A year and five months. That’s how long fans have waited for the next crumb of information about the recently delayed Grand Theft Auto 6. And boy, did Rockstar Games not disappoint.
Not only did a brand new trailer drop showing us a day in the life of this fictionalized Florida, the developer provided biographies for a good chunk of the game’s colorful cast of rogues, and a wave of new screenshots showcasing the grimy beauty of Leonida’s various neighborhoods and cities. It’s all people could have asked for in the shadow of last week’s delay and after over a year of radio silence.
But the biggest takeaway from today’s information drop is a little more subtle than the game’s dense, gorgeous visuals and implied new features. Instead, what’s most intriguing about Grand Theft Auto 6 is the relationship between its two protagonists, Jason Duval and Lucia Caminos.
“Jason and Lucia have always known the deck is stacked against them,” a game synopsis on Rockstar’s website reads. “But when an easy score goes wrong, they find themselves on the darkest side of the sunniest place in America, in the middle of a criminal conspiracy stretching across the state of Leonida — forced to rely on each other more than ever if they want to make it out alive.”
Grand Theft Auto 6 doesn’t exactly belong to a series known for believable, functional relationships, let alone romance. In the PS2 GTA games, the only prominently featured love interest ends up betraying the protagonist and becoming the primary villain. It’s also heavily implied that the other love interest is murdered off-screen for the heinous act of talking too much after a traumatic, near-death experience.
GTA’s HD Universe hasn’t faired any better. Grand Theft Auto 4’s potential love interests are all pretty gross stereotypes of women or turn out to be red herrings in cahoots with the bad guys. Grand Theft Auto 5’s only love interest, Michael’s wife Amanda, is portrayed as a vapid, stay-at-home Los Angeles-type who cheats on on her husband regularly and drives him up a wall (to be fair, Michael’s entire family sucks as much as he does so I guess equal opportunity awfulness there I guess).
While we’ve had less than five total minutes worth of footage from GTA’s next entry, it already portrays a much better understanding that love is a sincere emotion people can actually experience and even enjoy.
It’s clear right from the start of the newest trailer that Jason gets a lot of attention. And yet, he’s not a cynical jerk about it the way I’d expect a GTA protagonist to be. He’s not making a big deal about his neighbor fawning after him; he instead laughs it off and goes about his business. It’s clear why once Lucia enters the frame from prison. Jason has eyes for one person and one person only.
In the scenes that follow, Lucia and Jason’s relationship is portrayed with subtlety I wouldn’t expect from the series. Between the criminal hijinks of robbing stores and evading cops are surprisingly intimate moments most people in functional, healthy relationships would recognize. The two love birds are sitting at the edge of a pier reminiscing, imitating each other, and sharing a laugh. They’re enjoying a beer at the bar together, dancing at a club in their finest fit, and embracing one another after a long day of what I assume is community service.
This isn’t groundbreaking stuff for video games at large, as games have been depicting the understated and quieter parts of being in a relationship for decades. But for long-time fans of the open-world series, it’s a noticeable change especially compared to how most couples in GTA games have interacted up to this point. Even the game’s synopsis and trailer suggest that Jason and Lucia will remain on the same side, united against a single corrupt opposition. Pretty progressive stuff for a series known for poop jokes, heavy-handed satire, and incredibly obvious and straight-up not-funny innuendos.
That’s not to say that things can’t go left between Jason and Lucia. But at the very least, if things do go wrong between them, the believability of their relationship will build actual tension worth investing in. GTA 6 seems to be taking a page out of Red Dead Redemption’s book and telling a story that wants to be taken seriously.
This change can work wonders for GTA. While there’s a chance that what we’ve seen in this trailer isn’t what the full experience will be, a tonal shift toward actual sincerity is something the series has needed for a very long time now. And if what we’ve seen so far is part of the reported changes Rockstar’s making to the series, this is among the most welcome I could have asked for.
