And then nothing. Radio silence for close to a year-and-a-half, before the powers that be poked their heads above the parapet to postpone our faux-Miami reunion until May 26, 2026 (on consoles, PC release is still TBC), before teasing more of Jason and Lucia's tale with 'Trailer 2' days later.

Patience has characterised the long road to GTA 6 just as much as hype or pretty visuals, then, and so it seems fitting that long-rolling projects such as Razed's NaturalVision series—an evolving modding venture now years in continuous development that's widely considered the best-looking Grand Theft Auto visual overhaul mod of all time—stand to plug the gap in GTA 5.

For Razed, patience has been crucial in growing NaturalVision, which has been blessed with yet another big update, NaturalVision Enhanced.

"According to Steam, I have around 10,000 hours logged in GTA 5," says Razed. "I'd estimate that around 80% of that time was dedicated to developing and testing this project over the years. Other team members have also contributed hundreds, if not thousands, of hours towards developing the mod."

A long, long road

NaturalVision Enhanced must be seen to be believed. Razed and his team's work in overhauling Los Santos and Blaine County really is spectacular, leveraging the ray tracing features introduced in GTA 5 Enhanced Edition (which landed on PC earlier this year) to improve lighting, shadows and colours in both interior and exterior settings across the San Andreas sprawl.

With a host of props and high-quality textures ported over from NaturalVision's previous endeavour, NaturalVision Evolved, Razed has been able to weave a unique tapestry that feels seamless, with everything from garden hedges to the composition of asphalt on the highway having been tweaked to galvanise the illusion of realism.

Sure, there are loads of other visual overhauls among the best GTA 5 mods today, but none that look as good as NaturalVision.

"Maintaining subtly in this work is extremely important when you look at the bigger picture," Razed adds. "Games like Grand Theft Auto 5 and Red Dead Redemption 2 are packed with subtle details that many players might overlook at first, but it's those small touches that shape the atmosphere and make the world feel more alive and believable.

"For example, I've been having a lot of fun messing around with the lighting and testing out some of the new tech in GTA 5 Enhanced for NaturalVision Enhanced. There were always things I wanted to do in older versions of NaturalVision that just didn't work right until now. I'm really liking how the exposure and light adaptation turned out, and have also had fun recently working on volumetric cloud reflections with our lead shader dev for NaturalVision Evolved."

Ever humble, Razed says he's been thrilled by the constant support he and his team have received for their modding efforts over the years, and reckons if their initial goal was to create something players would enjoy for years to come then they've achieved that. For a game now closing in on 12 years old, 10 on PC, Razed is surprised by how far NaturalVision has been able to push the GTA 5 sandbox in visual terms, tipping his hat to community creators who've helped add new layers of realism through custom shaders such as volumetric clouds.

Again, it's this web of subtle nips and tucks that allow NaturalVision to create its illusion of realism. Well, this and 10,000+ hours of blood, sweat and tears toiling in front of a PC.

Razed adds: "I truly believe it's all been worth it in the end. Though I admit there was a time when I had doubts. In the beginning, people around me told me that modding GTA 5 was a waste of time. It wasn't easy to ignore that but I kept going, driven by resilience and a deep passion to create something great.

"Along the way I've picked up on several skills and met some incredibly talented people. Additionally I found a community that genuinely supports what I do. Thanks to platforms like Patreon and Discord, I've been able to turn this passion into a living. And in return, I've been able to give back by hiring others within the GTA 5 modding community and helping create opportunities for them as well. I hope those people feel like it's been worth it on their end as well."

The time Razed and the team has put into it has also made later iterations slightly easier to develop. "Over the years we've developed a list of custom tools designed to reduce development time and make certain tasks easier. One of the most impactful has been a set of hot reloading utilities for both GTA 5 Legacy and GTA 5 Enhanced, enabling near real-time editing of game assets, such as shaders, textures, and configuration files—without requiring a full game restart.

"This significantly speeds up testing and fine-tuning. We also use tools like Miro to keep track of tasks, stay organised, and make sure everyone on the team is on the same page."

Under construction

In the short-term, NaturalVision Enhanced stands to wow players all over again in the same way its previous iterations have over the last decade. By virtue of GTA Online, many GTA 5 mod users know the Los Santos and Blaine County playground inside out—which only makes NaturalVision feel even more impressive given its scope to surprise and excite within a sandbox so familiar to so many.

In the long-term, however, the NaturalVision project has allowed an A-team of Grand Theft Auto modders to flourish, perfecting a game that once pushed the bar in visual terms. GTA 6, from the little we've actually seen, looks to do the same and so what teams like Razed's might be able to achieve whenever the game lands on PC is exciting.

"I think modding is going to be bigger than ever once GTA 6 eventually drops on PC," says Razed. "I'm hopeful Rockstar will give players official tools to mod the game, especially with the direction they're heading with FiveM."

Razed has also been looking at how other developers have supported modding and hopes to see Rockstar do the same.

"There's a ton of potential here. Imagine if they took a page out of Bethesda's playbook and introduced a proper marketplace for user-generated content. It could benefit both mod creators and Rockstar in a big way. I'd like to see something like that happen.

"I'd love to create mods for GTA 6, but it still feels a little too early to get into the specifics of what that might look like. Honestly, I don't think visual overhaul mods will be in high demand this time around. The game already looks incredible. If anything, I think I'd really enjoy making content for people to use on their custom servers, like exterior map packs or custom interiors."

Razed adds: "I'd love to see someone take the Vice City part of the map and completely rework it into a full-on 1980s Miami vibe. It would require a major overhaul of the landscape, but the end result could be something incredible. I bet a lot of players would be into it, especially for an '80s themed roleplay server."

Given the prestige and standards to which NaturalVision is executed, surely Razed and his team would be well-placed to take something like that on, right? No pressure, guys. But, as has been the throughline for GTA 6, and indeed Razed and his team's ever-impressive work, patience is once again required with the end of this long road now just about in sight.

NaturalVision Enhanced is out now.

I thought I knew the original Grand Theft Auto. That I had The Knowledge, like a London cabbie, and could find my way through Liberty City's maze of bridge-connected islands. Most of all, I thought I knew what it meant to be Busted—thrown on the ground by a blue-jacketed patrolman in the midst of a mission and booted to the nearest police station, with the admonishments of some gangster overlord ringing in my ear.

As it turns out, despite many a 2D joyride in my early teens, I understood little of how DMA Design's game actually works. How it could be mastered, and what going to jail really costs you in the most brutal GTA ever made.

Let me take you aside, like a local wiseguy, and explain the rules of this town. From the moment you step onto the streets, you're on the hook for every mistake you're about to make. There are no saves here, and no reloads. Five deaths and you're out—unless you can bag an extra life from a Kill Frenzy, the incredibly high-risk predecessor to the Rampage. The most likely outcome of being handed a flamethrower and 60 seconds to run up a bunch of points is that your sprite ends up covered in little yellow and orange pixels, burning to a crisp before your eyes.

Fail a mission, and it stays failed. Afterwards, you'd better hope there's still a phone ringing somewhere in the city, because jobs are your primary way of building a score multiplier. And racking up millions of points, through mission rewards and murders, is the only way to beat a level and advance to the next. Short of a cheat code, of course. The original GTA is a '90s artifact through and through, and its dev team were evidently inspired by the arcades they'd grown up with—leveraging the structure of a scorechaser to grant players freedom in the way they approached its open world.

By today's definitions, however, Grand Theft Auto is absolutely a roguelike. Its punishing permadeath mechanics teach hard lessons, and as your understanding grows—as you figure out the law, figure out the frame—you develop a personal set of rules for survival. Most are about preparation: memorising the locations of multiplier pickups on the map, and grabbing them up early to maximise point gains; keeping a PDF map handy so that you can find the next bridge and know where your nearest spray shop is; never starting a mission with cops on your tail.

Some of my selfset rules, however, are more idiosyncratic. Never attempting to run over a policeman in reverse, for example. You'll only miss, and they'll throw you out of your seat faster than a rodeo bull. If you must engage them in combat, meanwhile, you're best walking backwards while you fire. That way you'll have valuable extra seconds to steer the hail of bullets into the path of the oncoming officer.

These are tools for coping with GTA's cruelest aspect: arrests. They happen immediately on physical contact with any cop. And every time you're busted, your multiplier total is halved. Which means, if you've racked up a x12 point modifier, you're suddenly on a x6—looking at a couple more hours of risk-taking on your remaining lives, rather than another 20 minutes. As a result, the most valuable pickup in all of GTA is the Get Outta Jail Free Card, which grants you one instance of clemency while, somewhere, the Monopoly Man twirls his moustache.

You can argue that this framework isn't best suited to a knockabout criminality sim. While Grand Theft Auto's speeding vehicles and roster of rocket-propelled weapons encourage recklessness, its underlying structure enforces caution and brings a terrible weight to the consequences of any screw-up. The threat of failure is undeniably tense, but it's not exactly what you'd call joyriding.

It's harder to argue with the influence of this initial setup on the direction of GTA down the years. If you've ever raged against the loss of your weapons in a pre-HD Rockstar game, then you've felt the ripples of design decisions first made in the mid '90s. Every player's relationship with Vice City was shaped by the need to remember where free guns and armour could be acquired after a setback. And lest we forget, GTA Online has a system for banking earned cash at an ATM machine, while looking over your shoulder for any player who might mug you. Exactly the kind of tension DMA baked into the series in the beginning.

Those same ATMs in GTA Online are completely undermined by online banking you can access from your in-game phone—a concession that suggests Rockstar and its players aren't always on the same page when it comes to having progress snatched away. Over time, however, the developer has doubled down on the frisson of giving us something to lose—particularly with cargo sales which send out a global alert to every player on a server. The more rivals there are in the area, the more cash you stand to gain—but the higher the risk of losing it all to some chancer on a flying bike.

Today, heists are perhaps the greatest expression of that sweaty pressure first seen in the '90s. It would be notable if GTA Online's centrepiece raids demanded that one player pulled off a series of feats in vehicle handling, shooting and underwater navigation with minimal mistakes. Instead, they demand the same of four players—all operating together in an unbroken sequence over multiple mission stages, while sharing a tiny pool of lives. In the midst of a prison break, a couple of slip-ups can easily cost you an hour.

In this way, modern-day GTA somehow captures more of 1997's spirit than the series has in most of the intervening decades. Rockstar still leans on our shrieking frustrations and painful, permanent losses—all to create moments of exquisite triumph. We're not criminals out there in Los Santos. We're rogues.

As I pointed out when the second trailer dropped, Rockstar's pushing the envelope hard enough to send me into an existential crisis with priority shipping. Still, this will be a game about doing crime and stealing cars, and also maybe about a really hot power couple. I don't know if it's going up in the Louvre.

Despite that, Zelnick's gotten all effusive about pursuing some sort of grand theft singularity again. Speaking with IGN, he reveals that the delay was to ensure Rockstar had time to pursue, you guessed it, perfection.

"As we get closer to completion of a title that’s seeking perfection, the needs or lack thereof, for continued polish become clear," Zelnick explains. "In this case there was an opportunity with a small amount of incremental time, we thought, to make sure Rockstar Games achieves its creative vision with no limitations. And I supported (of course) that approach."

It's all executive speak, mind, but it's clear Zelnick will brook no less than the platonic ideal of a videogame. The absolute distillation of game-ness into its purest form. We must become one with the Grand Theft Auto, and think of nothing else until its pristine aura has passed through our system like the breath of a sleeping god.

I'm being pretty glib, here, but it's clear Rockstar's whole identity has gone from 'let's make some pretty good open world games' to 'if we aren't completely upturning graphical expectations, what are we doing here'. Don't just take my word for it, Zelnick's literally said the team's seeking perfection from the get-go, back in February of last year.

In fact, it's a drum he's hammered constantly since. Back in May of this year, Zelnick also said that "perfection is indeed hard to measure". He also said that he was confident GTA 6 would make its release window, so maybe they figured out how to measure perfection in the interim.

Regardless, Zelnick says the delay pains him: "While of course, delays pain me—how could they not?—the most important thing to do is to support your teams in their search for perfection." There's that word again. Zelnick, mate, might I suggest a thesaurus. Flawlessness and sublimity are right there, and if you keep harping on about perfection I'm going to get worried. Given how gorgeous GTA 6 looks, though, it's paying off.

With NaturalVision Enhanced set to land today, May 15, Razed and his team are pushing GTA 5 further than they've ever been able to—and the results are absolutely stunning.

Despite a flurry of positive reviews more recently, at the time of writing GTA 5 Enhanced boasts Mixed views on Steam overall, however NaturalVision Enhanced almost single-handedly proves there's still life in the old dog yet.

"Oh yeah, even I'm a bit surprised by what we've been able to accomplish," Razed tells me. "I'm lucky to work alongside some incredibly talented people who've come up with things like custom shaders (such as volumetric clouds) and a range of other techniques that have helped shape NaturalVision over the years.

"And now, thanks to Rockstar Games and the release of GTA 5 Enhanced on PC, we have an amazing opportunity to take things even further. It's a really exciting time for us."

There are, of course, scores of visual overhaul projects that sit among the best GTA 5 mods, some of which are still supported today, 10 years since the game first arrived on PC. But there are none that have been as consistently impressive as NaturalVision.

With NaturalVision Enhanced, Razed and his team are bringing everything they've learned forward while capitalising on the base-level additions GTA Enhanced has brought with it.

Razed adds: "NaturalVision Enhanced taps into the new ray tracing tech within GTA 5 Enhanced to bring the world to life with a different sense of realism. Players can expect to see improved lighting, shadows and colors across San Andreas, along with some of the high-quality textures and props from NaturalVision Evolved ported over.

"I'm very happy with the progress so far and think it's the most refined and immersive version of NaturalVision we've ever created. For me, it's all about creating an illusion of a living, breathing world that pulls you in. Funny enough, the very first version of NaturalVision was called 'NaturalVision Photorealistic GTAV' but it was far from being truly photorealistic at the time.

"Although with NaturalVision Enhanced and the power of ray tracing, I think it's safe to say we're closer to that vision than ever before. Huge thanks to Rockstar Games for helping make that possible."

NaturalVision Enhanced will be available to download for free when it lands today.

Even though GTA 5 won't be required reading for GTA 6, it's a good excuse to play it if you haven't, or to jump back in with the Enhanced version's upgrades. Robert Zak called the updated game's ray tracing as important to Los Santos as it is to Cyberpunk 2077's Night City.

Epic has GTA 5 Enhanced for cheaper than usual and you'll get 20% of the cost back as a coupon if you buy it through Epic's payment system. And who knows, you might need that 20% to offset whatever Rockstar decides to charge you for GTA 6 when it finally comes to PC.

Epic's sale runs from May 15 to June 12, but the 20% back deal lasts until August 31. It isn't a one-time thing either—any time you buy a game the coupon will be added to your account. That means you can chain the deal on multiple purchases, which helps make up for the prices not going quite as low as Steam's.

Alan Wake 2, Stalker 2, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, and The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria are some of the highlights from the sale, and there will be free games and other in-game goodies given away during it too.

Steam also has a sale going on right now that is centered around Pokémon-like games, like Palworld. There isn't a whole lot of overlap, but it might be worth double checking you're getting the best deal you can on each platform.

NaturalVision Enhanced will leverage Rockstar's newly-introduced RTGI (ray traced global illumination) implementation, while also introducing a new real-time tunables menu that'll allow players with high-end hardware to push in-game realism to new levels.

Led by prolific Grand Theft Auto modder Razed, NaturalVision Enhanced is downloadable for free and builds upon the host of adjustments rolled out in previous NaturalVision entries, including environmental weathers, ambient colours and world textures.

When all of that and more comes together, it looks incredible. Here are a handful of exclusive screens shared with PC Gamer:

The return voyage comes with years of will-they-or-won't-they anticipation and a delay, making it hard not to scour every official GTA 6 screenshot or trailer for a hidden detail. After all, those fancy GTA 6 cars are nothing without a world worth exploring, and Rockstar's 2026 sequel certainly looks like an ambitious trip back to Vice City in need of obsessive cartographers.

Confirmed GTA 6 map locations

The reveal trailer introduced the setting, but it wasn't until GTA 6 Trailer 2 that we saw a more detailed dossier on where Rockstar will take console players (and hopefully us) next year. So far, we've got six confirmed locations for the GTA 6 map, including some you may vaguely recognize from playing the 2002 game…or by visiting Florida.

Vice City

Inspired by real-life Miami proper, Vice City is home to Tisha-Wocka flea market, Little Cuba, the Vice City Port, and Ocean Beach. Leonida's sunny vacation capital is easily its most notable, with some early clips harkening back to the OG's Ocean View Hotel and Vice City International Airport.

Mount Kalaga National Park

Mount Kalaga sits on Leonida's northern border, and Rockstar notes it "offers prime hunting, fishing, and off-road trails." That's not a confirmation you can do any of those things, but what better way to cement its RPG-lite status than adding a fishing minigame?

