Less than three full months before Rockstar Games’ Grand Theft Auto VI hits (exclusively digital) shelves, our first official look at gameplay has arrived through a 27-minute montage of PS5 gameplay and cutscenes courtesy of Netflix.
This half-an-hour exclusive bite comes immediately after the elephant in the room, Cyberleek, has flooded all corners of the internet with leaked GTA VI footage, from death screens, cutscenes and general gameplay to Vice City’s nudist buroughs. Many of these leaked systems were not countered by higher-res or updated footage in Rockstar’s extended look. Those leaks will likely continue, as rumours claim Cyberleek has the full build’s worldwide release hooked up to a dead man’s switch, effectively giving them – or the organisation – a gambit.
Nonetheless, finally receiving official footage of exactly what Rockstar would like us to see is greatly refreshing. The 27 minutes of seamless gameplay did not include any developer commentary or any direction to the audience, simply allowing the subtleties of GTA VI‘s various new systems to speak for themselves.
The showcase – assuming you could watch said showcase after it crashed the entirety of Netflix – opened with a long look at a specific mission involving a late-night drug pick-up from our protagonist pair Jason and Lucia. Their relationship is new territory for the franchise, bringing in romantic gameplay developments like being able to manually hold hands by pressing the right trigger while walking next to one another.
Later footage showed the two engaging in couple staples like texting – complete with their own Bitmoji-likes, with Rockstar also eluding that the game would have fully operational social media to scroll through – and robbing convenience stores together. Rockstar has confirmed that these couple mechanics remain mostly optional; deepening Jason and Lucia’s relationship across the game is your choice, and you can tell your partner that you’d rather be alone when the situation calls for it.
Beyond demonstrating this couple’s crime-committing chemistry, this first drug pick-up mission quickly devolved into an active shootout, providing our first look at GTA VI‘s gunplay beyond what the unfortunate leaks had already shown to the internet a week prior. Combat, in Rockstar fashion, plays the hits of simple third-person shooter gunplay rather than veering into intense realism or complex systems. Aim assist seems snappy as always, with slow-motion mechanics available while aiming down sights to ease landing shots. There also appears to be very Sniper Elite-esque killshot close-ups.
Still, controlling your weapon looks like a lot of fun, with weapons packing a punch and playing perfectly into GTA‘s iconic crime power fantasy. Dynamic crouching is introduced into the player’s kit rather than being simplified into a behind-cover action in previous Grand Theft Auto titles.
One of the most impressive sequences came with an escape setpiece from a convoy of VCPD police vehicles, causing a city-wide driving shootout. Here it was shown that the player can near-instantly shift between Jason and Lucia when they are in identical situations, allowing you to smoothly transition between driving with one character and popping cop tires with another. The transition time is absolutely lengthened when they are apart, though, displayed with a GTA V-style animation which travels across Vice City from an isometric view.
The user interface remains very minimalist, tapping into modern gaming’s stripped-back, cinematic approach that only shows the exact information relevant to a situation, such as the map when driving, or ammo while shooting. On that subject, the lengthy police chase revealed through the UI that crime again operates under the six-star system, as opposed to GTA V‘s fitting five. Footage of this sixth star in action was not shown.
Gameplay was captured on a PS5; assumedly a base PS5, but that clarification was not present within the footage itself. Each segment displayed Rockstar’s tenacity for crafting vibrant, busy and lived-in environments that set the bar for gaming at a graphical level. Characters have distinct personalities and are just the right amount of douchey, with an entire Rockstar studio opening up to work near-solely on non-player characters and facial animations. Some NPCs occasionally seemed stiff or unrealistic when out of focus in dialogue, but this is the nitpickiest of nitpicks when forced to digest Rockstar’s intense and boundary-pushing scope.
Of course, it wouldn’t be Grand Theft Auto without the “Auto”. Not only is there a wide range of things you can drive – from small canoes to typical cars and jet skis – but each of those is meticulously realised. NPC drivers even use their turn signals, and are seemingly able to do it incorrectly, too. Rapid sequences of motorsport racing challenges and minigames were shown as well, alongside other activities like scuba diving and playing basketball. This is likely just the beginning of the depth to Leonida and Vice City’s immersive sandbox.
Interestingly, footage of these vehicles restrainingly danced around showcasing the game’s radio stations and tracklists – something fans are always very eager to hear. The track listings are one of the primary ways each Grand Theft Auto is latched to a specific time period, though we also saw footage of livestreaming NPCs speaking to their chats, so it’s not a challenge to discern when the game takes place.
Despite diving into the world of GTA VI for almost 30 minutes, a lot of the game’s real weight is still kept tightly under wraps. Contents of the story beyond that signature protagonist relationship were hermetically sealed out of this showcase, with one of the only clues being an implied feud with merciless DEA cop Méndez seen in that initial drug bust mission. Such confident restraint was a good thing, though: Grand Theft Auto VI‘s release date is now (hopefully) firmly set for November 19th 2026 on Xbox Series X|S and PS5, so there is not long left to wait before the world of fans and pre-orderers gets to suck into the marrow of Vice City for themselves.
