NEW YORK TIMES: The grand ambitions of long-awaited sixth instalment of cultural phenomenon Grand Theft Auto

For nearly 27 minutes last month, I sat enthralled while watching Jason and Lucia, the main characters of Grand Theft Auto VI, ascend a social ladder from a drug deal gone bad in a seedy tower block to a party with coked-out entrepreneurs christening their new office building. Beyond the self-assured roughnecks and fidgety jet-setters, there was a panorama of scenes in the extended look at the video game: stock-car racing, skydiving, bayou boating, kayaking, nightclub dancing and, of course, balletic violence.

That extended look at Grand Theft Auto VI was shared with the public on Netflix, building further anticipation for its November 19 release date. The series, one drenched in violence and satirising American culture, is a virtual playground where you can blow up police cars or organise productions of Hamlet. The release of a new game is the equivalent of a fresh Beyonce album or Martin Scorsese film, a rare monocultural moment in a fragmented world.

Grand Theft Auto VI will be expansive: Vice City, its alluring interpretation of Miami, is twice the size of Los Santos, the version of Los Angeles in Grand Theft Auto V, according to its publisher, Rockstar Games.

The overall map, the studio said, is three times as large as the playable area of its previous game, Red Dead Redemption 2.

It also promises to be incredibly immersive. Unlike in other Grand Theft Auto games, a player in this one cannot whip out a shotgun or a rocket launcher and walk down the street without expecting the non-player characters to call the police.

Rob Nelson, who oversees Rockstar North in Edinburgh with Aaron Garbut, said he considered Grand Theft Auto VI an evolution of what the studio achieved in 2018 with Red Dead Redemption 2, which told the story of a man unsettled by the erosion of the Wild West.

That game’s systems were built to be responsive to a wide array of actions, whether the player was hunting animals, helping someone in hope of a reward or unrepentantly robbing that person instead.

“Once we managed to accomplish that level of interactive fidelity in a more sparsely populated version of America 100 years ago,” Nelson said, “we were already imagining what it would be like if we could do that at the scale and density of a modern environment”.

Fight and flight

Nelson picked up a controller and turned on Grand Theft Auto VI. “We are adding so much more depth and interactivity to the world,” he said while leading Jason around a safe house.

“Here I am eating an apple, opening the fridge and drinking a smoothie. So this will increase my health temporarily for a while, allowing people to sort of role-play.”

Exiting the apartment, Jason stooped down to pet a pedestrian’s dog. Nelson said you could buy pet snacks from convenience stores and dole them out if you wished.

Nelson ducked Jason into a gym, where he walked past people on treadmills and stepped into a squat rack. Unlocking higher weights requires working out and a mastery of technique. Success has a material effect on the character.

“Of course we want to do everything. We want to have every mechanic that you can imagine,” Nelson said.

“But we do have to carefully pick and choose what we think is best for our characters and our story and what we can handle creatively and technically.”

It was time to check on Lucia. The camera shot into the air overlooking the city and then descended on her walking down a street.

I watched Lucia get into a verbal altercation and then a fight with a group of women. After knocking one woman’s sunglasses to the ground, Lucia scooped them up, put them on and sauntered away in style. A little later, Lucia linked up with Jason and robbed a convenience store.

Jason and Lucia are on the run in Grand Theft Auto VI, and to skate by, they will need to make money outside of the story missions. Beyond criminal activity, they can earn cash by racing monster trucks, scuba diving for treasure, playing pool and more.

Whether they do so as lovers or simply as partners in crime will be up to the player. Keeping the couple’s relationship strong enough for Lucia and Jason to hold hands when leaving a clothing store will require effort — hanging out, responding to texts.

“It’s new for GTA, this idea of your actions having meaning in terms of how you treat your partner or how violent you are,” Nelson said.

While there is no right or wrong way to play, the world will react according to how the characters conduct themselves. If players stick up places efficiently and destroy security footage when necessary, Nelson said, they should generally be able to stay in front of the law. Going around guns blazing will make the police aggressive.

To raise the stakes, Nelson has the couple rob a bank. Back in their vehicle, Lucia shoots out the tires of a trailing police car, causing it to spin out of control and flip over in a way that is nothing short of cinematic.

I asked if the studio created a strong female character to address a longstanding criticism of the series. Nelson denied that was the case.

Rockstar initially considered making four playable characters, but worried that might make it hard to emotionally connect. That was when the idea of a playable relationship emerged.

“As soon as we had that Bonnie and Clyde concept,” Nelson said, “we knew it was the only way for us to go with this game.”

Transformative play

Rockstar is well aware of the expectations surrounding Grand Theft Auto VI, which will be released on the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S.

Rupert Humphries, Rockstar North’s senior vice-president for narrative, acknowledged that some of the seismic events during the game’s decade-long development — President Donald Trump’s rise to political power and the coronavirus pandemic — will not be directly addressed.

One of the game’s writers, Michael Wiafe, said, “I think if we can make a story about humanity where you are poking fun at greed and hubris and all these sorts of things that we can all agree are problematic, then I think that is a unifying thing.”

Depicting a wide cross-section of society meant on-the-ground research for Rockstar — visiting racetracks and nightclubs, riding along with police officers, meeting with owners of gun ranges. Humphries said he was proud the game showed all parts of life in Miami and South Florida.

“Everything is there, and you can take this ride through it, and that is something to escape into,” he said. “It’s a sort of critique, but it’s also like a love letter.”

To make this world feel more believable, Rockstar built a new team of writers, directors and producers in Los Angeles that focused solely on creating more realised non-player characters, known as NPCs.

Rather than use procedural generation to algorithmically mix and match body parts and clothes, the developers went for a bespoke approach.

“We art-directed each individual one of them,” said Garbut, the series’s art director.

Grand Theft Auto VI, Rockstar said, has well over 600,000 animations, compared with 55,000 in Grand Theft Auto V and 300,000 in Red Dead Redemption 2.

Garbut emphasised the new game’s human-made craft. “Every room in the game, somebody thought about this,” he said.

Phil Hooker, a head of development for Rockstar Games, reiterated that the goal was immersion.

“We wanted, whether you’re on mission or off mission, for it to feel the same so you wouldn’t really see the structure of the game underneath,” he said.

With Grand Theft Auto VI, Rockstar hopes to retain cultural influence for another decade.

“We’re trying to reflect a sort of crazy, warped version of this American state and city — we always try to do that,” Nelson said.

I asked what he would say to my literary friends who were not into gaming. He replied, “I think this story has — if you want it — themes of hopefulness, elements of sacrifice versus selfishness, and it plays out asking questions about whether love can survive through this storm.”

Grand Theft Auto VI: An Extended Look is on Netflix

Grand Theft Auto VI is due to be released PlayStation and X-Box on November 19