Historically GTA hasn't offered much diversity in its flora or fauna, but GTA 5 and GTA Online changed that by adding dogs, sharks, deer, coyotes, mountain lions, and cows. Most of those are packed into Senora National Park, so maybe another local wildlife destination bodes well for even more GTA 6 animals.

Grassrivers

Speaking of animals, the GTA 6 Grasslands are described as a home for more "deadlier predators and weirder discoveries" than just its gators. Who's to say what that entails, but damn near every screenshot of the wetlands in Rockstar's gallery includes a gator (or several). Take it as a bit of advice for visiting both the real Everglades and GTA's Grasslands—don't get too cozy near any substantial body of water. Especially if you can't see the bottom.

Leonida Keys

The Florida Keys sit just to the south of Miami and the Everglades, so we're assuming that's Vice City in the distance while looking at the Leonida Keys screenshots. The waters are a far cry from the muddy, gator-infested mangroves elsewhere, but it's still "some of the most beautiful and dangerous waters in all of America."

Sure, that could be a warning about local drug trade baddies, but there's definitely a shark waiting to snack on drunk party-goers in one screenshot. We're manifesting more sharks in GTA.

Ambrosia

Ambrosia sounds like the classic American one-company town where a single industrial entity employs and controls the whole shebang. In GTA 6, the Allied Crystal sugar refinery does all the employing, while the Final Chapter biker gang "provides almost everything else." Whatever that means, we're assuming it's no good, as Rockstar says Ambrosia is where "the battle for health and wealth" in Leonida begins.

Port Gellhorn

As "Leonida's forgotten coast," Port Gellhorn doesn't sound like it's faring much better than Ambrosia. It's a former vacation hotspot feeling the economic strife, packed with "cheap motels, shut-down attractions, and empty strip malls." The instability must've paved the way for more predatory industries because drugs, alcohol, and energy drinks are Gellhorn's primary moneymakers in GTA 6.

Rockstar now says that this trailer is the biggest video launch of all time, which is a rather fluffy phrase but it offers some impressive stats to back it up. Since the trailer was released on Tuesday it has received over 475 million views across all platforms, a number that's now doubtless even higher. The YouTube version alone is currently sitting at just under 95 million views.

The game's first trailer, released in 2023, saw 93 million views over the same time period after release, though that one for whatever reason was also a YouTube exclusive (and broke viewership records, even if it couldn't quite outperform BTS).

The Hollywood Reporter compares the 475 million number to some major movie releases: Deadpool & Wolverine's trailer got 365 million views in its first day, and The Fantastic Four: First Steps had more than 200 million.

One more stat. The trailer features several tracks but the main song is Hot Together by The Pointer Sisters, something of a deep cut from a band best-known for tracks like I'm So Excited, and Spotify says streams of this song subsequently increased by *checks notes* 182,000%.

"Grand Theft Auto cuts through popular culture like almost nothing else," said Spotify’s Sulinna Ong. "Music has been synonymous with the series since the very beginning, so it's great to see fans both new and established connecting with an iconic track in this way."

GTA 6 is now due for release on May 26, 2026, though when we'll see it on PC is anyone's guess: the same year would be lovely, but Rockstar's past form suggests a 2027 release wouldn't be out of the question (or even god forbid 2028).

You probably saw a bunch of seagulls and pelicans flying overhead as the trailer opens: they're easy enough to spot. But there's also an enormous iguana ambling toward Jason's house in the very second shot, and a raccoon can be seen, twice, digging through a trashcan in the background as Brian chastises our hunky hero. Aw, trash panda!

That's not all the wildlife and pets on display in the trailer and screenshots Rockstar released this week, if you pull your eyes away from the action. A bodega cat sits on an ATM cleaning itself as Jason buys beer, Jason and Lucia have a pet python in their house.

There's even a great white shark that can just barely be seen lurking beneath the waves of a busy marina.

I'm thrilled to see all these creatures in the background (I feel like I spot more each time I watch) and there are also plenty on full display: along with the trailer Rockstar released a buttload of screenshots this week featuring sea turtles, panthers, deer, gators, and don't worry, they didn't forget dogs.

Even screens with an animal front and center, like the one below showing a couple of gators, you can still see more animals: there are some herons or maybe spoonbills to the middle-right of the image and what may be nutria or muskrats to the middle-left.

I'm glad the tradition continues: GTA 5 also has tons of animals if you know where to look. Head to the farms of Grapeseed and you'll see pigs and chickens. Take a trip to Mount Chiliad and you might spot some elk or boars. From cougars to coyotes to cows to cats, the world is full of wildlife, livestock, and pets, so I'm happy to see GTA 6 is also bursting at the seams with feathered and furry friends.

Some of my excitement is purely selfish: a mod for GTA 5 let me play the game as a shark, which was quite honestly the most fun I had in GTA 5. Who needs guns when you can just bite your enemies in half? As long as they're in the water, that is. If not, you might have to wriggle out on land or call for a cabbie to have a snack:

I know my dream of being a shark in GTA 6 is a long, long way off: first the game has to come out in 2026, then it has to come out on PC in 2027 (?), and then modders will have to do whatever magic they do that will let me inhabit a shark instead of Jason Duval. But I bet it'll be worth waiting for.

I'm also happy because Rockstar gives a lot of attention to its animals in general. The wildlife in Red Dead Redemption 2 was so enjoyable, not just to hunt (though that was fun), but to observe. The horses were incredibly detailed, the bears were terrifying, and everything else from birds to beavers to bullfrogs were so caringly created that it made putting down your pistol and going on a nature walk supremely satisfying.

To me, GTA and RDR games are most enjoyable once you've finished the story missions and are left with a big, beautiful sandbox to explore and play around in. Once Jason and Lucia's drama is in my rearview, I'm looking forward to parking the car and going on a long nature walk to see how many animals I can spot. And hopefully, somewhere down the line, I'll get to play as a shark again.

"Grand Theft Auto VI Trailer 2 was captured entirely in-game from a PlayStation 5, comprised of equal parts gameplay and cutscenes," Rockstar Games posted on X earlier today.

GTA 6 is only confirmed for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X at this point, so it's probably no surprise that the footage is derived from what will be the lead platform. Still, I half-expected the footage to be running on a PS5 Pro. Or even a PC, even though the PC version doesn't exist as far as Rockstar is concerned.

It's worth remembering that GTA 5 first launched for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 in 2013. That's kind of shocking in retrospect, but the game was perfectly playable on those antiquated consoles, and the inevitable next-gen versions for Xbox One and PS4 weren't seismic improvements. The game's PC launch was different, though: not only did it finally support framerates higher than an occasionally ropey 30 fps, but we also got higher resolution, an in-game video and image editor, and mods.

GTA 6 probably won't hit PC until 2027 at this rate—the console version got delayed to 2026 this week—but when it does, it'll likely be sumptuous.

I was looking at all the fake logos, because I think they're neat.

This isn't a bit. I've always been fascinated with minute environmental details. For years I've had a regular practice of firing up empty private lobbies just so I could comb Halo and Call of Duty maps for the small creative decisions environmental artists might've made that are easy to miss when you're actively being murdered.

When you focus so closely on those granular choices—the placement of furniture nobody will ever sit in, the arrangement of bookshelves that'll become a mess as soon as the first grenade goes off—you can appreciate the artistry in crafting a digital environment. And there's no granular detail I love like some good fictional branding.

The only good brand is a fake one. I'm a sicko for logos for pretend companies, seals for governmental organizations that don't exist, and packaging for imaginary snack products. There's a beauty to me in the knowledge that the Destiny 2 artists who crafted the look for the Tex Mechanica gun foundry had to think through what brand identity would make sense for space cowboy guns in a world where it's been thousands of years since anyone's actually known what a cowboy was. Fictional branding is the kind of hyperspecific consideration that helps a space and setting feel unique—and makes it sting when someone shoves a Darth Vader costume in there.

In a game with a production budget like GTA 6, though, that artistic appreciation gives way to an almost existential awe. I'm fascinated by its density of fake beer brand signage and perfectly crappy billboard ads in the same way I'm fascinated by James Cameron making one of the best-selling movies of all time just because he really wanted to look at the Titanic. It's arresting. It's uncanny. It's an obsessive aesthetic emanation of money moving around at an unfathomable scale.

The new GTA 6 trailer first sent me into weirdo mode about 43 seconds in. As Jason walks through a convenience store with a six pack of Patriot beer, it wasn't the packaged bundles of Zesta brand soda or the abused Leonida lottery kiosk that grabbed my attention. It wasn't even the bodega cat on the right. It was the door.

As someone enters the store, the glass door swings inward, revealing a set of pretend stickers showing the pretend logos of the four pretend credit card brands the pretend gas station accepts. Nearby, another sticker shows GTA's own spin on a tap-to-pay symbol. And for good measure, there's an ad for Redwood cigarettes, and the obligatory disclaimer that the store IDs for every alcohol purchase.

That's more than a half-dozen bespoke bits of branding and signage on a visual space that the majority of players will, at most, glance at momentarily. Somebody had to design those. Somebody else had to approve them. And every moment it took was money that was deemed necessary and appropriate and important to spend.

The trailer's two minutes and 46 seconds are stuffed with fictional marina t-shirts, fictional fridge magnets, fictional bumper stickers. When we see a harborside bar at 1:30, I made a sound with my real human mouth that was somewhere between delighted and scandalized. It's draped with pennants, neon logos, vintage wooden signage, state license plates, snack bags, booze bottles, beer cans.

Does it suck that some of those beers are named "Piswasser" and "Pindayho"? Yes, but I'm mesmerized nonetheless.

I'm sure GTA 6 will play pretty good. I bet the cars will be fast and the crime will be fun. But I want to look at the bar—to see what's produced when someone's allowed to spend an unprecedented fortune to create a completely imaginary bar that's like a normal bar, but maybe a little sillier.

They're damn good pics, too, giving us a closer look at Grand Theft Auto 6's characters and locations within Leonida.

There are plenty of details so pour over, so we've gone ahead and compiled all the pics for you down below. Give them a peep:

Grand Theft Auto 6 location screenshots

Mount Kalaga

Located on Leonida's northern border, Mount Kalaga shows off the state's wilder side. Rockstar's official website says the area offers "prime hunting, fishing, and off-road trails," with plenty of colourful characters dwelling in the thick of Mount Kalaga's backwoods.

Grassrivers

Touted as "the untameable jewel of Leonida's crown," Grassrivers looks to be swampy as hell and full of alligators. I wonder if this is where we see that gator in the first trailer?

Leonida Keys

If you're afraid of water, the Leonida Keys perhaps isn't the place for you. If you like water and watering holes, however, this seems like the perfect location.

Vice City

It may be newer and shinier, but modern-day Vice City hasn't changed that much from the '80s, it seems. It's colourful and chaotic all at once, and it's the location Rockstar seems to be pushing the most across its two trailers.

Ambrosia

Leonida's industrial area. There's a big ol' sugar refinery here, as well as a biker gang we'll inevitably be crossing paths with in one or two quests. The official website says "old school values still reign supreme," so I'm interested to see what sort of folk Jason and Lucia run into here.

Port Gellhorn

Rockstar calls Port Gellhorn "Leonida's forgotten coast," being a run-down area with abandoned lots and seedy spots. Apparently it was once popular among tourists, but its current state doesn't look like a particularly friendly place to vacation.

Grand Theft Auto 6 character screenshots

Jason and Lucia

As Grand Theft Auto 6's two protagonists, it only makes sense that Rockstar has dropped a whole bunch of screenshots for both Lucia and Jason.

They're a pretty good glimpse into both characters: Lucia as a trained fighter, Jason as a good friend of Cal Hampton with some sort of army-related firearms training. There's still shockingly few of them together outside of illustrations, though, but it's nice to see what their lives look like outside of each other.

Side characters

Rockstar has introduced us to a wealth of supporting characters due to appear in Grand Theft Auto 6: Brian Heder, Raul Batista, Real Dimez, Cal Hampton, Boobie Ike, and Dre'Quan Priest.

We've already done an overview of all Grand Theft Auto 6 characters revealed so far, if you want extra info on who this colourful cast are.

Hidden among the crime, cars, and clubs of the GTA 6 trailer… could that be a few RPG-lite elements we see?

There's not a ton of evidence, but it's hard to see Jason using a bench press in the trailer and not think: is weightlifting just part of a cutscene, or something more? A screenshot of Lucia working a heavy bag in a gym has me wondering if practicing a skill, like unarmed combat, makes her a better fighter. We also see Jason's hair change during the trailer, ranging from a bit of stubble to a short beard, his hair style is longer at times, and at some points he looks more suntanned than others, too.

Look, this could mean nothing. In GTA 5 you can change your hairstyle and facial hair by visiting the barber, and there are a few minigames like golf that serve as activities but don't have a wider impact on gameplay. Weightlifting, punching bags, and Jason's changing facial hair might not signify anything, really.

But this is Rockstar, which has dabbled a bit with light RPG elements, like nutrition, weight, and exercise, in the past: most notably in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, where food wasn't just something you scarfed down to restore some health.

In GTA:SA, food was a necessity, and players had to make CJ eat every few days of in-game time or he'd lose weight and muscle mass. If he didn't eat at all, CJ would actually die from starvation.

Eating too much also meant he would gain an unhealthy amount of weight, leaving him unable to leap as high or run for as long as a more fit version of CJ could, and spending time working out would make him stronger and more agile.

That system wasn't carried over to GTA 4 or GTA 5, but there was a touch of it in Rockstar's Red Dead Redemption 2. Arthur's weight would fluctuate depending on what and how often you ate, and have a small effect on some aspects of the game. For instance, a heavier Arthur would have a bit less stamina than a slimmer Arthur, but have a bigger health bar. Conversely, a skinny Arthur could run for longer but take less damage than a thicc Arthur.

Arthur's hair and beard would also grow over time in RDR2, meaning that if you wanted to be smooth shaven you'd actually have to go to the barber and get a shave. Your hair could even be influenced by items like hair tonics, letting you grow long locks and a big bushy beard. It's not clear if that's the case in GTA 6, but I wouldn't be surprised if Jason's hair grew over time. It's a cool feature that makes characters feel more real, so why not include it?

And even if there aren't light RPG systems like the GTA:SA's in GTA 6, weightlifting could still have a gameplay effect, like yoga did in GTA 5. For Michael (the only playable character who could do the yoga activity), practicing yoga was one way to slightly increase his special ability (bullet time), so it was more than just a minigame or a time-killer. Maybe Jason pumping iron (and he's benching 265 lbs, which ain't bad at all) actually makes him stronger in GTA 6, and Lucia working a bag makes her a better fighter.

I personally doubt Rockstar will bring us back to San Andreas-levels of food, nutrition, and exercise: GTA isn't a survival game, and I don't think most players were all that enamored with having to constantly manage CJs weight and fitness. But I wouldn't be surprised if some of these systems were given a light touch in GTA 6, more along what we saw in RDR2. If it's good enough for Arthur Morgan, it's good enough for our two new lawbreakers.

The new Grand Theft Auto 6 trailer starts with a throwaway line that I didn't think anything of until Rich pointed out that it's clearly a joke.

"Oh, just fixin' some leaks," protagonist Jason says as he climbs down from a roof in the very first scene, and Rockstar is a meticulous sort, so I have to imagine that this is an intentional reference to the many leaks GTA 6 has seen over its long development.

The biggest of them came from a 2022 hack, and it's an incredible and unhappy story.

In 2022, 90 videos from a GTA 6 development build were posted online. It was one of the biggest leaks in gaming history, up there with the Half-Life 2 source code theft, and also felt like a sign of the times. The rise of remote working in response to Covid meant that far more information was being transmitted outside of office networks, opening new avenues for hacking and social engineering.

The hack wasn't the first time GTA 6 details leaked, and it confirmed previously leaked details, such as the dual protagonist setup and Vice City setting. It wouldn't be the last GTA 6 leak, either: In 2023, the first GTA 6 trailer hit X before Rockstar officially published it, prompting the developer to put it up early.

But the 2022 hack was the most significant incident, and incredibly, it was carried out by a teenager who was out on bail and under police protection over other hacks, including a major Nvidia breach, which he was involved in as part of hacker group Lapsus$.

Arion Kurtaj reportedly managed to bypass Rockstar's security from a Travellodge hotel where police had placed him for safety after he'd been doxxed by rivals. The conditions of his bail included an internet ban, but he reportedly used an Amazon Fire Stick, smartphone, and a keyboard and a mouse to make his way onto protected Rockstar servers.

Kurtaj, who is autistic, was deemed unfit to stand trial but was found responsible for the Rockstar hack and others, and in 2023 was sent to a secure hospital for an undefined duration.

As reported by the BBC, the sentence was motivated by belief from the court that Kurtaj was likely to repeat the offense as he "continued to express the intent to return to cyber-crime as soon as possible."

