer, moving between three substantial job sequences and a wider montage of life across Leonida. It ends where every Rockstar video has ended this year, on the date.

Stripping out the spectacle, this is what the broadcast adds to the record. Each is expanded below, and each carries its own provenance there.

• The player moves between Jason and Lucia — mid-journey, mid-fight and across a building — and the one you are not holding fights on their own.
• Stealing a car is a choice of methods rather than one animation.

The question hanging over this game since Trailer 1 was how two protagonists would work, and the presentation answers it by simply doing it repeatedly. The switch happens on the road, in the middle of a firefight, and between floors of a tower with the two of them nowhere near each other. Close switches are near-instant; the long-distance ones use the aerial transition the series has used since Grand Theft Auto V.

The more interesting half is what the other one does while you are not there. This is not a companion who waits by a door: in the footage Lucia clears rooms on her own initiative, and Jason works the back seat while she drives.

In the presentation the relationship is carried entirely by small things: a contextual prompt to hold hands on the rooftop, an argument about being late, one of them covering the other without being asked.

The first six minutes are a single unbroken sequence and the best look yet at how a mission is actually built. It starts at home — Lucia getting changed, Jason waiting and picking through a fridge, a parody advert running on the television — and moves out to a run-down block where the pair are collecting for Boobie Ike.

A phone warning arrives before anything goes wrong, which is the kind of pacing detail a trailer cannot show you. Then it goes wrong. What follows is corridors, stairwells, a lift, and armed police arriving in numbers, with Lucia fighting her own way through it.

The second sequence is the set piece. Bautista — the career bank robber Rockstar introduced on the Only in Leonida pages — runs the job from the back seat while Lucia drives and Jason shoots. Police cars come apart against traffic, a helicopter joins, and the escape ends with the crew swapping into an unremarkable van and putting a Molotov through the car they arrived in.

Burning the getaway car is the moment worth being careful about. It is plainly a deliberate act of disposal, and it is one scripted sequence — it is not evidence of a general system for shedding police attention by destroying evidence, however much it looks like the seed of one.

The third sequence puts the pair in suits. They are hired as security for a media executive arriving by private jet for the Vice City launch of Megamundo, a Spanish-language broadcaster opening its first American headquarters. The executive withdraws to a private meeting, drugs are involved, and then armed men come through the building.

It is the clearest demonstration of the switching system doing narrative work rather than showing off: the two are separated across floors, and the player crosses between two simultaneous fights. Lucia's text — “GUYS EVERYWHERE” — arrives on screen mid-firefight rather than in a cutaway. Rockstar has printed no spelling of the executive's name, so this piece does not give one.

The Wanted Level is intact and behaves as it always has.

Gunplay is cover-led and noticeably weightier than Grand Theft Auto V's, with rifles and shotguns doing visible structural damage to the rooms they are fired in. Lucia handles a pump-action one-handed while carrying something in the other, which is a small animation detail that implies a lot about how the game intends to keep you moving.

The closing minutes introduce the one genuinely new combat idea: a slowed-down aiming state that picks out regions of a body in two colours.

Rockstar has not named the mode, has not explained the colours, and has said nothing about whether a campaign can be played without killing.

No weapon in the presentation is named on screen, so any model name attached to one is an identification made from a frame, not something Rockstar has stated.

Our weapon database records what a game establishes, so no weapon from the presentation has entered it.

The single most consequential mechanical change in the broadcast is also the quietest. Walking up to a locked car no longer offers one action. It offers a choice.

Elsewhere: a convertible roof raising and lowering as a state rather than a cutscene, visible panel damage accumulating through the chase, and traffic dense enough that the pursuit is fought through it rather than around it.

A long montage covers the state's diversions, and it is worth being precise about what a montage proves. It proves the thing is in the game. It does not prove it is an activity with rules, a reward and a reason to return.

One of them is shown as more than scenery. Racing carries a real interface — lap counts, positions, timing — across circuit, off-road and night street events.

The apartment sequence shows a fridge that opens and has things in it, a television playing something, and clutter that has clearly accumulated rather than been placed.

Rockstar has not said what any of that is for.

The crowd is where the generational gap is most obvious. Beaches, rooftops and clubs are populated by people who differ in build, age and dress, and who are dressed for the part of the state they are standing in.

Wildlife is genuinely present rather than decorative: birds working the shoreline, manatees and marine life in the water, wetland fauna in the interior. It is worth separating that from the animals that appear on in-game television, which are a different kind of evidence entirely.

Jack of Hearts, Megamundo, Sprunk, eCola, Fleeca and Gruppe Sechs all appear in the presentation.

A named brand is not a shop you can walk into, and none of these has been established as a location.

The phone is not a menu you retreat into. It is used while driving and read mid-firefight, and a live stream with its comments scrolling appears inside active gameplay rather than in a cutaway.

The HUD itself is conventional and clean: minimap, GPS route, wanted stars, weapon and ammunition, a reticle, contextual prompts, a weapon wheel, and a separate interface for clothing and masks.

This is the section most reveal coverage leaves out, and after twenty-six minutes it is shorter than it was — but it is not empty, and several of the gaps are being filled in elsewhere tonight with things nobody has established.

• The maximum wanted level. Four stars were shown; Rockstar has said nothing.
• Anything about an online component: whether one exists at launch, what it is, or when.
• Any platform beyond PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S, including PC.
• How large the map is.
• How long the story is, and how much of the state is open from the start.
• What the two-colour aiming overlay does, and whether the campaign can be played without killing.
• Which of the montage's activities are systems with rules, and which are scenery.

Evidence note: We distinguish between details directly stated by Rockstar and details clearly visible in official footage. Where evidence conflicts, we say so.