The first trailer for GTA VI tells us several details about what the game could offer when it is released in 2025.
GTA VI revealed a first trailer of one minute and thirty seconds. If Rockstar Games had to slightly revise its schedule following a leak, that did not prevent the trailer to have the expected success and even more: at the time of writing these lines, the video has amassed 63 million views, while the first trailer for GTA V is at 97 million views 12 years later.
Far be it from us to overanalyze video frame by frame, you will find a plethora of YouTube videos zooming in on every pixel for just that; However, we draw some lessons from this trailer.
An even larger open world
The important thing in an open world is obviously this world. And it promises to be even larger than ever with a dense and extensive urban area, much more than in the Los Santos of GTA Vbut also other environments around this city.
Like the real city of Miami, Vice City will be surrounded by several other biomes which will offer a nice variety of settings. We of course think of the Everglades, this national park which will take another name in the game, but which will offer a huge swampy area in which we expect to do many missions.
There are also the Florida Keys, these small archipelagos of islands connected by a road almost 150 km long in real life. We clearly see a representation in the trailer and given their importance in Florida culture, they will not only be present for tourism.
As usual, Rockstar wanted to take inspiration from the real geography of the place: a Reddit user revealed that two years ago, studio employees had taken advantage of private tours of the Miami Art Museum, which we imagine it to be a place that will be explorable in the game.
An even more lively city
One of the most stunning aspects in this trailer lies in the density of the crowd. Whether it’s crowded streets, beaches, nightclubs and even residential areas, everything seems populated with life. The crowd is denser, but also more diverse, with many body profiles, but also clothing, when everything could tend to repeat itself in GTA V.
This is still what is lacking in very modern open world games like Cyberpunk 2077whose city is still considered not very lively, despite the latest updates.
It is this density which makes the world alive, but also the behavior of the NPCs (non-player characters) which will help to register the player as part of a population. Rockstar Games had notably evolved the different routines of the NPCs in Red Dead Redemption 2 and here the technology is expected to advance further.
A city to explore in several phases
This is one of the most shared details since the release of this trailer: on the end visual (which looks like a cover, by the way), Lucia is wearing an electronic bracelet. Knowing that we see it from the first seconds of this trailer in prison, we can therefore assume that she then finds herself on parole.
This bracelet could be a trick to block the player in certain areas at the start of the game, which some of the previous games have also done: GTA Vice City prevented crossing bridges due to tropical storms when they were completely destroyed in GTA III. We appreciate seeing Rockstar Games return to this approach while the entire city of GTA V was explorable from the start of the game.
The use of social networks is growing in importance
We talked about it in a previous article, but social networks seem to take a prominent place in GTA VI. In each scene, the characters are filmed by a phone, including in the background.
Many sequences show an application interface heavily inspired by TikTok and Instagram. The player will be able to visibly consult the contents “ viral» of the moment and, one imagines, filming NPCs who will be able to react to being filmed. In addition to being thematically in the tone of the game, it could therefore be that the presence of social networks is a real mechanic of gameplay .
Even more vehicles… especially on water
Each version of GTA brings its share of new vehicles to drive. And it seems that this new opus is no exception to the rule. In addition to the return of certain emblematic cars from the series, we can also notice the presence of vehicles typical of the Florida landscape such as yachts, but also fan boats which will allow you to explore the Everglades.
We also imagine that Rockstar Games will not hesitate to import many vehicles already present in GTA Online : the multiplayer mode of GTA V contains over 700, many of which are missing from the single-player campaign.
A duo of characters at the center of the gameplay
If we knew that a female character was finally going to be at the center of the game’s story, the trailer for GTA VI highlights a duo: Lucia and Jason. Many observers have made the connection with Bonnie & Clyde (or Natural Born Killers by Oliver Stone) and it seems that the game revolves its narrative around Lucia.
Now to know what mechanics the game will adopt, in particular if it will be possible to switch from one to the other likeMarvel’s Spider-Man 2or if Jason will be a secondary character who will assist Lucia in key moments, or even an additional character in co-op. We are working on the first solution, even if it is obviously too early to say before the game is released in 2025.
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