A 17-year-old hacker was also tried and was found guilty, and sentenced to an 18-month Youth Rehabilitation Order, which the BBC reported involved "intense supervision and a ban on using VPNs online."

Perhaps it's appropriate that a game series about gleeful criminality would be the target of real crime, but Rockstar seemingly did not find the irony amusing, testifying that it spent $5 million to recover from the hack.

The new trailer's opening lines would've been funnier had it also leaked early, and Rockstar might've even anticipated that possibility, but, nope, this GTA video actually dropped when Rockstar intended it to.

It wasn't exactly a big surprise, though. We were expecting a new trailer closer to the start of the year, and when that didn't happen, we started to anticipate a delay announcement. We got that the other day, when Take-Two announced that GTA 6 has been delayed to May 2026.

The news didn't help Take-Two's share price, but that's nothing a new trailer to stoke the hype can't solve—shares in the company rose 2.89% today.

According to the site, Mount Kalaga occupies the "northern fringes" of Leonida, GTA 6's parallel universe Florida, where Rockstar says visitors can find "prime hunting, fishing, and off-road trails." Accompanying screenshots show kayakers paddling down riverways, camo-clad hunters beneath pine trees, even a Florida panther (Leonida panther?) stalking unsuspecting deer.

It almost looks like Rockstar spliced a little slice of Red Dead Redemption 2 into the GTA 6 map. Given the undying fascination GTA 5 players have with the natural majesty of Mount Chiliad—gamers yearn for uppies—I suspect it'll be a popular destination for anyone looking to venture outside Vice City.

I'm surprised by how much wildlife those screenshots show, though. If I fight off a Mount Kalaga panther, can Lucia sell its pelt for cash? Much to think about.

The Mount Kalaga region has more to offer than just the wonder of the great outdoors, however. "In the lush surrounding backwoods," Rockstar says, "hillbilly mystics and paranoid radicals live far from the prying eyes of the government."

I'm a little conflicted about the description. On one hand, past GTA games give an impression that Rockstar struggles to conceive of a person living outside the city who isn't either fully divorced from reality or wearing a tank top coated with mystery stains, and the "hillbilly mystic" characterization doesn't sound like the studio's going to be covering new ground there. On the other, I am curious about what it looks like to be subjected to the wizardries of a sorcerous Florida Man.

The paranoid radicals, I don't have any hope for. Probably a good idea to bring body armor if you can.

The game's second trailer focuses largely on Jason and Lucia, and shows sequences from what I'd speculate is the game's opening stretch: Jason living in a shabby beach property doing favours for his shady landlord instead of paying rent, Jason and Lucia reuniting on her release from prison, the couple getting all loved-up and vowing to improve their situation. But alongside that was an absolute treasure-trove of incidental details that showcase just how much of a leap Rockstar is taking with this game's scale and ambition.

It's more grounded

The first observation is that, when you zoom out a little on everything being shown here, GTA 6's astonishing visual style is coming alongside a way more grounded tone and world than the oft-absurd GTA 5. Obviously GTA 6 is going to deliver some incredible set-pieces and spectacle, and there's a brief glimpse of the protagonists hanging out of an airplane, but for the most part this comes across as a world of low-level criminality, hustles and shakedowns.

GTA has at one level always been about engaging in fantasy criminality, whether that's the carjackings of its title or going on murderous rampages and seeing how long you can survive at max Wanted level. I do wonder how those things, which I recall with great fondness from the older entries, are going to translate into this visual style and verisimilitude.

There's a cute nod to the 2022 hack

The trailer also opens with a gag, Jason shouting down from his roof "oh, just fixing some leaks." GTA 6 was the subject of a 2022 hack that saw lots of footage and details splurged onto the internet (the hacker was subsequently convicted in the UK and sentenced to indefinite detention). Rockstar exerts total control over how its games are marketed and released, so all that beta footage must've stung, and this is them taking back control of the narrative, showing the things it wants you to focus on.

Are those RPG-lite elements we see?

The trailer shows Jason weightlifting at one point, and if you look closely at the various official screenshots and the different scenes in the trailer, his appearance is subtly different: from tan to the hair cuts. This shot instantly brought to mind San Andreas' weightlifting minigame, which tied into that game's RPG-lite elements around CJ's weight and physique. GTA 6 seems to be revisiting that idea, though perhaps not to the extremes seen in San Andreas.

This also ties-in to a brief sighting of a fight club: Lucia delivers a kick within an arena as people watch on from behind wire fencing.

It looks like there are some returning characters (and Stephen Root?)

This is speculation but it certainly looks like we see Phil Cassidy at one point, the gun store guy, which would make him the second character (after Lazlo) to make the jump from the original GTA 3D Trilogy (Cassidy was in GTA 3 and Vice City, as well as the PSP spinoff games). The first name is confirmed by the gun store's name: Phil's Ammu-Nation.

There are reasons to think it's not him, mostly relating to the timeframe and him having both arms, and the character could well be a relative or just a nod, but I think Rockstar's comfortable playing around with its own history like this.

This is yet to be confirmed but Brian Hader, Jason's shady landlord-slash-boss, sounds an awful lot like the actor Stephen Root.

It's modern, but still feels '80s

The setting is up-to-the-minute present day, with yet more glimpses of social media-style footage and modern technology. But the vibes are all 1980s, and among the tracks heard at different points are Wang Chung’s "Everybody Have Fun Tonight" and the Pointer Sisters' "Hot Together", both major '80s hits.

Yep, Jason is named Jason

We've now got the full names of both protagonists. Jason gives his full name as Jason Duval when at the prison, and here we also get Lucia's surname: Caminos. Their house also has different stuff in it at different points in the trailer, so presumably you can upgrade your pad as you progress. There's even a PS5-style console and a PS4-style pad at one point.

There are cats!

Other things we get a glimpse of include a GTA version of Miami's MetroRail, an elevated train system, and most exciting of all cats! You can see a cat climb out of the bins behind Brian Heder at the start of the trailer, and one on Jason's right as he exits a store carrying a six pack of beer. The latter did make me wonder about getting drunk in-game, which we don't see in the trailer but was a feature in previous games.

We see a big cat, too: One of the new screenshots on the website shows a panther hunting deer, suggesting that not only will we find wildlife in GTA 6, but it displays behaviors as complex as stalking and hunting.

Oh and on the beer: the characters don't drink Pißwasser, but we do see an advert for it at one point.

One other notable animal reference is a character wearing a green football jersey with "Manatees" written on it. Manatees are also known as sea cows, so this is the GTA version of the Miami Dolphins.

There are hundreds more details to be extrapolated from this trailer, and the more I notice the more excited I am for where Rockstar's going with this. It'll be fascinating to see how the reactiveness of the NPCs holds up when it's dealing with players and their actions, rather than a trailer showcase, and I can't wait to see how environments like bars are handled when it's not a cutscene. You have to hand it to Rockstar: this game may not live up to its promises, but what golden promises they are.

While the first trailer was a broader overview of Lucia and a modern-day Vice City—with Jason only speaking a single word and appearing for less than 10 seconds—the second trailer has honed in a lot more on the Bonnie-and-Clyde-esque relationship between the two. Tender moments are spliced between criminal activity, helicopter fights, and swamp chases, and leaping from motorbikes on highways.

We already knew Lucia has spent an undisclosed amount of time in prison, and the latest trailer shows Jason picking her up as she's released. While the reunion doesn't seem to send sparks flying straight off the bat—the initial awkwardness has me theorising she's been in there for at least a couple years—it takes approximately two seconds before we're treated to a scene of the two rolling around on the bed, ankle bracelets and all.

There's beer drinking (lots of it), heavy petting (even moreso), and clearly a severe lack of lesson-learning as it doesn't take the two long to ingrain themselves in some classic crime committing. But even among the chaos and the violence—I mean, it's GTA, of course there's an abundance of both those things—the few sentences that the two do share are full of care and affection. It's a perfect juxtaposition, one which shows a surprisingly normal and healthy relationship between two delinquents.

Maybe it's 12 years of being hit over the head with GTA 5's Michael and Amanda De Santa's toxicity and marital problems, but getting glimpses of the dynamic between Jason and Lucia is incredibly refreshing. It already has me both excited for their story and anxious for their inevitably tragic ending. It's a dynamic which feels like the two actually like each other, which is already a rare win, but also like it's a couple on equal footing with one another. Couples who rob convenience stores together, stay together, or however that saying goes.

It also doesn't feel like Lucia only exists to be the nagging woman, or the sassy woman, or any other stereotype that Rockstar has cribbed from in the past. When she comes home from her community service towards the end of the trailer to Jason lazing on the couch with a half-drunk beer, she doesn't deride him. She goes straight in for a lie down and a hug. Hell, there's even a second beer on the table, one which I've already headcanoned Jason had ready for her when she got back.

It's one of those incredibly normal moments. They're not caricatures, they're not over-the-top zany criminals. They're just people. A woman tired after a long day of… work? That moment when you get to share an intimate moment with your partner and all the stress melts away.

Though we've still not seen much of them, Jason and Lucia feel like a breath of fresh air after GTA 5. While I love Michael, Franklin, and Trevor, it's nice to see a return to more grounded protagonists. As grounded as you can get for a GTA game, mind. It's made me even more interested in just how these two have fallen into a life of crime, and how they ended up finding each other.

Honestly, props to Rockstar for already having me so invested in these two and their story in what amounts to an entire four minutes and 16 seconds of trailer footage between the two teasers—hell, they're not even in it for all of that time, much less together. If I'm already this hooked off such little exposure, I imagine Rockstar's going to be taking me on a hell of a narrative ride when the game launches next year. Just for the love of god, don't put me in a situation where I have to kill one of them.

There's this pretty underground game coming out next year called Grand Theft Auto 6. Not too sure if you've heard of it. A second trailer has just launched for Rockstar's cosy city life/ murderthon, and the thing I'm most impressed by are its beer bottles. Boring, I know.

Just over the two-minute mark into the latest trailer, Lucia and Jason, two of the game's protagonists, arrive at their riverside property and lie down with a couple of beers. Not only do you see the bubbles and the condensation on those glass bottles, but you also see the reflection of the TV and the light pouring in from the outside.

I shouldn't be surprised. Rockstar is known for little details, it is the company that made horse testicles shrink in the cold, after all. But it does suggest a splash of ray tracing is being used here on at least certain effects. There are bottles, frames, puddles, and even controllers reflecting on glass tables littered throughout the trailer that all scream 'look my these reflections', and the shadows look pretty impressive too.

The water in the latest trailer also looks impeccable, flowing naturally in the warm sun. You might ask, 'How do you know the sun is warm?' and I'd respond, 'I can practically feel it through the screen.

Oohing and ahhing at the trailer in the PC Gamer office brought about a conversation about how bottles and the technology around them have always represented a challenge for video game textures.

Water is hard to make look real, lighting is hard to make look real—bottles are a combination of the two. Back in 2020, Half Life: Alyx implemented a rather wonderful shader which accurately reflects how water moves in a bottle, and that same shader was later implemented in Counter-Strike 2. It's a small detail that means a lot in context. This is something both Valve and Rockstar do well.

When not admiring bottles and lighting fragments, the rest of the trailer looks great, too. Textures are nearly movie-like, and the sheen that comes off water, or a dull light bulb above our main characters, makes the game feel grounded and real. I'm not one to normally stare, but even the way sweat pours down the chest of Jason in the hot sun feels so needlessly but impressively Rockstar.

Rockstar seems to always be at the front of graphical limitations with the launch of its big games, and early signs suggest GTA 6 will be no different. It's a looker, and the way that trailer 2 leaves shots of glass, guns, and the smoke of the back of a motorbike to just sit shows how confident Rockstar is in its vision.

I bought a new PC near the latter half of last year, and my RTX 4070 Super has been able to handle pretty much everything I've thrown at it. I have no doubt it will be able to run GTA 6, especially when the current generation of Xbox and PlayStation will both be able to play it at its launch.

However, I can almost sense the strain that Red Dead Redemption 2 on Ultra settings leaves my rig under. Everything gets quite hot, and I can get above 60 fps on 4K, but not much more.

This doesn't seem too bad, but the RTX 4070 Super is a mid-range card that launched five years after Red Redemption 2 did on PC. By the time GTA 6 launches on PC (likely at some point in 2027), we will be either ready for the launch of the RTX 60-series line or already have it in our PCs.

You can actually see some stuttering even in the trailer. Trailers are highly edited and likely watched many times before they go live, so the inclusion certainly seems a bit strange. For instance, at 1:42 into the trailer, there's a scene with a man with a towel over his neck and, as he steps forward, the frame rate slows down.

We still have a year until the game launches on console, so that is time for Rockstar to clean up performance, but it's clear it's going to be a mighty game from a technical standpoint.

This is all before mentioning that Rockstar is known for having much better console ports than PC ones. GTA 6 will likely be aiming for 30 fps on PS5 with some amount of ray tracing included, but we don't know what kind of PC rig is needed for an equivalent experience. GTA 5 had a miserable launch on PC, and even the GTA 5 Enhanced launch in March this year was met by a mixed response.

Assuming there will be a 12-month+ wait for GTA 6 on PC, one can always hope it will be optimised for that RTX 20-series card you've been rocking, but Rockstar's history suggests it may be a bit of a slog to run on older gear. A worthwhile slog, thanks to excellent visuals and an engaging story, but a slog nonetheless.

Alongside the trailer, Rockstar's official website was also updated with a ton of new information about the characters and the game.

Jason Duval "grew up around grifters and crooks. After a stint in the Army trying to shake off his troubled teens, he found himself in the Keys doing what he knows best, working for local drug runners. It might be time to try something new [...] Meeting Lucia could be the best or worst thing to ever happen to him. Jason knows how he'd like it to turn out but right now, it's hard to tell."

Lucia Caminos was taught to fight by her father "as soon as she could walk" and all that fighting led her to the Leonida Penitentiary. "Sheer luck got her out. Lucia’s learned her lesson—only smart moves from here. Fresh out of prison and ready to change the odds in her favor, Lucia’s committed to her plan—no matter what it takes."

Then we get a rundown of some of the game's supporting cast. Jason's buddy Cal Hampton is an online conspiracy theorist who's "safest hanging at home, snooping on Coast Guard comms with a few beers and some private browser tabs open [...] Cal is at the low tide of America and happy there. Casual paranoia loves company, but his friend Jason has bigger plans."

Then there's Boobie Ike, one of the few to turn his youthful indiscretions into a "legitimate empire spanning real estate, a strip club, and a recording studio—Boobie's all smiles until it's time to talk business." In the game, his focus is all on Dre'Quan Priest and Only Raw Records: "now they just need a hit." As for Dre'Quan, he "was always more of a hustler than a gangster" and breaking the music scene is the goal.

Doubtless they'll be crossing over with Real Dimez, two women called Bae-Luxe and Roxy, high-school friends who have "the savvy to turn their time shaking down local dealers into cold, hard cash via spicy rap tracks and a relentless social media presence." They had an early hit but have gone off the boil, and are now signed to Boobie Ike's Only Raw Records, "hoping lightning can strike twice."

Then there's career criminal Raul Bautista, "a seasoned bank robber always on the hunt for talent ready to take the risks that bring the biggest rewards." One suspects that Bautista may be the starting point for GTA 6's version of GTA Online: "Sooner or later, his crew will have to double down or pull their chips from the table."

Finally we get Brian Heder, who seems to be the kingpin of Vice City's criminal scene. A "classic drug runner" from the "golden age of smuggling in the Keys", Heder is "still moving product through his boat yard with his third wife, Lori." He's the character we see in the new trailer pulling up to hassle Jason, who's living rent-free in one of his dilapidated properties on the seafront.

Heder "looks like a Leonida beach bum" but "moves like a great white shark", and his apparent benevolence towards Jason extends only insofar as Jason "helps with local shakedowns, and stops by for Lori’s sangria once in a while."

GTA 6's second trailer focuses on Jason and Lucia, but we get a brief glimpse of all of the above characters. As ever, Rockstar's telling a story through an ensemble cast of apparent lowlifes and hustlers with big dreams, and this feels like a setting where absolutely no-one has their shit together. It's also by a distance the most visually stunning game I've ever seen: the delay certainly hurts but, by god, it sure looks like this game is going to be worth it.

This weekend, Devolver shared a post on X in response to the Grand Theft Auto 6 release date announcement, with the ominous message, "You can't escape us. May 26, 2026 it is then."

This challenge was a follow-up to a post from back in March where Devolver casually vowed, "Gonna release a game the exact same day and time as GTA 6."

Devolver hasn't yet announced what game it'll be pitting against GTA 6. The publisher is known for its irreverent industry stunts, but there could be something to the plan if it finds the same mutually-beneficial hype experienced by Animal Crossing: New Horizons and Doom Eternal on March 20, 2020.

That shared release date was notable for the comical contrast—as with movies Barbie and Oppenheimer—so whatever Devolver lands on will likely be a wildly different game from GTA 6.

