Rockstar boss Rob Nelson has stated that GTA 6 won't make players "all-powerful" like they were in GTA 5 and the games that came before it. For GTA 6, this means NPCs in the world will have impulses of their own, and could come after you.
Speaking to IGN, Nelson said, "The world will act upon you as well as you acting upon the world." In previous GTA games, except for the police, the player was the only one with an "invisible arsenal hidden away," and everyone in the world would run away in terror. "This world in GTA 6 is not like that," he said.
Nelson went on to say that GTA 6's story, which follows the partners in crime and lovers Jason and Lucia, is about "criminals on the run." However, the game's narrative is such that they are incentized to "do what they need to do while not drawing unnecessary attention."
"So if you're doing things on a mission that you are required to do--or you’re robbing places, or somebody comes and messes with you and you have to deal with them by smacking them down or whatever--that’s all fair game," he said. "It's when you go beyond what is necessary on a consistent basis or you do completely unnecessary stuff consistently that you may start to sway your criminal profile in a certain direction. Maybe you care about that as a player, maybe you don't. There is no right or wrong way to play this."
Nelson said being "overpowered" as a character compared to everyone else except the cops "can be fun but not as fun" as a world in which other people may have "impulses of their own and act upon you."
"You are still powerful and capable, but you are not the only one capable of violence or the only one with weapons or the only crazy person out there," he said. "It makes the world far more unpredictable and interesting. It's something that we started doing in Red Dead Redemption 2, where you are not the only dangerous person in the world. There are gangs that will attack you, things that will happen to you. The world will act upon you. That happens here a lot, and then when it does, you have a decision to make. How do you want to deal with it?"
In GTA 6, the cops are getting upgrades, too. A new "heat" system means the police now know what the player looks like and what they're wearing, so even if players put on a hat or glasses, the cops still know who they are until they change clothes.
GTA 6 releases on November 19 for PS5 and Xbox Series X|S, and it's reportedly already sold close to 6 million copies. A recent report said the game might be available to stream in November, but that's apparently not the case.
