I've formatted my notes in a similar way to add to this. Maybe someone could create the ultimate GTA 6 Bible with the info we got from other previews too? POLICE & HEAT: ▸ Police no longer appear on the minimap at all. This was deliberate, and Focus is the intended replacement. It reveals police through walls. ▸ Rob: "It can be harder, but it's fun. Depending on the wanted level, you have to think more. You can't just play the game and avoid the little vision cones anymore. This time, you have to use focus." ▸ Someone has to actually witness and report a crime for police to respond. Rob said that happens by phone, by triggering an alarm during a robbery, or by stealing a vehicle with a tracker that reports itself. ▸ New system layered under the wanted stars called Heat. ▸ Rob: "We wanted to get past that thing we used to have where you could lose the cops instantaneously and then they forget about you instantly. And we wanted them to have a bit more persistent memory." ▸ Heat indicators sit below the stars and show exactly what police know about you. CCTV footage, that you're operating as a couple, your outfits, your appearance, your weapons, your vehicle. ▸ Each indicator can be addressed separately. Destroy the footage, split Jason and Lucia up, change outfits at your vehicle, mask up before the crime, stash the weapon you were seen with. ▸ Splitting up as a couple can drop a star on its own. ▸ Solid white stars mean police have direct line of sight on you. That's when you need to break away. ▸ Flashing white means you've broken line of sight and are actively losing them. ▸ Hollow stars mean an alarm went off but police have no description of you at all. In the Extended Look, Lucia rides straight past cops with hollow stars and flips them off. Nothing happens. ▸ Red stars mean you've technically lost them but you're still inside the search zone. They don't know where you are, but they know who they're looking for. ▸ The search zone renders on the minimap as a red area, with a larger, lighter red ring outside it. Clearing both is the cleanest escape. ▸ At the highest wanted level, police search map wide instead of by radius. ▸ Fail a store robbery and they'll set up a perimeter around the shop in case you come back. I watched this happen. ▸ Every police vehicle has a shotgun or assault rifle in the boot, and often body armour. You can loot them mid shootout, which makes them a genuine early game weapon source. ▸ During a shootout on Vice Beach, NPCs who were too close to escape safely crouched and hid behind cop cars, walls and benches rather than running. That is not GTA 5 behaviour. ▸ All cop cars carry trackers, so escaping in one is nearly impossible. I watched Rob attempt a store robbery and fail it, narrating his decisions the whole way. He knocked the clerk down without killing her, spotted the CCTV and destroyed the footage, realised someone had already called it in, hunted for a safe code he couldn't find, and walked away empty handed. His summary afterwards is the clearest picture of how this game actually plays: "Sometimes it's about cutting your losses. I took the mask off. I destroyed the footage. We're essentially fine. But if I stayed in there, the cops would have come in. There they are. They're setting up a perimeter around the shop. That really plays on your mind. You're gambling. If they come in, am I going to shoot them? Is it going to affect my criminal profile? Do I care? Don't I?" VEHICLES: ▸ Hijacking a car with a driver now triggers a quick time event to pull them out. If there's a passenger, they'll fight to wrestle you out too. ▸ Parked cars give you a loud option and a quiet one. Smash the window, or use a slim jim. ▸ Smashing sets off the alarm, and if the car has security, police can be alerted. ▸ Vehicles are stratified by security level. Rob: "You don't need anything to hotwire, but not all vehicles can be hotwired. We've added some stratification to the vehicles. Some vehicles need a key cloner to start. You can smash the window and get in, but you can't start it without the key cloner. If you have a key cloner, you can also use it to get in and start the vehicle without setting off the alarm." ▸ Theft tools unlock through fence work rather than being available from the start. Rob: "Throughout the world, as we do things for them, we unlock things. A lot of the things you're seeing me use here, like the slim jim, has been unlocked by the point I am here in