Devolver has published some spectacular indie games, including Cult of the Lamb, Death's Door, The Talos Principle, Gris, and The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood. If anyone can successfully launch an indie game on the same day as GTA6, it's probably them.

The mystery upcoming game destined for GTA 6's new May 26, 2026 release date could be almost anything. We know Enter the Gungeon 2 is slated for a 2026 release, although Hotline Miami 3 might be a more theme-appropriate candidate (however, a third installment in the series has yet to be announced).

The situation could get especially spicy if GTA 6 gets delayed again, allowing Devolver to either release its game on time and brag or delay it unnecessarily to stay true to its word.

At the very least, Devolver might get a good showing from PC gamers, since GTA 6 likely won't even be on PC on launch day.

Before the delay was announced, Take-Two had been saying Grand Theft Auto 6 was on-track for release in fall 2025. But ever since the first reveal it's refused to announce or even confirm a PC version. Grand Theft Auto 6 is confirmed for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and nothing else.

The gap between GTA 5 and GTA 6 also means that the gaming landscape itself has changed. PC has not traditionally been a priority for Rockstar: GTA 5 launched in September 2013 on consoles, but it wouldn't come to PC until April 2015. Even this was something of an industry hangover. As Rockstar North veteran Obbe Vermeej put it:

"Initially the consoles were a much bigger market for a game like GTA. They just got into the habit of doing consoles first. There used to be way more money in the console versions. Now that that's changed, hopefully the PC version will be closer behind."

Vermeej's explanation does make a lot of sense. GTA 3, Vice City and San Andreas always felt like one of the major reasons to own a PlayStation 2, and two decades ago games were still mostly sold in boxes. But now PC is a much more dominant force and boasts an installed base of players that, frankly, no console could ever dream of: one recent estimate says there are 908 million PC players. They might not all have a rig that can handle GTA 6, but plenty will.

Even Take-Two head honcho Strauss Zelnick admits the winds have changed, and basically said the same as Vermeej. PC is a "more important part of what used to be a console business" not least because of ongoing elements like GTA Online still boasting "enormous ongoing engagement."

So at least we can confidently say that a PC version will happen: GTA 5 consistently remains one of Steam's most-played games, and thanks to having both a standard and premium edition is somehow in the global top 20 sellers list twice.

But Rockstar hasn't exactly rushed to take advantage of that. The expanded and enhanced version of GTA 5 was released for consoles in March 2022, but took fully three years to make its way over to PC.

I've got two big concerns about GTA 6 coming to PC. The first is that Rockstar and Take-Two really can afford to take their sweet time on this: everyone knows it's going to be the biggest game on the planet from day one, and probably break every sales record going. If GTA 5 is any indication, it's also planned as a living experience that will last well over a decade. Which means that 26 May 2026 is the current release date, but don't go all surprised Pikachu if Rockstar decides it needs a little longer.

The second is that, even if GTA 6 makes that date, Rockstar is being coy about a PC release for a reason, and that reason is probably that it doesn't even want to think about it until the console versions are in perfect shape. GTA 4 took a mere seven months to come to PC in 2008, but ever since then Rockstar's marquee titles have seen gaps of 13 months (Red Dead Redemption 2) and 19 months (GTA 5) before appearing on god's own platform.

It's almost unimaginable but, if GTA 6 makes its new release date and that kind of form is maintained, we might not even be looking at 2027. It's not what anyone wants to hear, but something like a 19-month gap here would push GTA 6 PC into early 2028, almost three years out. Rockstar just delays games a lot.

PCG's EIC Phil Savage said around the time of GTA 6's reveal that he couldn't see the PC version "stretching into 2027," but a year-and-a-half later it's looking like that might be optimistic and, right now, feels like the most likely scenario to me. This is Rockstar, and it does what it likes.

At least when the PC version of GTA 6 does appear, it'll be the best and shiniest version of the game. But today, right now? That feels like very little consolation.

Which sure made game devs hoping to release something this year breathe a sigh of relief, but didn't much please investors in Rockstar's parent company Take-Two Interactive. Per the FT, Take-Two's share price dropped 15% in the aftermath of Rockstar's characteristically austere news post announcing the delay.

So it's no wonder Take-Two put out its own press release concurrently with Rockstar's announcement—it anticipated just this kind of reaction. This release, though, was less focused on players and more aimed at convincing its bug-eyed investors that the sky wasn't falling. "We support fully Rockstar Games taking additional time to realize their creative vision for Grand Theft Auto 6," said Take-Two boss Strauss Zelnick.

Zelnick said that "While we take the movement of our titles seriously and appreciate the vast and deep global anticipation for Grand Theft Auto 6," it's also "steadfast in our commitment to excellence." Releasing GTA 6 in that original autumn window, it seems, would not have upheld that standard for excellence, so off to 2026 it goes.

But Take-Two urges its shareholders not to freak out, and promises it'll still make more money than anyone could possibly know what to do with even with GTA's release date slipping across the horizon. Take-Two's took some time and "reiterated its expectations that the Company will achieve sequential increases in, and record levels of, Net Bookings in Fiscal 2026 and 2027," which is to say it's still gonna sell a record volume of stuff in this fiscal year (2026) and next fiscal year (2027, they make this stuff confusing on purpose, I reckon).

"As we continue to release our phenomenal pipeline," Zelnick reassured investors, "we expect to deliver a multi-year period of growth in our business and enhanced value for our shareholders." Well, that's a weight off my mind.

"Grand Theft Auto VI is now set to release on May 26, 2026.

"We are very sorry that this is later than you expected. The interest and excitement surrounding a new Grand Theft Auto has been truly humbling for our entire team. We want to thank you for your support and your patience as we work to finish the game.

"With every game we have released, the goal has always been to try and exceed your expectations, and Grand Theft Auto VI is no exception. We hope you understand that we need this extra time to deliver at the level of quality you expect and deserve."

The post ends promising more information "soon", but let's just pause for a second: gutting. Grand Theft Auto 5 released in 2013 and this means there'll have been a 13 year wait for the next installment in the series.

No doubt the news will have many feeling wasted: including many developers and publishers, who feared this exact scenario. Grand Theft Auto 6 was announced in late 2023 with a spectacular trailer, and the 2025 release date that's now for the birds.

The worst thing about this news? Rockstar still hasn't even confirmed a PC version exists, even if it's a racing certainty, and the worry must be that for PC gamers we'll be waiting even longer after May 2026.

First up, if you've ever wondered why GTA 4 ditched so many interesting systems from San Andreas—"Stats (fitness, weight), multiple cities, stealth, underwater swimming, jet packs, tanks, bicycles, monster trucks, car modding, planes"—it was so Rockstar could "focus on making the game truly next-gen" for the Xbox 360 era. "Any time we would spend on those old features we could spend on the rendering engine, optimization, natural motion and making everything better."

Those fancy graphics and the cars that handle like out-of-control cruiseliners don't come out of nowhere, you know. Rockstar had to allocate resources to make it all happen, so bye-bye to buff CJ and monster trucks. I probably would have rather had the latter, but what's past is past. And hey, with its Mansa Musa-like fortune, Vermeij reckons Rockstar won't be making "the same cuts for 6."

Vermeij then starts musing on GTA 6. "[GTA 4's] original release date was October 16th 2007, in time for Christmas," he writes. "We made the decision to delay the game in July 2007," pushing it back to April 2008. "Only at that time," just a few months before the initial release, "did it become clear that we were going to miss the deadline.

"I'm guessing decision-day for [GTA] 6 will be similar. Fingers crossed for Take2's August earnings report."

Which is certainly foreboding, though Vermeij emphasises that he has "no inside info" and is just reflecting on things through the lens of his own experience. Of course, whether GTA 6 gets delayed or not, we here on god's own platform are gonna have to wait a little longer for the game, just like we did with GTA 5, Red Dead Redemption 2, and, uh, even RDR 1.

Someone asked Vermeij about that, and rather than saying what I suspect we all feel in our souls—that Rockstar loves to sell you a game on console then sell it to you again a year or two later on PC—his explanation for Rockstar's PC delays is a little less mercenary. "Initially the consoles were a much bigger market for a game like GTA. They just got into the habit of doing consoles first.

"There used to be way more money in the console versions. Now that that's changed, hopefully the PC version will be closer behind."

Wouldn't that be nice? To be fair, Take-Two boss Strauss Zelnick has been out and about saying PC is a "more important part of what used to be a console business" these days, but with the publisher still refusing to commit to a day-and-date release on our platform? I'm not holding my breath (another thing you couldn't do in GTA 4).

Silent received a "rather specific bug report" relating to SilentPatch, in which a user noted that after updating their Windows 11 to version 24H2, the Skimmer plane disappears completely from the game. It can't be spawned using the trainer tool, nor does it appear on its usual spawn points.

Our programming hero notes this wasn't an isolated complaint, and he's been receiving comments about the missing Skimmer since November last year. One user set up a virtual machine (VM) running Windows 11 23H2, confirmed that the plane spawned OK, then updated the VM to Windows 11 24H2 and the plane disappeared. As this user put it, why "a small feature update in 2024 breaks a random plane in a 2005 game is anyone’s guess."

Silent asked a few people on 24H2 to test and, yep, they all hit this bug. At this point he rolled up his sleeves, set up his own VM running 24H2, and confirmed it. Here's where it gets good:

"I then used the script to spawn a Skimmer and put CJ inside it," writes Silent, "just to be launched 1.0287648030984853e+0031 = 10.3 nonillion meters, or 10.3 octillion kilometers, or 1.087 quadrillion light-years up in the sky."

I'll ha' that

Needless to say GTA: San Andreas has no means of actually showing this extraordinary event, instead showing "a famous 'burn-in effect' known to occur when the camera gets launched into infinity or close to it. Funny enough, you can still kind of make out the shape of the plane even though the animations give up completely to the inaccuracies of the floating point values."

Silent began investigating the issue and hit upon an "obviously enormous" numerical value for the plane's rotor blade speed, but what caused the plane to shoot up such an unimaginable distance? "There are two possibilities," explains Silent:

• The plane spawns high up in the sky already.
• The plane spawns at ground level and then shoots up in the next frame.

At this point Silent starts going into the details of functions, Z coordinates, bounding boxes, and a dozen other pieces of terminology. If I tried to stitch together an explanation, I'd probably get bits of it wrong and it would look like gibberish anyway. For the more code-inclined, you can feast on Silent's workings in his excellent full writeup.

The long-and-short is that Silent identifies a corrupted Z value (spawn coordinates), and guesses that this is resulting in either the collision file being read incorrectly ("highly unlikely, but not impossible given that this issue could potentially have been an OS bug") or "the bounding box is read correctly, but then it’s updated with an outrageously incorrect value."

This leads Silent to further analysis of the bounding box and Z coordinate, and the realisation that when a specific vehicle is spawned for the first time, the game updates the Z coordinate to reflect the car's natural suspension height. Yes, we are still talking about a plane.

"This is where things went wrong first," writes Silent, before launching into a detailed analysis of how the suspension lines are computed, and where he finally identified the problem: In vehicles.ide, the Skimmer has fewer parameters than other planes, making it resemble the entries for boats instead. It's the only plane missing parameters for its front and rear wheels."Does re-adding those parameters fix the seaplane? Unsurprisingly, it does!" he writes.

Having identified the problem, which somehow involves the game thinking the plane is a boat, our man then goes full Sherlock to identify why Rockstar's coders missed it.

"I have a likely explanation for why Rockstar made this specific mistake in the data to begin with—in Vice City, Skimmer was defined as a boat, and therefore did not have those values defined by design! When in San Andreas they changed Skimmer’s vehicle type to a plane, someone forgot to add those now-required extra parameters. Since this game seldom verifies the completeness of its data, this mistake simply slipped under the radar.

"In the case of this rabbit hole, the discovery of this fix only raised more questions—why did this break only now? What made the game work fine despite this issue for over twenty years, before a new update to Windows 11 suddenly challenged the status quo?"

Surprisingly enough, this particular version of Windows 11 is actually not responsible. He identifies the ultimate problem as being an "actual floating point value that was sitting on the stack in exactly the right spot.

"I then inspected vehicles.ide for TopFun—the vehicle defined directly before Skimmer. Sure enough, its wheel scale is 0.7!" he wrote. "This is the exact proof I needed—notice that in the Windows 10 run, some of the local variables are even still visible to the human eye (like the normal vehicle class), while in Windows 11, they are completely gone. It’s also worth pointing out that even in Windows 10, the very next local variable after the wheel scales has been overwritten by LeaveCriticalSection, which means the game was 4 bytes away from hitting this exact bug years earlier! The luck at display here is insane."

So even though Windows 11 24H2 brought this bug to light, "the real issue here is the game relying on undefined behavior (uninitialized local variables)." The bug could've popped up on Windows 10, or 7, or XP, or even Windows 98—the math just didn't end up that way."

Ever the completionist, Silent goes on to look through the code on other San Andreas releases, and finds that the original Xbox version of the game included a fix not dissimilar to his own. This fix was included in other San Andreas releases, including GTA: The Definitive Edition.

"This was the most interesting bug I’ve encountered for a while," writes Silent. "I initially had a hard time believing that a bug like this would directly tie to a specific OS release, but I was proven completely wrong. At the end of the day, it was a simple bug in San Andreas and this function should have never worked right, and yet, at least on PC it hid itself for two decades."

In a flourish I can only admire, Silent ends by explaining why his fix is slightly more accurate than Rockstar's equivalent, and uses the discovery to reinforce some good coding principles like validating your input data: "San Andreas was notoriously bad at this." Meow!

In Tom Wolfe's book The Right Stuff, which focuses on the remarkable test pilots who worked on the early stages of the space program, he poses a question: "What is it, I wondered, that makes a man willing to sit up on top of an enormous roman candle, such as a Redstone, Atlas, Titan or Saturn rocket, and wait for someone to light the fuse?"

In the microcosm of San Andreas, a man called Silent wondered what made CJ enter a plane and then instantaneously launch "1.087 quadrillion light-years up in the sky." The real answers are all above, and in his full writeup. But the other answer is in the absurdity of these things working at all, the countless co-dependent calculations and things that can go wrong in something so seemingly simple as making a vehicle appear in the world. Now you see it: Now you're in another galaxy.

Publisher Take-Two's CEO, Strauss Zelnick, says that's partially due to one thing—you gotta keep 'em thirsty. I'm very much paraphrasing, there, Zelnick is a professional and doesn't talk like that, but it's the spirit of what he said in a video interview with Bloomberg.

The interview is very dry and business-heavy—mostly angled towards people who've never thought about videogame development before—but towards the end, the interviewer asks Zelnick why GTA 6's exact release date is such a closely guarded secret.

"The anticipation for that title might be the greatest anticipation I've ever seen for an entertainment property," Zelnick says, with a confidence that's not entirely unearned—most publishers are scrambling to get out of the way of GTA 6 like it's a tidal wave. But it's not just flexibility that keeps the game's debut mystified… it's showmanship. "We want to maintain the anticipation and the excitement."

He says that Take-Two has "competitors who will describe their release schedule for years in advance," however, "We found the better thing to do is to provide marketing materials relatively close to the release window in order to create that excitement—and balance the excitement with unmet anticipation."

"Unmet anticipation" may be light language for what is a ravenous thirst for more GTA 6 news—when the trailer first debuted, fans started scribbling over still frames of freckles just to have a nugget of applicable knowledge about its story.

Zelnick's being cheeky, here, but he's also speaking with the knowledge of a man who knows he could set a horde of theorycrafting YouTubers into a flurry of free advertisement at the wave of a hand. Still, he makes a stab at being humble: "We don't always get it exactly right, but that's what we are trying to do."

Voice actors in America are embroiled in a battle over rights to their own vocal likeness, studios with enough money to do better are bending over backwards to avoid paying artists, and no matter how many backlashes they endure, social media accounts keep thinking they can just rinse properties through a generator and call it a day.

That's not to say it doesn't have its uses—frame generation's neat, and deep-learning tech has lots of annoying busywork to automate, but the way you see some execs talk about it, generative AI is somehow the future of everything. Soon we'll be able to simply ask a machine to generate a game we want to play—and isn't that better? Not really, says CEO of Take-Two Strauss Zelnick, a publisher that's currently bankrolling a tiny little game called Grand Theft Auto 6.

That's as per an interview with Carolyn Dailey in her book The Creative Entrepreneur (thanks, GamesRadar+). Zelnick is sounding pretty whelmed by the tech, overall: "I’m not worried about AI creating hits, because it’s built on data that already exists. It’s backward-looking. Big hits are forward-looking and therefore need to be created out of thin air. Being the most creative means not just thinking outside the box; it means there is no box."

I'm skeptical as to whether generative AI can actually produce a cohesive videogame you'd want to, y'know, invest time into—but supposing it can in the near future, Zelnick isn't that far off the mark, here. Stuff like the garish Ghibli-style AI generated art is eerily competent, and it might send ripples through social media, but in terms of making anything that has a lasting impact on people, I don't think anyone cares.

Or, in the words of Psychonauts creator Tim Schafer: "That's a really impressive technical challenge, and it does sound like music, and it does sound like Mozart? But also, who cares, because it's not Mozart."

It's a sentiment that Zelnick sort of echoes while talking to Dailey—if you want to make something that actually gets the people going, he says that you need to "Hire the best creators and insist they pursue their passions. Encourage them to always try something new and to stay away from derivative and copycat works … in Hollywood it’s common to pitch your product as 'it’s a combination of Spiderman meets Batman meets Back to the Future' … We don’t do that here; we want something that you’ve never seen before."

It's a little funny, seeing Zelnick's words directly countermand Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, when he boasted that AI could let you "play a first-person shooter with aliens set in ancient Rome, me as Indiana Jones, and a comedy narrative inspired by Monty Python." The names are swapped around, but that's the exact kind of Spiderman-meets-Batman nonsense Zelnick's laying into.

I'm not so naive as to believe that a game predominantly made with generative AI won't be successful at some point, though. It's not happened yet, but given one of the most-played games on Steam has you clicking on a banana jpeg, anything's possible. But it's also weirdly reassuring to have Zelnick—the head honcho at a publisher pushing a game so massive, other publishers are scrambling to escape the looming shadow of it—saying 'thanks, but no thanks'.

These reports come from newly minted podcast The Game Business (via Eurogamer), hosted by former gamesindustry.biz editor Christopher Dring. Dring spoke to numerous individuals in prominent positions at various publishers, and while none of them would put their names on the record, they all shared similar anxieties about the impact Grand Theft Auto 6 might have on their businesses.

The central issue is the lack of a firm date for Grand Theft Auto 6's launch, which is penciled in for the end of 2025 but is currently not confirmed. The problems this causes were highlighted by the "European head" of a triple-A publisher. "We don't want to launch just before or just after the game," they explained. "If it arrives in late October, that means you either have to launch early—which a lot of people seem to be doing with the recent glut of summer release dates—or go later, putting you up against the Black Friday sales, or alternatively, just get out of the year entirely"

Yet the executive also pointed out that the problem is not necessarily limited to 2025. "If we move out of 2025, what if Rockstar do too? Will we have to push our game up, or will we have to delay further? It's proven to be very stressful."

Running alongside this is a theme to what specifically the executives are worried about. Contrary to what you might expect, this isn't necessarily the amount of money Grand Theft Auto 6 will make. Rather, it's the amount of time it will occupy players for." "Even without GTA, it's immensely difficult to find free time for new games to shine. Time is the real scarcity for us, not money. It's tough out there," said one executive.

Another exec, from "one of the biggest publishers in the world" fretted about how much worse GTA 6 could make this: "Rockstar games always suck a lot of money, and more importantly, time out of the market. "We don't want to be anywhere near that. We're working up different plans for our title."

These statements reflect a general sentiment around GTA 6's launch that's been present for a while. Industry analyst Ben Porter, from intelligence firm Newzoo, recently characterised the situation in a similar manner. "If you're a game company who's holding its breath waiting for GTA 6 to get out, and then it gets delayed by three, four, five, six months, what do you do?"

Yet it's one thing making such statements from the outside looking in, quite another to hear them directly from senior executives at major publishing companies. There are a couple of indicators that might suggest how the launch will go down. Looking backward, pretty much every game Rockstar has released since Grand Theft Auto 4 has been pushed back from its initial release date by several months, so history would suggest the same will happen here.

In addition, Grand Theft Auto 6's publisher Take-Two Interactive is also publishing Borderlands 4. Gearbox's shooter is currently scheduled to land on September 23, which falls into the launch window of GTA 6. It seems highly unlikely that 2k would force its games to compete with one another, so that may also indicate a potential delay for Rockstar's game. Yet whether GTA 6 is delayed or not, we'll still be waiting to find out when the game will come to PC. Right now, it's only confirmed for PS5 and Xbox Series X/S.

"In case you don't know, I basically created a playable GTA 5 map based on the leaks and the trailer shots of GTA 6," explains map creator Dark Space in a recent YouTube video. Dark Space based his project on a GTA 6 community mapping project, one that's attempting to model the upcoming game's world based on trailers and leaks. It didn't come as a surprise, mind you: Dark Space says he always feared Take-Two might go nuclear on them, and the only real shock was that "They didn't bother emailing me."

"My guess is that the map was probably a little too accurate," muses Dark Space. "They must feel some sort of threat from it existing, because they feel that having a playable version of the map to drive around in could ruin the surprise and newness of GTA 6 when it releases."

So Take-Two got YouTube to take down Dark Space's videos of the project, leveraging its ownership of all things GTA to have the footage thrown down the memory hole. Although Take-Two, in its infinite mercy, didn't issue takedowns against the actual download links for the maps, Dark Space "removed the download links to my mod, even though they didn't ask me to, but I think it's smarter to get out in front of them rather than waiting for their email (that will never come)." He adds that the takedown took away a "month's income that I spent two months working hard to earn".

It's a sad if predictable outcome for a project like this, driven by fan passion but which ran the risk—at least in executive heads—of spoiling Take-Two and Rockstar's best-laid plans for GTA 6's marketing blitz. Dark Space is, well, less than thrilled about it.

"In reality, my map does not negatively affect their sales. It was building hype around the game and giving players something to enjoy while we waited for the next trailer from Rockstar. When will these companies learn to stop attacking their own feet? Because it's thanks to the community of players and modders that these companies can stand."

Which is, ah, maybe a tad grandiose, although I don't disagree with the spirit of Dark Space's point. I don't think Rockstar, of all studios, needs any assistance keeping the hype train for GTA 6 going, but I do agree that publishers would do better to recognise that modding communities are just hardcore fans who only make their games look better and livelier.

"If you're a game company who's holding its breath waiting for GTA 6 to get out, and then it gets delayed by three, four, five, six months, what do you do?" said Porter in an interview with PC Gamer at GDC 2025 this week. "You either have to be able to launch into that big black hole that's been left open now, or you have to extend your run rate by an additional six months—I'm certain some companies are going to tank as a result of that, right?"

GTA 6 is currently scheduled to launch on consoles this fall (PC is still TBD, annoyingly), but it's so common for games to be delayed that it's easy to imagine it being pushed into 2026. Cyberpunk 2077 was delayed, Starfield was delayed, Assassin's Creed Shadows was delayed—big games get delayed, a lot.

It's also common for studios to time their releases to avoid big competitors that are likely to hog the limelight, and there isn't a bigger hog than a new GTA. Even very niche games might want to get out of the way, picking release dates in spring or summer 2026.

But if GTA 6 is itself delayed to spring or summer 2026, those developers could end up having to push their release dates even further out. A setback like that could be disastrous for a studio whose finances are already fragile, and given the number of closures we've seen in recent years, financial fragility doesn't seem rare.

On the other hand, a last-minute GTA 6 delay would be a big opportunity for anyone who can fill the space with a game that tides over disappointed GTA fans. There's a lot of money riding on what Rockstar decides to do before the year ends, and not just for Rockstar.

One possible clue about the likelihood of a GTA 6 delay is the Borderlands 4 release date: September 23, 2025. Why would Take-Two, which owns both Borderlands 4 and Grand Theft Auto 6, put them in competition with each other this fall? Does the Borderlands 4 release date mean that GTA 6 is likely to be delayed?

It's a sensible guess, but I wouldn't want money riding on it. Porter says there's hope that the games industry as a whole could get a boost from GTA 6's release—which if nothing else will probably get a lot of people to upgrade their consoles—but he doubts that industry execs are going to be all smiles this fall, whatever happens.

"You do hear a lot of people who are saying that GTA 6 is going to rejuvenate the market," said Porter. "And I think that there's an element of truth to that, but I don't know that it's necessarily going to be universally uplifting.

"It will certainly have an effect. It will put eyes back on the games market from investors and things like that. But everybody that we're talking to, they're ships trying to move out of the way of this big iceberg that is GTA 6. Everybody's trying to pull their game forward, push their game back—their strategy is to get out of the way. So if that's what everybody's behavior is, then how do you believe that this is going to rejuvenate the games industry?"

Porter gave a talk at GDC about Newzoo's latest industry report, which among other things estimates that PC gamers spend 92% of their time on older games, and that there are 908 million of us.

Maybe I'm not the only one, because Rockstar is giving away $3,000,000 to any lapsed player who returns to its loving bosom. If you're currently playing then you're already hooked, and Rockstar has nothing for you but scorn.

The offer applies to players "who haven't logged in to GTA Online in the last 60 days," and requires you to hit a big 'Claim Now' button on Rockstar's website and then sign into your Rockstar account. Which is exactly the kind of thing our corporate IT training courses tell us not to do, but I guess it's okay if it's literally Rockstar.

Anyway, then Sam Houser cackles and reveals you've been hoodwinked, because you don't actually get the full $3 milly all at once (or all for free). Simply logging into GTAO will net you $1,000,000. Want another $1,500,000? You have to purchase one of the game's Shark Cards, specifically either the Great White, Whale, or Megalodon card. Those are $20 (£12), $50 (£31), and $100 (£60) respectively. So, uh, a little less than free, then.

Altogether, that'll get you $2,500,000. So close and yet so far. If you want that final $500k, Rockstar demands you fork over for $8 (£7) for a GTA+ subscription. Rockstar doesn't quite make it explicit, but I have to imagine that $500k is in addition to the regular monthly $500k that GTA+ members get as a matter of course. Either that or they're really bamboozling you.

So if I were you, and you were a lapsed GTAO player, I'd just hit claim now and login for the free $1 million and leave the rest for the birds. But if you're dead keen to get back in or you're the rare person who has both not played the game for over 60 days and also has concrete plans to buy a Shark Card anyway, then you might as well get the offer too.

That's as per a report by Polygon late last week, which states that Take-Two is alleging "the website PlayerAuctions.com offers a vast online marketplace containing thousands of listings for unauthorized, infringing GTA 5 content" in a complaint.

The publisher's lawyer then goes on to accuse PlayerAuctions of peddling "heavily modified player accounts, in-game assets, and virtual currency—all gained by using hacking software, cheats, and technical exploits."

The complaint proceeds to allege that PlayerAuctions "runs a sophisticated sales platform and actively recruits 'sellers' skilled at using hacking software and other exploits to create infringing digital goods and to provide illegal 'services' to players", and that the site "reaps millions in revenue by taking a cut of every transaction on its marketplace."

It also points fingers at certain policies of the website, such as a refund service if the account you bought happens to get banned for, well, being a bought account. "PlayerAuctions offers this 'protection' because it knows the hacked player account listings on its marketplace are infringing and unauthorized under Take-Two's terms of service."

Finally, Take-Two claims that it's already sent a fleet of cease and desist orders, which PlayerAuctions has simply ignored:

"Take-Two has repeatedly confronted PlayerAuctions with evidence of infringement and other tortious conduct, and has demanded that it cease and desist its unlawful activities. PlayerAuctions refuses to stop because it continues to rake in illicit profits through the wholesale, willful infringement of Take-Two's copyrights and trademarks, and the intentional interference with Take-Two's relationships with its customers.

"Accordingly, Take-Two brings this lawsuit to shut down PlayerAuctions' rampant infringing online marketplace, end its corrupt business model, and protect the integrity of GTA V for its players." The publisher is claiming relief on the grounds of copyright and trademark infringement.

If you're at all familiar with MMOs, you'll know this sort of thing isn't new—gold sellers and account 'service providers' have run amok since the days of yore. Developers are in a constant war with bots, one seemingly defined by attrition and having precious little end. Certain public figures, ahem, have also made use of similar services before.

It's an arms race big enough that some games, like World of Warcraft, have to combat it by straight-up allowing you to buy gold through methods like the WoW Token, which leads to other problems, like digital inflation.

While GTA Online isn't exactly an MMO in the more traditional sense, it's still been an enduring name in the live service space, and it's a money-making machine for Take-Two Interactive and Rockstar. So much so that more traditional DLCs were shoved out of the way so its online component could flourish. I'm not shocked that Take-Two is taking aim at PlayerAuctions for illegitimately muscling in on its business.

Though, to be fair, it's not just an issue of money. It is very much true that, in order to stay competitive, the sellers PlayerAuctions facilitates will hack accounts rather than grind out digital currencies or level accounts themselves. There's a very real argument you can make that these sorts of ecosystems aren't just annoying for players, but risking their online safety, as well. PlayerAuctions is also in trouble from another online giant, too—with Roblox coming for it in a lawsuit last month.

Returning to this spit-and-polished iteration of GTA 5, I was reminded about the good and bad of Rockstar's money-spinning machine. I'm impressed by just how content-rich GTA Online has become yet saddened by how the single-player has been left behind; I'm impressed by how great the open world of San Andreas still looks and feels to zoom around in, but also terminally bored by the prescriptive mission design and archaic controls that are something of a Rockstar hallmark.

In short: it's been bittersweet.

We've already detailed the differences between GTA 5 Enhanced and GTA 5 Legacy, which the original version is now called, but the gist of it is that the game now benefits from full ray tracing, DLSS, and FSR support, and adds in a bunch of stuff to make the online aspect more inviting and enticing.

Some games definitely benefit from ray tracing more than others. In the relatively shine-free world of The Witcher 3, for instance, I had to really look for the differences far and wide before eventually falling in love with a wood-panelled wall in Novigrad that looked particularly delicious when the sun would shine through its window.

In GTA 5, the ray tracing really jumps out at you. The patchwork paving of the streets soaks up those polluted pink sunsets, the neon signage for every spoofily named shop you can imagine beckons you in off the street, and the soft glow of every orange streetlight bounces cleanly off the chrome of your car. For me, GTA 5 was always right up there with movies like Nightcrawler and Drive at capturing the alluring alienation of nighttime LA through the driving and street lighting, and ray tracing amplifies that effect beautifully.

Ray tracing also lends itself well to emphasising the seediness of late-stage capitalism, from the way nocturnal advertising shimmers with uncanny realism in every remotely reflective surface to assault you from all sides, to the increased contrast between light and dark, which means that the illuminated things that businesses want you to see pushes the actual architecture of the city into the background.

GTA 5 Enhanced is right up there with Cyberpunk 2077's Night City when it comes to extending ray tracing from a graphical luxury into a thematic tool (which is apt given that Los Santos is pretty much a modern-day precursor to Night City, with everything that GTA 5 pokes fun at becoming starkly manifest in CDPR's vision).

But I digress. What else is new here? Well, there are now animals in GTA Online, which I only learned about when mounting the kerb to avoid hitting a kitten (and wiping out a yoga instructor instead). The newly online fauna comes with a daily challenge that sends you to take wildlife photos out in the wilderness: a nice, relaxing way to spend some downtime between the cross-city cocaine runs and random shootings.

I hadn't engaged much with GTA Online before, but dipping into it now it's amazing just how much of it there is: cutscenes, challenges, business management, mini story arcs involving old favourites like Tony Prince, or even continuations of the Story Mode's campaign, such as one series of missions which lets you join Franklin and Lamar in their business ventures years after you left them.

I've always bemoaned how GTA 5 didn't give us singleplayer story expansions like we saw with GTA 4, but seeing the sprawl of content in GTA Online in 2025, I can at least see where all those resources went. GTA Online is an absolute behemoth, and after just several hours of setting up my Rollo's Rejects Motorcycle Club and stumbling through my first cocaine operation, I can at least say that I get it, even if I wish some of this was a little more accessible without other players around to bother me.

In other ways, no matter how much botox and facelifting it gets via ray tracing and enhancements to its online mode, GTA 5 is inevitably showing its age. First up: there's the matter of movement. It kind of feels like you're grabbing your avatar's head in a claw grip, then tilting their upper body in the direction you want to go before the legs follow.

On-foot movement in this game is sludgy, top-heavy, and feels like driving a tank under the influence of ketamine. It's an issue that's pervaded every Rockstar game since GTA 4 right up Red Dead Redemption 2, but at least in the latter you have don't have to navigate the sharp angles and alleys of urban sprawls, and can somewhat justify it by the fact that Arthur Morgan is literally trudging through mud most of the time.

Then there's the mission design that forces you to follow Rockstar's vision for the mission to the letter. There's almost always a specific path to follow, a specific yellow dot on the mini-map that you have to stand on, a specific angle from which to approach an encounter, and on-the-fly character-switching—a cool idea in principle—isn't nearly as creatively implemented as it could've been.

You feel like a child being directed for a school play: "Stand here--no, not here, here, good, now switch to him, then kill him, but don't be spotted otherwise you'll have to restart, and we don't want that now, do we?" At one point, I happened to drive past a mission marker where I was supposed to buy masks for a heist, and was hit with a Mission Failed simply for driving past the shop. In the space of seconds I'd somehow activated then failed the mission!

There's nothing wrong with a good scripted action movie sequence where you're chasing a crashing jet on your motorcycle across half the state, or need to parachute out of a falling cargo plane. GTA 5 nails those moments, but they're highlights in a sea of humdrum missions filled with fail-states, stringent rules, and wave-defence shootouts.