flow." ▸ There's a scanning app on the phone called Waink. ▸ Scan a car before touching it and it shows security level, which tool you'll need, tracker tier, cost to register it as yours, and resale value. ▸ Rob, showing me an expensive car: "This vehicle has an alarm on it and a standard tracker." ▸ Tracker removal requires fence progression. I watched Rob steal a car he wanted to keep and be unable to register it, because he hadn't unlocked that ability yet. ▸ Higher tier trackers have a speed mechanic. Drive fast and they stay quiet. Slow down and they start beeping. Stay slow too long and they ping your position to police. ▸ Mod shops all have specialities. Rob: "All the mod shops have different specialties, and there's a lot of mod shops. Almost all of them will do basic things, but no one mod shop does everything. Just like every hair salon has standard styles, and then they have signature styles that are unique only to them." ▸ Pay'n'Sprays are back and deliberately simple. Repair and respray into a handful of basic colours. They exist to shed the vehicle heat indicator, not to customise. ▸ Rob: "Car fences and Pay'n'Sprays are not necessarily available at the start of the game. Some of this stuff unlocks over time because of the way the narrative unfolds." ▸ You cannot buy safehouses. You can buy garages. ▸ Rob: "I can have as many personal vehicles as I have storage spaces in garages that I buy. So you could buy a storage garage for a few thousand bucks, steal a $50,000 car, and stash it there, and it'll be safe even though it's not yours until you have the means to register it and make it yours." ▸ Safehouses unlock through story progression instead. They aren't permanent fixtures, because Jason and Lucia are on the run and it wouldn't make sense for them to own property police can knock on. ▸ Fuel is real. Gas stations also repair your vehicle. ▸ Refuelling is a short hold R2 sequence, around ten seconds. ▸ They knew it would be divisive. ▸ Fuel only really bites if you grab a random car mid getaway without checking it. ▸ Driving has been rebuilt from scratch. Rob: "Only in the best way possible. The team has worked hard to maintain some of the best parts of the weightiness and feel of GTA 4, but have the accessibility of GTA 5. It has all been built up from scratch on this hardware, and they have much more control tuning drivetrain, tires, suspension, steering. All of that is getting applied to the physics model." ▸ Rob: "The driving's been completely rebuilt from the ground up. All of the cars are very different, very different feel. You can reach much higher top speeds in the fast ones. Powerful rear-wheel drive cars feel great. Muscle cars and things like that, you do have to be a little bit more careful on the throttle with some of them. Also, traffic density is crazy compared to previous games. Also, the roads are narrower than GTA 5, so you've got to maybe try and drive a little better because you're just squeezing through sometimes. The vehicle team has gone bananas on this one." ▸ Taking a supercar off road is genuinely difficult now. Right car for the right job. ▸ Duffel bag storage scales with the vehicle. Bikes carry none beyond what you're holding, cars a couple, vans and trucks considerably more. Your getaway vehicle is now a real decision. ▸ Vehicle recovery runs through Scooter Bros. Rob: "You can always get your own vehicle back through Scooter Brothers for not too much money. If you left it when the cops are after you and they know it was your vehicle, they stick around it. So you can either try and sneak back and steal it from under them, or if you leave it too long, they'll impound it and it'll cost more to get it out, or you'll have to steal it back from the impound." ▸ Shooting tyres is properly effective. Cars flip and lose control rather than shrugging it off. ▸ Crash cams trigger on major collisions. Toggleable. ▸ Handbrake has moved to X on PlayStation, because L1 and R1 are now shooting while driving. ▸ Every vehicle has a weapon crate. ▸ The vehicle menu tab lets you drop a convertible roof, open the trunk and so on. CRIMINAL PROFILE: ▸ It's not the RDR2 honour system and it isn't a morality meter. ▸ Several named states, running from Professional down through increasingly violent ones to Psycho. ▸ Below those is a further state where the icon visibly cracks and shatters. That's irreversible for the playthrough. ▸ It isn't there to punish you. My read was