For such an accomplished open-world game, it's amazing how little of that freedom gets expressed in the missions themselves, which feel like they're just giving the player something to do between the sassy cutscenes and story progression. Again, this is very much a Rockstar problem, going all the way back to the first 3D GTAs, but man does it need to sort it out for GTA 6.

If GTA 5's getting a little stale in the way of mission design, it still shines in detailing its world. The endless advertising, the soundscape of radio presenters, the fact that you can walk into a gas station and spend five minutes reading the ridiculous labels on all the foodstuffs and magazines (RIP) still amount to one of the strongest visions for a videogame world.

Sure, some of the spoof branding doesn't quite land (Life Invader as the Facebook equivalent, Krapea as IKEA), but the sheer silliness of Jizzy Jims as a stand-in for Jimmy Jazz speaks to my inner adolescent, while the sheep-themed Bleeter as the in-world answer to Twitter feels even more on the mark in today's online world of echochambers and groupthink than it did back in 2013. GTA 5's mad, mad world covers the spectrum from puerile pastiche to sharp satire, and there's still nothing quite like it.

If we were to use GTA 5 Enhanced as a barometer for what GTA 6 will be, then the future is, for better or worse, online. This isn't to say that this edition isn't the best way to play GTA 5 (it is, if your PC has the specs to handle it), but beyond the gleaming graphical improvements, everything else in this version is tailored to make GTA Online that bit more appealing.

Even I, as a Story Mode loyalist, was quickly pulled in by the new Career Builder in GTA Online, which lets you pick one of four career paths to give your online journey a bit more of a direction and narrative bent. The other big highlights of the Enhanced edition are the vehicle customisation shop Hao's Special Works and Oscar Guzman Flies Again storyline, both of which are for GTA Online.

And of course that makes sense, because in a sizable update like this why would Rockstar direct us to the side of the game that's sequestered away from the grind and microtransactions and other service-game money-making trappings? I can't exactly begrudge it, because the online product is a good one, but I do hope that GTA 6 is a bit more accommodating for solo players to partake in the endless wealth of activities enjoyed by the online bunch, such as the far more detailed businesses management side of the game, or by offering more solo-friendly ways to take on some of the storylines in GTA Online.

This Enhanced edition leaves me both hyped and wary for GTA 6—hyped because it showcases Rockstar's industry-leading talents for building engaging open worlds (and if it could do this 12 years ago, just imagine what it'll do today), but wary because it highlights how much the studio's focus with the series has shifted towards the service model, which may demote the singleplayer element to a kind of elaborate lead-in to the 'main event' of GTA 6 Online. But hey, we've some time to wait yet—especially us PC folks who'll arbitrarily get it later than console players—so I may as well get my cocaine business off the ground and catch-up on all the content I missed in GTA Online over these past several years.

I nearly hydroplaned trying to figure out how to agree to Rockstar's darn online policies, which sounds ridiculous—but this is GTA Online we're talking about. Why would anything be straightforward? I can at least help you avoid your own road rage by talking you through this poorly-explained requirement for GTA Enhanced.

Here's the quick rundown on what you need to know about transferring your GTA 5 save file from GTA 5 Legacy to Enhanced and how to get it done without stalling out.

How to upload your GTA 5 save file in story mode

• Launch GTA 5 as normal and open story mode
• Open the menu to the "game" tab and navigate to "upload save game"
• ❗Accept Rockstar's online policies (details below) if needed
• Choose the one (only one!) save file you want to upload
• Open GTA 5 Enhanced and start story mode
• Open the menu to the "game" tab and navigate to "download save game"
• Accept the download of the save file attached to your account

Remember, Rockstar says that you can only go through the save file transfer process once and never again. You can reupload save games to your account in GTA 5 Legacy, overwriting the one you'd picked before multiple times. But you can only import a save file to GTA 5 Enhanced one time. You also can't transfer GTA 5 Enhanced progress back to the Legacy edition because, yeah, why would you want to?

Transferring a save file will not delete the save data from your GTA 5 installation, but it will overwrite any save data you may have made in GTA 5 Enhanced before importing. So do the save transfer process before you sink hours into the updated version of the game.

How to accept Rockstar's online policies

To accept Rockstar's online policies, open your menu in GTA 5 Legacy and launch GTA Online instead of story mode. Why do you need to agree to online policies to transfer your singleplayer data? I don't know either.

When you get to the "Upload save game" portion of your GTA 5 menu you might get hit with a screen that says "You must accept the latest Rockstar Games Online Policies to upload a save game." This seems to happen if you've either never played or haven't played GTA Online in a long while. It just directs you to visit the Rockstar website which is totally unclear and unhelpful.

Ignore that direction entirely and stay in your game. Navigate to the "Online" portion of your menu and attempt to launch GTA Online. You'll get a notice here telling you to accept the latest privacy policy and code of conduct before entering GTAO. Tick the box and accept and then head back to story mode where you should now be able to upload a save game.

How to transfer your GTA Online character to GTA 5 Enhanced

To import your GTA Online progress, start up GTA 5 Enhanced and enter Online mode. This is painless compared to the story mode upload and download process, fortunately.

GTA 5 Enhanced should immediately ask you before entering GTA Online if you want to migrate your profile from the Legacy version. Press Enter to accept migrating your characters and you'll be set to go.

Just remember that GTA 5 has separate instances for Legacy and Enhanced. So you can't play online with friends still on the Legacy version if you move over to Enhanced and you also won't keep the same progress between the two versions of the game, even in GTAO. So once you migrate your profile, commit to playing the new version.

The current Steam rating for GTA 5 Enhanced is "mixed," with just 56% of user reviews currently coming in positive. Steam user reviews aren't the most precise and on-point expression of useful videogame criticism, but they do often reflect the mood of the moment in a very broad sense—at least when that mood is "anger."

In the case of GTA 5 Enhanced, there doesn't appear to be any singular issue setting people off: Expressions of discontent range from technical and performance problems to difficulties transferring existing accounts and a general sense of disappointment in the extent of the enhancements—quite a few people just aren't as blown away by the upgrade as they expected to be, and one relatively common complaint is that the Enhanced edition is capped at 120 fps, while the frame rate of the original is uncapped. There's also a bit of grumbling about Grand Theft Auto 6 here and there, which in case you were wondering still hasn't been announced for PC.

It's possible Rockstar didn't anticipate this level of demand for GTA 5 Enhanced: A support page linked by Rockstar Support in response to numerous inquiries on X says, in typically understated Rockstar fashion, that "some online migrations may take additional time to complete."

But the page also warns that suspended or banned accounts "may not be eligible for migration," something a number of users have already reported running into. Some aren't too happy about it, but others are taking it as an opportunity for a fresh start.

It's also interesting that while GTA 5 Enhanced has powered its way into Steam's top 10, it hasn't done so by cannibalizing GTA 5 Legacy, the original version of the game that remains available separately on Steam. The Legacy version currently has roughly 122,000 people playing, a bit of a drop from recent numbers but not too far off where it normally would be, while the Enhanced edition has more than 115,000 going at the same time.

The Enhanced edition concurrent player count was actually quite a bit higher than the Legacy version at one point, but the numbers have fallen off since, presumably as the initial rush of curiosity about the "new" game has given way to the reliable consistency of the old.

Even so, that's a big bump in overall player count when taken together. It surely won't last, as Rockstar gets account migration issues sorted and lapsed players who were idly curious about the changes in the updated release drop off, but it does point to persistent, deep interest in Grand Theft Auto 5 and GTA Online among PC gamers—something Rockstar and Take-Two will hopefully keep in mind as they continue to keep us in suspense.

GTA 5 Enhanced has its own listing on Steam hidden from usual searches, but don't panic about your access to Rockstar's carjacking escapades. It's free for anyone who owns the original Grand Theft Auto 5 (now known as GTA 5 Legacy) on PC. Multiple versions always make things a bit confusing, and there are certainly a few differences between GTA 5 Enhanced and Legacy you'll want to note before making the upgrade—especially if you're looking to transfer GTA 5 save files to GTA 5 Enhanced.

When is the GTA 5 Enhanced Edition release date?

Grand Theft Auto 5 Enhanced launched on March 4, 2025. The new version should automatically add to your list of games available in your Steam or Epic Games library if you have the base game. First-time buyers will also have access to both the Legacy and Enhanced editions.

GTA 5 Enhanced price and download

What is the GTA 5 Enhanced version price?

The Grand Theft Auto 5 Enhanced update is free for anyone who owns GTA 5 on PC. If you're a little late to Rockstar's crime building emporium, then you'll still have to buy Grand Theft Auto 5 Legacy and choose whether or not you'd like to install the free upgrade to the Enhanced version.

What storefronts will have the GTA 5 Enhanced Edition?

Anywhere you can buy GTA 5 on PC will have its Enhanced version available for a free download after purchase.

• On Steam, the Grand Theft Auto 5 store page lists its Premium Edition bundle at $29.95. That's the game with its Story Mode, GTA Online, plus the Criminal Enterprise Starter Pack from 2017.
• On Epic Games, you can get that same Grand Theft Auto 5 Premium Edition for $29.99.
• On Rockstar's official site, Grand Theft Auto 5 is available via its Launcher for $29.99. It also includes the Criminal Enterprise pack with Story Mode and GTA Online.

The Steam version of GTA 5 goes on sale quite often, so if you want to wait to try the Enhanced version until it's cheaper, you probably won't have to wait long. Its lowest price ever was just over $9, while Rockstar's usual sale price is around $15. Keep an eye on our Steam sale calendar for upcoming discounts.

GTA 5 Enhanced vs GTA Legacy

What is the difference between GTA 5 Enhanced and Legacy?

Grand Theft Auto 5 Enhanced is the update that came to PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S a few years ago, plus some PC exclusive technical settings. The Enhanced version includes features added to Story Mode and GTA Online. Transitioning to the upgraded edition of GTA 5 is optional, and since its PC system requirements call for newer hardware, you'll want to make sure your setup can handle the new specs (we've listed those below for reference). A brief list of GTA 5 Enhanced changes include:

• Hao's Special Works access for new vehicles and upgrades
• Ambient Animals in Southern San Andreas, along with the daily Wildlife Photography Challenge
• The Career Progress feature for tracking GTA Online activity
• A new Landing Page and improved introduction to GTA Online
• Kernel-based anti-cheat and automated voice chat moderation through Modulate
• Option to sign up for a GTA+ Membership

Rockstar will continue to support the previous PC version of GTA 5 that does not include all of those new features as Grand Theft Auto 5 Legacy.

There's no GTA Online crossplay between Legacy and Enhanced

This version includes a separate instance of Grand Theft Auto Online, so you can't play with your friends if you remain on GTA 5 Legacy and they're on the new Enhanced version. If you can't find your friends in GTA Online, double check to make sure you're on the same version.

GTA 5 Enhanced gameplay details

Hao's Special Works in GTA Online

The Hao's Special Works auto shop was once only available to PS5 and Xbox Series X/S versions of GTA Online, but now PC players can roll into the LS Car Meet for new vehicles and customization. Rockstar also outlined new upgrades for a longer list of vehicles available for a spin in Hao's Special Works Time Trials, Premium Test Rides, and HSW Races. Some of these are among the fastest cars in GTA Online—worth noting if you're ever feeling a bit jealous of a console player's ride.

GTA Online Enhanced cars include:

• Coil Cyclone II (Super)
• Imponte Arbiter GT (Muscle)
• Karin S95 (Sports)
• Pegassi Weaponized Ignus (Super)
• Pfister Astron Custom (SUV)

Upgradeable cars in GTA 5 Enhanced:

• Super: Principe Deveste Eight, Överflöd Entity MT
• Sports: Bravado Banshee, Bravado Banshee GTS, Grotti Itali GTO Stinger TT, Penaud La Coureuse, Übermacht Niobe
• Sports Classic: Benefactor Stirling GT, Grotti Turismo Classic
• Muscle: Bravado Buffalo EVX, Declasse Vigero ZX, Declasse Vigero ZX Convertible
• Coupe: Annis Euros X32, Übermacht Sentinel XS
• Off-Road: Maibatsu MonstroCiti, Vapid Firebolt ASP
• SUV: Karin Vivanite, Weeny Issi Rally
• Motorcycle: Shitzu Hakuchou Drag
• Compact: Grotti Brioso R/A

Ambient Animals and other GTA 5 Enhanced features

New rides aren't the only thing GTA 5 Enhanced is packing, the PC update's Ambient Animals update for GTA Online adds a bustling wildlife system to Southern San Andreas. Some of the new fauna are pretty chill to hang, like the deer or birds, while others, like wild cougars, won't hesitate to take you down. So respect nature and all that.

You can also shoot photographs of GTA Online's added animals in a daily Wildlife Photography Challenge. The LS Tourist Board asks for three different animal photographs as part of that daily, random rotation.

Above all else, PC players hopeful for official Rockstar support pushing a decade's worth of hardware upgrades should finally see some payoffs in Enhanced's technical improvements. Since those new PC specs require an SSD as part of its minimum ask, you'll of course see faster loading times. There's also DualSense support with adaptive triggers. As for major visual upgrades, GTA 5 Enhanced should look a lot better with graphic updates that include:

• Ray tracing, with global illumination and ambient occlusion
• Nvidia DLSS 3 and AMD FSR1 / FSR3 support
• Support for higher resolutions, aspect ratios, and framerates

Then there's the new option for PC players to grab a GTA+ Membership. It's cool and all, adding things like The Vinewood's 100 car garage and workshop.

Grand Theft Auto 5 Enhanced Edition specs

What are the GTA 5 Enhanced system requirements?

All those new bells and whistles in the Grand Theft Auto 5 Enhanced update come with a bump in system requirements, too. Sure, it's an older game, but the modern refresh makes quite the leap from the original's minimum and recommended specs. Since Rockstar will continue supporting older versions of GTA 5, double-check that old laptop's hardware before committing to the upgrade and make sure you've got an SSD ready to go.

Minimum:

• Operating System: Windows 10
• Processor: Intel i7 4770 or AMD FX 9590
• Memory: 8GB RAM
• Graphics: Nvidia GTX 1630 4GB or AMD RX 6400 4GB
• Storage: 105GB SSD

Recommended:

• Operating System: Windows 11
• Processor: Intel i5 9600K or AMD Ryzen 5 3600
• Memory: 16GB RAM
• Graphics: Nvidia RTX 3060 8GB or AMD RX 6600XT 8GB
• Storage: 105GB, DirectStorage-compatible drive

Team Bondi was liquidated in 2011, with McNamara and many key staff moving to the Australian production house Kennedy Miller Mitchell to work on the ill-fated (and cancelled) title Whore of the Orient. Ever the busy bee, McNamara also founded Video Games Deluxe in 2013, since when it has exclusively worked on Rockstar projects: The studio's collaborations with Rockstar include the 2017 re-release of LA Noire and LA Noire: The VR Case Files. It also did the heavy lifting on Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy–The Definitive Edition after it launched in a bit of a state, and got that title up to scratch.

The press release comes with the usual from Rockstar, which is to say the most banal quotes imaginable. "After working together closely over many years, we are excited to have Video Games Deluxe join the team as Rockstar Australia," said Rockstar's Jennifer Kolbe. Not to be outdone, here comes big bad Brendan: "It’s been an honor to work closely with Rockstar Games this past decade. We are thrilled to be a part of Rockstar Games and to continue our efforts to make the best games possible."

So meet Rockstar Australia! For some reason that name just makes me think of Nick Cave. It doesn't appear that Video Games Deluxe is especially big in terms of headcount, and the LinkedIn page simply says it's "looking for experienced programmers to work on something new." This takes the total number of Rockstar subsidiary studios to ten, plus Rockstar HQ in New York City.

There is one little nugget squirrelled-away in the press release. In the boilerplate text at the bottom about Rockstar itself, it calls Grand Theft Auto "one of the most successful entertainment properties of all time with over 440 million units sold-in worldwide." This figure did appear in a Take Two earnings call last month but, hey, it's news to me: And GTA5 is responsible for 210 million of those sales.

Grand Theft Auto 6 remains on-track for this year, though don't be surprised if Rockstar decides to give itself a little extra time for the spit and polish, and to make it super deluxe. After all, per Strauss Zelnick, the goal is simple: "We're seeking perfection."

This is the update that has, for the last three years, been strictly console-exclusive, and contains a whole bunch of up-dazzles and modernisations for the venerable old carjacking sim. That means stuff like raytracing, DirectStorage, DLSS 3 (plus FSR1 and FSR3) and all sorts of other graphical and gameplay treats. The good news? You can actually preload it on Steam right now, presuming you already own GTA 5 Cool Original.

Grand Theft Auto 5 Enhanced has its own Steam page, cunningly obscured from regular Steam search, but you probably don't actually need it. If you're a GTA 5 owner, you'll find that the original version of the game has been renamed Grand Theft Auto 5 Legacy in your Steam library, and there's a whole new entry called Grand Theft Auto 5 Enhanced, which you can download ahead of its release next week.

Another surprise: the Enhanced version of the game is actually smaller than the original, unless Steam is lying to me. Where GTA 5 Legacy says it wants 114GB of your hard drive, GTA 5 Enhanced only lays claim to a slender 92GB. That's a 22GB saving! You could install KOTOR 1 seven times over in the space you've freed up, there.

If you're wanting to carry over progress—either online or in-story—over to GTA 5 Enhanced, there's another hurdle to leap. Once you've got the Enhanced version preloaded, boot up original GTA 5 and you'll be able to transfer over your save on the pause screen. GTA Online transfers require a bit of a wait, though—you'll only be able to do those once GTA 5 Enhanced actually comes out.

The good news is it's a full transfer: you'll get all your in-game gubbins and cash and, barring some kind of terrible crisis, not lose a single thing from your dragon's hoard of GTAO goodies. Plus they'll all be ray-traced now. So that's nice.

The arrest becomes tricky the moment we step inside. The tight, jagged angles of the clubhouse make it a deathtrap, full of nooks that could easily hide a perp with a shotgun. My fellow bail enforcement officer trains her weapon on a door, and asks me to open it.

A simple nudge would have sufficed. Just a slight bump to pump those hinges and expose the armed bikers in the next room. Instead, as I push forward and then back on the thumbstick, my avatar swans through the portal into the firing line, pulling off a glacial 360 degree spin. Imagine Grandpa Simpson in the famous gif—slowly plucking his fedora from the hatstand as he rotates in the lobby of the burlesque house—only under a hail of submachine gun fire. My super heavy body armour is immediately shredded. It's the opposite of Rainbow Six: less breach and clear, more breach oh-dear. It's also standard fare for anyone getting to grips with the not-so-simple act of walking around in GTA Online.

A few years ago, I talked to Patrice Désilets about the creation of Assassin's Creed. Back then, in the mid noughties, his team was looking at the work Rockstar had done to make open worlds a delight to bounce around in. "I guess a lot of games in the beginning of the 2000s were inspired by it," he told me. "Exploring GTA, my pleasure was just to be in this game world and see the sun rise. So it was like 'Can we replace the car with the main character? In GTA I can go anywhere with the car, can I go anywhere with the character?' That's why we had the parkour."

The attempt to transpose that feeling of freedom was successful, to the extent that Assassin's Creed became Ubisoft's most dominant series—leaving the likes of Driver, the company's more direct rival to GTA, in the dust. But as part of the process, Désilets' team ditched the physics of Rockstar's driving model for something more controlled and athletic—the point-to-point leaping we now associate inextricably with Altaïr and Ezio.

When I play GTA 5 and its online counterpart, by contrast, a part of me feels as though I'm literally driving a car, even when my character is on foot. That's because pedestrians in Los Santos, the protagonist included, are subject to the forces of physics—in a fashion that's alien to most third-person action games.

If you're steering Geralt, or Nathan Drake, or Spider-Man, you're given the final say over when your character starts and stops moving. It's the sort of precision in control you take for granted. But if you're Trevor, or Franklin, or Michael, then you're dealing with concepts like acceleration and inertia. Work up a sprint by repeatedly tapping the run key—itself a unique anachronism from the days of the PlayStation 1—and you'll find that taking a corner requires some forethought. It's common to overshoot a staircase or mission marker because you didn't account for your turning circle.

As when driving a sedan through the uneven streets of Liberty City's Portland, it's all too easy to flip onto your head. In a typical action game, ragdoll physics is something that happens to other people: your enemies. But in GTA 5, Rockstar is happy to hand over responsibility for your body to the whims of gravity whenever you lose your footing. Stepping off a rooftop, only to watch The Walking Dead's Steven Ogg flip in midair like a piece of toast and land butter-side down on the tarmac, is a rite of passage for every new visitor to Blaine County.

These skull-cracking pratfalls and understeers are made palatable by two things: first, they're funny, and eminently clippable. Second, they're offset by the handful of mechanics that let you hack your way to something resembling authority over your avatar. One is the good old-fashioned 'take me to the nearest car' button, a homing device that has been plonking players in the driving seat since 1997's Grand Theft Auto. Another is the cover key, gluing you to the next available wall; a third is the jump button that contextually lets you vault fences, so long as they're not too high. Between them, these conveniences let you pretend that GTA 5 and Online aren't bizarre experiments with simulated movement, partway along the road to comedic physics games like QWOP and Octodad.

I think most of us have had moments of frustration while wrestling with the controls in Rockstar's latter day games. But doing so is also fascinating, and gives me hope for the company's future. Most mammoth Western game companies, at the mercy of shareholders and enormous sales expectations, tend to sand off the stranger edges of their series to appease an imagined, median player in the crowd. But Rockstar has never done this, knowing that its cachet will ensure fans forgive and embrace its idiosyncrasies—whether that's eschewing fast travel in the face of industry norms, building combat encounters around auto-aim, or structuring GTA Online progression around the fake internet on your in-game phone.

Where the likes of Ubisoft would be castigated for asking the same of Watch Dogs players, Rockstar gets away with pushing its players to invest the time to learn new and wonky skills—even when that skill is 'walking to the end of the street successfully'. On the whole, I think that's a good thing. But I also think I'm owed $500 in super heavy body armour.

So maybe we should just thank our lucky stars that GTA 5's sparkly next-gen update, which originally hit consoles all the way back in 2022, finally has a solid PC release date. It comes out on March 4, just under two weeks from now. It's a free update, and will involve a "one-time Character Migration flow to bring over your Story Mode and Online progress."

The update contains a big old bevy of additions to GTA Online, which I'll get into below, but it's the technical stuff that excites me. Rockstar promises that, even beyond the "ray traced shadows and reflections" the update already brought to the latest generation of consoles, the PC release will add "Ray tracing features only available on PC such as ambient occlusion and global illumination." The lights are gonna be pretty, folks, even prettier than the lights they've got on their PlayStation whatsits and Xbox thingummies, and that's the truly important thing.

Aside from that, we'll also get support for tech like AMD's FSR1 and FSR3, plus DLSS 3, so you'll be able to generate frames out the wazoo for this game that's now over a decade old, and we're also getting "Faster loading times using SSD and DirectStorage on supported devices and configurations." GTA 5 will finally take full advantage of that NVMe gumstick you're toting. Rockstar says you can expect better support for higher resolutions, aspect ratios, and framerates, plus support for your fancy DualSense controller adaptive triggers and Dolby Atmos audio.

If you're a GTAO sicko, there's a lot of stuff in here just for you. So many, in fact, that I am gonna put them into a more digestible, bullet-pointed format:

• New vehicles—including five previously only on console—and upgrades at a new car shop, Hao's Special Works, which you can find inside the LS Car Meet.
• Ambient animals, which honestly sounds cool as hell, across southern San Andreas that you can photograph for a challenge. I kinda hope these are in the story mode, too.
• You can now sign up to GTA+ for "special benefits," if you need another monthly sub in your life.
• The Career Progress feature tracks your burgeoning criminal empire across GTAO's many updates.
• A refreshed Landing Page that should make penetrating the ever-so-slightly impenetrable world of GTAO a bit easier, also "an improved introductory flow for newer players with a GTA$4,000,000 windfall," which sounds quite nice.

Plus some other bits and bobs you can read about in the Rockstar Newswire post. I'm excited for this one. I've been feeling a stirring in my gut to replay GTA 5's story for a while now, and I reckon the excuse of diving in to check out these traced rays and loading times might be the thing that finally tips me over the edge. But hey, Rockstar, if we could not wait three years to get GTA 6, I'd really appreciate that.

That's right, GTA 3 was almost as daring as Mafia 1, the only open-world crime game I can think of that actually stuck to the rules of the road and punished players with wanted levels for running red lights. Was it weird? Yes. Was it tedious? Kinda. Did even Mafia's devs jettison it for the sequel? Absolutely (although you still got in trouble for speeding).

So it's probably no surprise Vermeij and co killed the idea in the crib. "During GTA 3, I gave players a 1-star wanted level for running red lights," says the dev, but alas, "This was not popular with the team. I quickly removed it."

Which was, undoubtedly, the correct decision, but I almost wish I lived in the world where a game as definitional as GTA 3 set open-world crime sims to evolving along a route where we all had to obey traffic laws. Or, you know, I wish I could visit it and then come back. I don't want to deal with that nonsense.

One of the commenters on Vermeij's post actually brings up the case of Mafia 1, and it turns out the ex-Rockstar dev is a fan. "It suits Mafia a bit better I think," he says, since "That game was a bit more slow paced."

I reckon Vermeij was a bit keener on the idea at the time than he seems to be now: he notes that he even tried tweaking the system so that you'd only get a wanted level if you ran a red light with a cop car nearby. "It was still annoying. The cops were quite aggressive even at one star so you'd get nailed immediately." Even if no cops were about, it still "forced you to scan all cars around you before running a light," with dire consequences for the game's pace.

So no traffic laws in GTA. Ah well, maybe the mad lads at modern-day Rockstar will stick them back in for GTA 6? Vermeij is unconvinced: "It was really really annoying. I'm sure they'll realize it's a bad idea."

Among the many fan theories about the game are hopes that we may see some of the old gang from GTA 5. GTA doesn't really do recurring characters, but it has had cameos as well as plenty of nods to previous protagonists. GTA 5 voice actor Steven Ogg, who plays the deeply sociopathic Trevor, has now rather definitively put paid to that idea, even if he does have a notion of how he would've liked it to be handled.

"I wish [I was in GTA 6]" said Ogg in an interview with ScreenRant. "It would be fun if Trevor appeared in it just to be killed at the beginning." This is an echo of Trevor's own beginnings, which can be fairly called one of the most divisive in series history: Near the start of GTA 5 Trevor is confronted by Johnny Kleibitz, the protagonist of GTA 4: The Lost and the Damned, and promptly beats him to death. Funnily enough Rockstar returned to this story beat for an Easter egg in 2023, bringing Johnny's ghost back for a final farewell.

"I think that would be cool," says Ogg. "Because it also acknowledges the fans of like, 'Hey, thank you.' Pass the torch, stomp Trevor's head in, and sort of put an end to that and allow a new generation to take over."

Either way Ogg isn't in the game, so it's safe to say Trevor won't be returning (for now). That doesn't necessarily mean anything for other cast members of course and, when it comes to the likes of the much younger Franklin, I'd be surprised if we didn't see him again somewhere down the line, even if it's just GTA Online missions.

Funnily enough (or not) there is a lost element of GTA history when it comes to Trevor. Rockstar was initially planning singleplayer DLC for GTA 5 before GTA Online became the developer's main focus, as part of which Ogg recorded dialogue for a mooted "James Bond Trevor" style expansion.

"Trevor was gonna be undercover," says Ogg. "He works for the feds. And we did shoot some of that stuff with like James Bond Trevor: he’s still kind of a fuck up, but he’s doing his best to pretend to be like [an agent]. We shot some stuff and then it just disappeared and [Rockstar] never did it, and they never followed up on it."

And because nothing with GTA can be entirely uncomplicated, it was a reveal that came earlier than planned, with Rockstar unveiling the GTA 6 debut trailer a day ahead of schedule thanks to an early leak. Now, two trailers and a delay announcement later, we know the sequel will release in May 2026. On console, at least. On PC, well… 😬

When is the GTA 6 release date?

GTA 6 releases on PlayStation and Xbox on May 26, 2026. Originally, Rockstar planned the sequel's launch for sometime in 2025, but announced the Grand Theft Auto 6 delay decision to "deliver at the level of quality you expect and deserve."

The big question at this point is platforms: Yes, it will undoubtedly come to PC (see more on that below), but whether our version will launch simultaneously with GTA 6 on consoles remains to be confirmed. Historically, we've had to wait well over a year for a PC release.

GTA 6 trailers and footage

The latest GTA 6 trailer spotlights Jason and Lucia

The second GTA 6 trailer once again hones in on its protagonist couple, Jason and Lucia, but there are plenty of little gems tucked away in Rockstar's most recent montage. A closer look from PC Gamer's Rich Stanton hit the highlights, pointing out easy-to-miss details from the new GTA 6 footage like a reference to the 2022 hack, possible RPG-lite elements, and a shift in its visual style.

What was in the GTA 6 reveal trailer?

The first GTA 6 trailer didn't dive deep into details about the game, but it did seem to confirm a lot of what was previously rumored, including a "Bonnie & Clyde-inspired" criminal duo as the lead characters in the game, and a Florida-like setting in the GTA universe's equivalent: the state of Leonida. Both of those details came to light through earlier leaks.

Portions of the video also emulated Instagram and TikTok-style social media posts, which could provide some interesting gameplay twists depending on how (or if) the social mechanic is integrated into the game, and of course there's an abundance of nice cars, scantily clad women, glitter and grime, and bad behavior throughout. It is definitely a Grand Theft Auto trailer.

We've also started picking out all the GTA 6 cars that appeared in the trailer. There are a lot of old series favorite brands coming to the new Vice City.

GTA 6 story and characters

What do we know about the GTA 6 story?

GTA 6 will feature dual protagonists, following criminal couple Lucia Caminos and Jason Duval in their Bonnie & Clyde-style lawbreaking. The duo grew up in far more difficult circumstances and want better, fighting for family and each other, but it sounds like a scenario impossible to bootstrap their way out of. Rockstar says they've "always known the deck is stacked against them," but it seems some of their lower-stakes crime goes further south and lands the couple in major criminal territory.

Beyond that, we're still in speculative territory, and don't worry: People are speculating. References to "a new life" come up a lot in the second GTA 6 trailer, so we're assuming it all starts with Jason and Lucia happy about her recent release and future together before things escalate. The supporting character list certainly includes more seasoned criminals they're involved with, but how that lands the couple in "a criminal conspiracy stretching across the state of Leonida" is still a big mystery.

What do we know about GTA 6 characters?

The initial reveal trailer didn't get into many details around the primary cast, but Rockstar's updates after the delay included official character reveals and a closer look at the GTA 6 lovebird protagonists.

Lucia Caminos

Half of GTA 6's protagonist power couple, Lucia makes an important mark in the Rockstar record book as the first female lead in the series. And based on the reveal trailer, she's doing a lot of leading: She's the first face we see, she's the only one named, and in the closing shot, she's the one kicking the door in to launch an armed robbery.

An update to the GTA 6 official site offered a little more on her background, and it sounds like Lucia's had it tough from the start. She's done a stint in prison and was just recently released by the time we meet her, but even with a fresh start, Lucia is driven by "the good life her mom has dreamed of since their days in Liberty City," and sees that possibility with Jason.

Jason Duval

Jason is part of the former troubled teen to Army pipeline, and it seems joining the war machine didn't do much to improve his circumstances. The second string of major GTA 6 updates highlighted the crimes he commits with his love and that he picks her up from prison, but didn't do much to paint a clear picture of their romantic timeline.

In his official bio, Rockstar describes his relationship with Lucia as "the best or worst thing to ever happen to him," but even if it's tumultuous, he sounds dedicated.

Aside from its main duo, we know about seven other characters in GTA 6, like Jason's weirdly paranoid friend and some extremely divorced landlord. For now, our list of confirmed Vice City residents includes:

• Cal Hamptom, Jason's friend and a guy probably living on conspiracy subreddits
• Boobie Ike, a powerful Vice City businessman investing in local artists
• Dre'quan Priest, an artist looking to move on from dealing and into music
• Real Dimez, the viral social media duo Bae-Luxe and Roxy
• Raul Bautista, a bank robber with a storied rap sheet
• Brian Heder, an old-school smuggler who sounds like a better landlord than husband

GTA 6 setting

What will the GTA 6 setting be?

Everything flows from Rockstar's choice of city and decade, and we now know that GTA 6 will take place in modern day Vice City, in the state of Leonida—the GTA universe's parallel reality version of Florida.

Rumors from July 2021 already pointed to GTA 6 returning to Vice City. The same predictions also claimed GTA 6's map will evolve or expand over time, possibly through DLC or live game updates.

The GTA 6 map adds new locations around Vice City

Parts of Vice City may be familiar from the PS2 era, but the GTA 6 map expands on fictional Miami and builds out the surrounding area. So far, Rockstar has confirmed six regions (including Vice City itself), those are:

• Mount Kalaga - The go-to for "prime hunting, fishing, and off-road trails"
• Grassrivers - Miles of mangroves and gators
• Leonida Keys - Cousin to the sunny Florida Keys
• Ambrosia - Ground zero for "the battle for health and wealth" in Leonida
• Port Gellhorn - A former hotspot, "Leonida's forgotten coast"
• And of course, Vice City, the metropolis inspired by real-life Miami proper

Will GTA 6 release on PC?

Will GTA 6 come to PC?