that Rockstar steps back if you clearly don't want the system. Notifications can also be turned off entirely. ▸ Part of the reasoning came from RDR2, where you could kill hundreds of people and then greet and pet your way back to sainthood before Chapter 6. ▸ There's no bar. It's states, not a slider. ▸ Jason and Lucia have completely separate Criminal Profiles. You can run one as a professional and the other as a psycho in the same playthrough. ▸ Visible bottom right during play, and in a dedicated Jason and Lucia menu tab that also shows their character models and relationship status. ▸ Rob on whether it affects the story: "It may, depending on how you play. There's no right or wrong way to play the game, just a bit more choice. Now, how do you want to play this game if your actions may have some impact on things? You can still cause as much chaos as you want if that's what you want to do." ▸ I pushed on whether this fundamentally changes what GTA is. He disagreed: "I don't think it changes what GTA is. It changes what it can be for people who want to engage with it that way. You still have as much freedom as you had before. Now you can just do more, and you have more choice in terms of how you approach situations." ▸ On raising it: "Restraint. Control. So doing a robbery and controlling the people, the situation, not killing or injuring anyone unless you have to. Essentially just doing what you need to do and not being excessive. If someone crosses you and you have to deal with them, you were just doing what you needed to do, if you care about that sort of thing. If you don't want to play that way though, that's fine as well." ▸ I asked what he was most proud of that people might not notice on day one: "The way the whole thing works together. We've got a lot of very complicated systems working in an interconnected way. You can forget that it's a game that's been designed to try and work this way. I think it sort of allows you to roleplay as heavily or as lightly as you want to. The idea that you have a fair amount of choice now in terms of the way you can approach situations, you can still cause as much carnage as you can imagine. How does it make you feel if it has an impact on certain things? Do you still want to do it? Do you want to do it more? Do you want to do it less? Do you care at all? It's up to you and what matters to you." RELATIONSHIPS: ▸ Same design as Criminal Profile. No bar, no live meter. Rob described it as stages or states you can be in rather than a number moving up and down. ▸ Dates are entirely dynamic. Rob: "The system is dynamic, so you sort of make your own dates. It's however you want to spend time. Some people want to go to the zoo and look at animals, or go kayaking, or walk down the beach together. You can do all of these things dynamically when you're just hanging out." ▸ No fixed date structure like San Andreas or GTA 4. ▸ Both characters can text each other, including saying goodnight. Holding hands is an interaction. ▸ The gym doubles as a date if you go together. MONEY & ROBBERIES: ▸ Three money types. Bank balance is safe and managed through BuckMe, a Cash App parody. Cash on hand is lost on death. Duffel bag loot is worthless until fenced. ▸ You cannot deposit cash from your phone. You have to physically go to an ATM. ▸ Several tiers of robbery, scaling from local stores up through jewellery stores and banks to compounds and full heists. Armoured vans around the map as well. ▸ Low tier stores don't blip on the map. Higher tiers can appear with an estimated payout you can hover over before committing. ▸ Rob on discovery: "People may approach you and ask a favour and give you a tip in return. Someone you meet during the story may tip you off. Sometimes you may be led to them by something that happens while you're out and about in the world, and so you learn about them emergently. We'll tell you the possibility for a bank. We've got smaller payday loan places that you can hit. And these are just the places we point out. The little gas stations and stuff are not even on here. So this is a big part of the game, and then the story is woven through it." ▸ Rob: "You can try and rob any store that you walk into, not just money-making opportunities that are blipped on the map. There are lots and lots of compounds that you find out about either through the flow, or tips from people you meet, or just by stumbling across them. And you can go and hit them for drugs