It's a pretty safe bet. Rockstar's past with PC versions has been a bit erratic, but the immense popularity of both GTA 5 and Red Dead Redemption 2 on PC is a great reason for Rockstar to take the platform seriously.

And it seems like Rockstar feels the same, considering it released the Rockstar Games Launcher on PC in 2019. It's hard to believe the studio would release its own games launcher if it didn't plan on hosting its future games there, including GTA 6. That said, we can probably expect a gap between the release of GTA 6 on consoles and PC. It took GTA 5 a year and a half to come to PC, and RDR2's gap was almost a year as well.

The full announcement for GTA 6 also suggests that the PC version will come later: It says "Grand Theft Auto 6 is coming to PlayStation 5 computer entertainment systems and Xbox Series X-S games and entertainment systems in 2025," but makes no mention of a PC release.

GTA 6 Online

Will there be a GTA 6 online?

Almost certainly. While GTA 5's online Los Santos has yet to run out of gas, with Rockstar still regularly adding new activities, content, and events to its big multiplayer world, it's hard to imagine GTA 6 would skimp on a multiplayer offering. Given that GTA 4, GTA 5, and both Red Dead Redemption games have had online servers, it feels like a must-have for GTA 6.

GTA 6 leaks

What was in the GTA 6 leaks?

The big dump of leaked footage from GTA 6's first major leak may still be floating around, but unless you're extremely interested in picking apart debug footage you aren't missing much. Based on what we'd seen: yup, this sure is a GTA game in the works. It's all older footage and is absolutely internal development stuff, not some sneaky peak at a final, polished product.

Here are the few high points that give us a hint of what to expect in the launch version of GTA 6:

• Two playable characters: Referred to as Lucia and Jason, they are likely the "Bonnie & Clyde inspired" crime duo referenced in past rumors.
• Vice City: Part of the footage includes a modern rail car labeled "Vice City Metro," making the rumors of a return to fictional Florida seem likely too.
• Modern day setting: We've spotted at least one pedestrian with a smart phone, which seems to discount smaller rumors about a possible '80s setting.

No matter how likely they do seem, all the other features we can glean from the footage—Lucia committing a robbery at a waffle joint, dialogue options for playable characters, a character seen moving and crawling while prone, the messaging system called "WhatUp!"—should be taken as subject to change until we see a more representative gameplay showcase from Rockstar closer to GTA 6's release.

The joy was, however, short lived. As is now something of a tradition, the mod gained some traction, was covered by the traditional media and spread rapidly on forums and social sites. And then The Man at Rockstar HQ noticed.

The Man doesn't like GTA mods, especially in this the year of our lord GTA 6, and Take-Two has a long history of going after mod makers whose projects get a little too close for comfort (there have been rumours of an official GTA 4 remaster for a while now).

The modding team behind LCPP has now taken down the mod, and the following was posted on the project's Discord:

"Due to the unexpected attention that our project received and after speaking with Rockstar Games, we have decided to take down the Liberty City Preservation project," says a post from modder NK Jellman. "We appreciate all the support that the project has received, and we look forward to continuing to pursue our passion for modding the Grand Theft Auto series."

The message has thus far been greeted with 668 emojis of Niko Bellic, GTA 4's protagonist, crying at the news. Angrier reactions are also easy to find, with players frustrated at Rockstar (or "L-Star" as some have taken to calling it) obliterating yet another community project that didn't seem to be doing anyone any harm, and was distributed free of charge.

"We've noticed a lot of misconceptions and theories surrounding our latest announcement and would like to make a few things clear," added NK Jellman in a later Discord post. "This isn’t a DMCA, rather a friendly takedown, mutually agreed upon by all parties involved. There is no negativity between us and Rockstar Games / Take-Two Interactive."

Hmm. The Discord server remains active, though will no longer host any LCPP download links, and the team recommends against downloading from unofficial sources due to the risk of malware.

Well chalk another one up to the Take Two lawyers. GTA has had an extensive and complicated history with modding, but generally the rule seems to be that when you get a little too close to the official products, Rockstar steps in. This isn't even the first GTA 4 "remaster" project to be shut down, and the company seems especially invested in playing legal whack-a-mole with mods that try to polish-up the older games (then of course dropped the highly janky but official GTA Trilogy, great job). With GTA 6 still due for release this year, don't expect that stance to be changing anytime soon.

In 2021, actors Sam Crane and Mark Oosterveen were whiling away the Covid lockdowns in GTA Online when they had an idea: "Why not stage Hamlet inside the game?" They recorded hundreds of hours of in-game attempts to perform Shakespeare amid the chaos of GTA 5 and put together a feature-length documentary, Grand Theft Hamlet, which has now won multiple awards, earned a 94% Rotten Tomatoes score, and will premiere in US theaters on January 17.

The film is already in a number of UK theaters, and was first shown at SXSW back in March, where it won Best Documentary Feature. Crane and co-director Pinny Grylls also picked up a couple of British Independent Film Awards.

The juxtaposition of a violent, chaotic videogame and Hamlet creates an obvious tension, though the amphitheater in GTA 5's Los Santos isn't necessarily all that different from Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, says Grylls.

"There's a certain thing, the irreverence of the fact that the people we were meeting didn't really give a shit," Grylls said in a recent interview with Radio Times. "You [co-director Sam Crane] said to me very early on, 'It feels like I went back in time to the Globe 500 years ago where people would just throw apples at you ... or there were prostitutes coming and going, and people were selling stuff.' The theater in Shakespeare's time was like that. It was popular entertainment. It wasn't a dark room where everyone had to be quiet."

We already know, of course, how much meaning and comedy can be found in the ways players interact in online games, and GTA Online has been a particularly fertile ground for dramatic roleplaying. Perhaps PC Gamer contributor Joe Donnelly didn't approach "I tried to rob a jewellery store as a blind drunk Bad Santa in a GTA 5 roleplay server" with a mind to seek the "moments of pathos, emotion, and lyricism" that the Grand Theft Hamlet website promises, but you know, same kind of thing.

Outside of Red vs. Blue, I can't think of another obvious instance of machinima getting a theatrical release, and reviews for Grand Theft Hamlet are positive so far. Empire called the film a "riotously funny, unexpectedly poignant ode to gaming, Shakespeare, the indestructible nature of art, and the benefits of befriending bazooka wielding extraterrestrials."

Grand Theft Hamlet is not available to stream right now, but will presumably be available on Mubi, which owns the subscription streaming rights, sometime after the US theatrical release in January.

Of course, neither game was at the event. As far as we know, Half-Life 3 doesn't exist, and even if it did, Valve is far more likely to announce it by putting up a blog post on a Friday afternoon. Rockstar is even more allergic to mainstream hype-building outlets like The Game Awards, so the thought of it bringing a trailer to Geoff Keighley's show is just comical.

Case in point: YouTube had been around for a couple years by the time Rockstar revealed GTA 4 in 2007, and after so many awful years of RealPlayer, there was now a relatively reliable way to stream videos to millions of viewers on the internet. And yet Rockstar chose to host the first GTA 4 trailer on its own custom-built website, which of course immediately went catatonic when it was flooded with traffic.

If Rockstar was reluctant even to let YouTube share in its glory, you can bet that it isn't going to hand the most anticipated trailer of the year over to Keighley. In fact, the first GTA 6 trailer seemed to taunt the awards: Rockstar posted it on December 4, three days before the 2023 Game Awards, which made it very clear that it could have used the awards as a platform, but chose not to.

So it's not weird that GTA 6 wasn't at The Game Awards, but it is slightly weird that there's been no GTA 6 trailer at all this year. One new trailer per year is the typical cadence, and GTA 6 is supposed to release on consoles in the latter half of 2025, so the marketing machine ought to really be spinning up about now.

It's possible that Rockstar had planned to post a trailer this year—maybe right before The Game Awards, like last time—but delayed it for some behind-the-scenes reason. It feels likely to me that we'll see GTA 6 again in January or February.

The bigger question is whether GTA 6 will actually release in 2025. Delaying major games by months at a time has become so commonplace that it's expected. Ubisoft just delayed Assassin's Creed Shadows from this year to February, and Bethesda had originally planned to release Starfield in 2022 but didn't get it out until September 2023. (It even had a great novelty date picked out originally, 11/11/22, which was 11 years after Skyrim's release.)

Delay or no delay, we still don't know when GTA 6 will come to PC. Rockstar has only announced console releases as of now, and our expectation is that it'll remain a console exclusive until Rockstar is ready to put out an upgraded special edition. It's annoying and old-fashioned, but all we can do is harangue them about it: Rockstar does what Rockstar wants to do. It might be gaming's most appropriately-named studio.

These results were broadly "driven by the continued success of the Grand Theft Auto and Borderlands franchises," said chairman and CEO Strauss Zelnick on an investor call following the results. "We have one of the strongest portfolios of owned intellectual property in our industry. With many exciting new titles coming in Fiscal 2026—including Grand Theft Auto 6 in the fall, Borderlands 4 and Mafia: The Old Country—we expect to create long-term value for our shareholders.”

The results are accompanied by a list of 2K's upcoming titles, which includes Grand Theft Auto 6 listed for "fall of calendar 2025" but unfortunately only on PS5 and Xbox Series S/X. Other titles in the list such as Civilization 7, Borderlands 4, Mafia: The Old Country, and Judas are down for PC release alongside that. So yeah: Us PC gamers may well be looking at 2026 for GTA 6, in the best-case scenario.

There was one later aside that suggests things will generally improve with Take-Two's titles and simultaneous PC releases, when Zelnick was talking about the different target platforms in the console market. Mentioning PC as the "open platform" Zelnick went on to say "I do think PC will be more and more a part of [our] business going forward."

Zelnick does a little verbal dance on all of these results calls, as hard-nosed financial wonks drill-down into the performance of individual games and, as always, try to get more information about Golden Goose Theft Auto. Mostly these questions are politely stonewalled, though they do bring out some interesting asides about GTA generally.

"Sales of Grand Theft Auto 5 outperformed our expectations and to date the title has sold over 205 million units worldwide," says Zelnick. "Grand Theft Auto Online has also exceeded our plans, driven by sustained engagement [...] momentum also continued within GTA+ as Rockstar grew its membership by 35% over the last year."

Zelnick also mentioned Red Dead Redemption 2's sales, which have seen it consistently chart since release, and says the game has now sold over 67 million units to date.

The suits were less self-congratulatory about the Borderlands film, which is one of the year's biggest flops and was roundly panned by consumers and critics alike. Asked by one shareholder to detail the financial contribution here within the wider Borderlands franchise, Zelnick instantly says "we don't really need to break out the contribution of the film."

Read between the lines though, and they're not happy. "Even though the film was disappointing, it actually benefited our catalogue sales so that is a sign that making a movie or a TV show can drive sales and that's a good thing," says Zelnick.

"We're really selective, because we would prefer that everything that comes out with our brands in it is really really successful. We can't guarantee that, especially when it's out of our hands, so we have licensed other titles, will continue selectively to do so, but emphasis on the word 'selectively.'"

Ever since Rockstar released the first trailer for Grand Theft Auto 6, dating the title for 2025, there has been speculation over whether the game will make that date. It's not just that there's a history of delays to GTA titles, but that Rockstar is "seeking perfection" with this title and, as one former lead dev put it, there's really "no competition" to worry about. Maybe this time next year you'll be playing GTA 6, on console at least. Mr. Zelnick and all of his shareholders certainly hope so.

“I believe in the democratic process. By all accounts, this was a free, fair, and secure election,” Zelnick says (via Variety). “We’re an entertainment company, not a politics company. We’re focused on our mission.

"I think that the President-elect has made it very plain that he believes in reducing regulation. I do believe that the FTC was misguided during President Biden’s term, and I do think that the FTC tried to impede some transactions that were beneficial for both the companies in question and the economy at large, and the FTC lost all those cases since. So I do think that, depending on what the specific topic is, deregulation can be a positive, and I am certainly looking forward to a more sensible FTC.”

From the beginning, the FTC was a big roadblock in Microsoft's bid to buy Activision Blizzard. At first, it planned to sue Microsoft in order to stop the deal from going through, as it said that the company's treatment of Bethesda games demonstrated that it "can and will withhold content from rival platforms." The biggest sticking point was whether Microsoft planned to make the Call of Duty series exclusive: "With control over Activision's blockbuster franchises, Microsoft would have both the means and motive to harm competition by manipulating Activision's pricing, [as well as] degrading Activision's game quality or player experience on rival consoles."

Another issue that the FTC tried to warn courts about was the potential that the acquisition of Activision Blizzard could mean a hike in Game Pass prices. Something that was made a reality after Microsoft announced that the PC Game Pass would get a $2 price increase and Game Pass Ultimate changed from $16.99 to $19.99/month.

I do believe that for Take-Two and other large corporations, deregulation is a positive, but that's not the case for consumers. Yes, the FTC spent the better half of the last two years breathing down Microsoft's neck only for the deal to go ahead anyway, but I'd much rather see some attempt, no matter how successful, to put the consumer first over profit. But I'm not the CEO of a billion-dollar company, so maybe my priorities are a little different.

In fact, it's such a good patch that it's earned the endorsement of Obbe Vermeij (via GamesRadar), former Rockstar technical director who worked in that role on GTA 3, Vice City, San Andreas, 4, and several handheld games. "Games have bugs and GTA is no exception," Vermeij wrote. "If you want to play the original games I would recommend installing SilentPatch."

And you know what? He's right. In spite of that, though, I do have to note that Vermeij's enduring issues with his babies seem extremely dev-brained, rather than rooted in anything the average player is likely to encounter.

For instance, he says "the worst bug [Rockstar] missed" in GTA: San Andreas wasn't the one that let players drive exploded cars (which, to be fair, is great), the unreadable 4K credits, or the one that made mission text stay on the screen for longer the higher your resolution is. Vermeij's great regret is "The one with the front-end map that makes random things change when the player goes outside the map." Which sounds like exactly the kind of thing that would weigh heavy on the head of Rockstar's technical director but that means remarkably little to me, the humble player. I'm not sure I've ever been outside the map in a Rockstar game anyhow.

Vermeij ended up in a kind of impromptu Q&A about working on the games. How many of their bugs could be traced back to him specifically? "I'm not going to count but erm… Quite a few." Why do so many of the game's models have swearing in their filenames? "Anything that isn't visible to players tends to have swearing in it. Just something devs do to keep sane." What does he think of the remasters? He hasn't played them, but he hears "most of the bugs are fixed now." Nevertheless, "they were rushed."

This is surely just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Vermeij's inside stories, but we might be waiting a long time to hear the real juicy stuff. This is the same poor guy who made a blog to chat about his experiences last year and promptly got Rockstar's dander up, leading to its unceremonious shuttering. What did he say then? "Maybe I'll try again in a decade or two."

The GTA SilentPatch fixes numerous issues in the PC ports of GTA 3, Vice City, and San Andreas, many of which weren't present in the console originals. It's not a patch for the Definitive Edition rerelease, however, which is a whole different kettle of fish with its own well-documented problems.

Among the fixes the SilentPatch now adds for all three games are fix for the issue where cars could blow up twice if you bailed out during the explosion, a restoration of the PS2 version's random chance that some drivers wouldn't turn on their lights in the rain or fog, metallic vehicle extras now appearing properly shiny rather than weirdly matte, the credits scrolling at the correct speed (they used to go slower at high resolutions), and the mission completion text likewise leaving the screen at the correct speed (again, it was linked to resolution).

There are also a significant number of changes specific to individual games. For instance, the SilentPatch now gives GTA 3 proper boat-sitting and driving animations rather than having Claude simply sink through the seat, pedestrians dive away from your vehicle instead of toward it, and severed limbs use the proper model rather than being weirdly doubled up so you'd see two hands on each severed arm. Oh, and NPC drivers can turn right on one-way roads now, something they couldn't do before.

Meanwhile, a lot of the Vice City changes have to do with broken backface culling. If you're not familiar with it, culling is the way videogames save memory by not rendering things you can't see—like the backs of objects. Vice City had all kinds of problems with its backface culling, resulting in car windows and parts of Tommy's collar disappearing, among other things. That's all been fixed, as has assault rifle muzzle flashes being aimed the wrong way, and a separate patch for pedestrians and Tommy not talking as much as they were supposed to on the street has been incorporated into the SilentPatch.

Finally, in sunny San Andreas, CJ's clothes now move when he's riding the quadbike just as they do on regular bikes, and you can hover with the jetpack even if you're using keyboard controls (it defaults to Q+E, and makes the jetpack segments way less annoying). Those weird falling black dots have also been fixed—while conspiracy theorists have long theorized they were supposed to be flying saucers, Silent looked into the code and realized they were supposed to use the textures from clouds, but were taking the wrong part of it. They now look white as they were originally intended to and clearly appear as shooting stars. Mystery solved.

You can download separate versions of the SilentPatch for each of the three Grand Theft Auto games it supports, then follow the setup instructions. They'll differ based on which storefront you bought the games through, or whether you have an old retail version on disc, so make sure to follow them closely.