or cash, and then you take it to a fence. You can do these robberies by yourself or you can do them together. Making money this way off mission is an important part of the game." ▸ Safes need codes, and there are multiple ways to get them. You can search the room, or a fence can text you one directly. I watched that happen. ▸ The store Rob tried to rob had a back room covered wall to wall in feet pics, including the computer screen he needed the password from. Watching a Rockstar developer hunt for a safe code in that room is going to stay with me. ▸ Store clerks, security and civilians can try to be a hero and physically intervene. I saw this several times. ▸ Every store plays differently. Some have back doors, some don't, some have cameras, some have safes. ▸ Fences are specialised by loot type. Drugs, jewellery, cars, and others. They unlock as the story progresses, so early on you may have no way to move high value goods at all. ▸ Money gates the story. Rob: "There are also spots where we actually slow down the flow or stop the flow until you hit certain cash goals that they need for certain things. You have to do some of this. We're trying to balance that for people that just want the story, but sometimes the story needs a minute to breathe, for events to settle down or to open up some new contacts in terms of connecting with the characters and the story. If that's what you like to do, you'll really get out what you put in with this one." ▸ Rob directly acknowledged the GTA 5 problem of finishing the story with tens of millions and nothing meaningful to spend it on. ▸ You can register stolen street cars as personal vehicles for a fee, but not high end ones at the start. GUNPLAY & WEAPONS: ▸ Auto aim is gone as a default. Rob: "A little bit of stickiness but leaning more on a free aim feel. All tuneable in options. But definitely less of a default lock on aim than previous games. With the combat focus, where you can slow it down, it's very controllable, but without having enemies on the radar and the mini-map, and without having the auto-aim as default, you can balance the combat a lot in a way that feels better." ▸ Enemies in general aren't on the minimap, not just police. I haven't seen this covered elsewhere. ▸ Focus slows time and highlights weak points. Red for lethal, yellow for non lethal. On vehicles it marks the engine block, gas tank and tyres. ▸ Hit markers are white for a hit, yellow for incapacitated, red for a kill. ▸ Rob on the yellow marker: "That yellow X means she is down, she's not getting back up. She's not a threat. I don't have to kill her if I don't want to." ▸ The screen border flashes yellow when you knock someone out in melee, so the feedback isn't only inside Focus. ▸ Two concealed handguns, always. Two long guns is possible, but you can't stow both. ▸ Rob: "You can't put both on your back. One goes in your off hand, one on your back if you want to carry two. People will react to you if you are rolling around like that." ▸ On storage: "You can store the long guns you are carrying in any vehicle you want, but only your personal vehicle carries your entire selected loadout. A temporary vehicle is not persistent though." ▸ NPCs react in tiers. Rob: "It depends. The reactions are much more nuanced than before. So, if you've got a long gun on your back, you should be fine. If you've got one in your hand, people don't like it, and they react and start moving away from you. The more guns you carry and the way you carry them matters. If cops see you they will give you a warning. If you hold a long arm in both hands as though you are ready to fire it, things begin to escalate." ▸ I watched this myself. Jason walked past a group with a two handed weapon lowered. Nobody screamed or scattered. They quietly started walking away, then jogged once they were out of his line of sight. ▸ On why it changed, Rob: "Yeah, you know what, we don't feel that works any longer at this resolution, with the behavioural sophistication we need from our population now. In GTA 5 you can pull out a shotgun from nowhere in front of people and they don't react. That doesn't work here." ▸ Aim at someone and, in Rob's words, "they'll freak out and run, or pull their own concealed weapons on me." ▸ Weapons have real weight now. I watched a rifle shootout on Shore Drive and Rob was tap firing constantly. You can't hold the trigger and stay accurate the way you could in GTA 5. ▸ Jason and Lucia can hand weapons to each other. Physically walk up and pass a gun across. ▸ Pistol fire rate is unlocked. Tap as fast as you can pull. ▸ Kill cams, RDR2 and Max Payne style. Toggleable. ▸ Quick weapon swapping is in. MOVEMENT: ▸ Cover stays on R1. Rob: "Cover is still on R1, but the crouch is pretty effective as well. I like crouch because you can still strafe. We've got a good quick swap now for guns." ▸ Crouch is a separate state from cover. Prone doesn't appear to be in. ▸ Shoulder switching returns from RDR2. SIDE ACTIVITIES: ▸ All of it is optional. You can finish the entire game without setting foot in a gym. Engage and you get modest boosts to health, stamina and focus. ▸ You buy a membership at the gym's front desk. There are vending machines near the change rooms with a long item list. ▸ Rob bought Lucia a protein shake for a temporary stamina and strength boost so she could push more reps. ▸ Each completed exercise fills the workout ring by a third. Complete the ring and you get a timed health or strength boost. ▸ Equipment I saw: treadmill, punching bag, squats, lat pulldowns, bench press, deadlifts. ▸ Rob on how lifting feels: "The way this weight lifting mechanic feels pretty good, it's consistent across a lot of exercises as well. So, it's L2 R2 to go up and down. It's sensitive, so you pull it down, then you let it go, deadlifts you want to drop fast. But the stamina is going down as I'm doing this, so it's a little bit of a balance to get through your set before stamina drains. That's why you want to have an energy drink or coffee to buff your stamina before you start." ▸ Bring your partner and you get a two for one. Rob: "Your partner will go and workout while you workout, so it's like an emergent date." ▸ Cardio raises overall stamina. Strength work raises health. ▸ Fishing is as deep as RDR2 but catch and release. Rob: "You can't take the fish with you because it didn't fit this game." ▸ On the split between them, Rob: "Fishing is for fun and some narrative, collectible, challenge stuff. Hunting is for money and it's through a character that knows Jason." ▸ Your body changes. Rob: "You get heavy if you eat too much, but you have to actually go eat quite a bit. You will lose muscle if you have a lot and you stop maintaining it." ▸ Sleep is tracked. Rob: "It will say whether you're well rested or not. That will have some effect on regens of certain attributes. We track lots of things, all this good stuff." ▸ Also confirmed: basketball, pool, mini golf, backyard wrestling, a proper walkable shooting range. Basketball is aim, hold R2, time the shot. ▸ Swimming has its own lung capacity bar. The stamina bar visibly swaps to it as you enter water. THE WORLD: ▸ Hundreds of interiors. I asked about the old 700 interiors rumour and didn't get a specific number, but hundreds was confirmed. ▸ Safehouse interactivity is extensive. I watched Rob eat an apple and then throw the core in the bin. He shaved at the bathroom mirror. Hair can be cut shorter at home but not grown. ▸ There's a zoo. ▸ Drive thrus are in. ▸ At one point in development you had to buy groceries. They cut it as a step too far, but you can still buy snacks and drinks. Rob bought the six pack Jason is holding in Trailer 2. ▸ Fast travel: bus stops, train stations, trams, taxis, and RydeMe, the Uber equivalent. ▸ Scooter Bros lets you call your personal vehicle to you. That was never possible in GTA 5 single player. ▸ Phone apps seen: BuckMe, RydeMe, Scooter Bros, WhatUp, Waink, a fitness app, and Snapmatic. ▸ Social media is fully implemented. NPCs post, and for some posts you can travel to that location and find the event actually unfolding in real time. ▸ Greet and antagonise is back, usable on any NPC. ▸ No Rockstar Editor at the time I saw it. There is a photo mode. ▸ Streamer mode exists. A toggle to disable copyrighted music. I asked specifically and they showed me where it sits in the menu. ▸ No radio wheel. You scroll stations one at a time. There's a separate on demand tab with podcasts. ▸ The TV system is far more built out than GTA 5's. Rockstar hired outside animators to produce in game shows. ▸ Mission waypoints are pink. Custom waypoints are cyan. ▸ The map is twice the size of GTA 5's and three times RDR2's playable area. Vice City alone is twice Los Santos, and Vice City with its surrounding built up area is roughly eleven times the built up area around Los Santos. ▸ It's pronounced Leonida. Lee-Oh-Nigh-Da