Rockstar to The Guardian: GTA VI is the first GTA to encourage empathy, Jason and Lucia start out stealing cheap cars, and there are 62 birds to spot

Status: Confirmed. These are statements from Rockstar's Rob Nelson and Jennifer Kolbe in a Guardian feature. We read the whole thing in the print Saturday magazine of November 14 (pages 32 to 34); online there's only the November 11 newsletter preview. Last updated: November 14.

The Guardian's games editor, Keza MacDonald, spent a day at Rockstar North in Edinburgh watching GTA VI in action with Rob Nelson, co-studio head and one of the game's three co-creative leads, and Jennifer Kolbe, Rockstar's head of licensing. The feature runs across three pages of the November 14 Saturday magazine, five days before launch, and it delivers the line of the week: this is the first GTA that tries to encourage empathy. We read all three pages and the preview The Guardian ran online on November 11. Here's what's in it.

"The first GTA to encourage empathy"

MacDonald asks Nelson whether this is the first GTA that tries to encourage a measure of empathy. "I would say so," he replies, calling it a product of the story they're trying to tell: for the first time in a GTA, they've tried to provide mechanisms that encourage it, for those who want to.

That doesn't push crime aside. "Crime is a fundamental part of GTA, at least, up until now, it has been," Nelson says. They're trying not to punish people for playing the way they're used to, but your actions will affect how the game plays out. According to the feature, the game draws heavily on Red Dead Redemption 2, and one of development's biggest challenges was nudging players to behave differently without restricting their freedom.

The relationship is on you

• Lucia is the first woman to get headline billing in a GTA. In some acts you're locked into one character's perspective; most of the time you can switch freely.
• When they're apart, they text and call each other.
• When they're together, you can take them on little dates: the gym, a bar, a meditation retreat… or a liquor-store stick-up.
• There's a button to make them hold hands.
• Neglect the relationship and there are consequences. "The relationship is yours to nurture or yours to lose," Nelson says. Whether it stays romantic is in your hands.

MacDonald notes that nobody has ever really cared about anyone in a GTA. Here, the game asks you to care about these two and act out how they care for each other.

An unscripted demo

Pre-release demos are usually choreographed to show a game at its best. Not this one: Nelson and MacDonald just tooled around Vice City, doing almost anything she suggested.

• The dog. Stepping out of Jason and Lucia's flamingo-wallpapered apartment, they see a woman walking her dog. Nelson presses a button and Jason asks if he can pet it. She says yes: the dog loves to greet her public.
• Conversations. You can overhear pedestrians as you pass, and interrupting them can get you a bemused look or a stream of abuse.
• Birds. At the beach, MacDonald asks what kind of bird a gull on a post is. Jason pulls out binoculars and the gull goes into a wildlife logbook. There are 62 types of birds to spot.
• The night. Jason and Lucia head from a bar to a nightclub, dance in a crowd wearing UV-reactive mesh tops, then put on caps, sunglasses and bandanas to hold up a jewelry store and escape in a beaten-up car with a trunk full of cash bags and guns.

From the online preview: Jason eats a hot dog in detail, bites a donut with one hand while sipping a beer with the other, and tucks a six-pack under his arm when he runs, with the liquid sloshing inside. The magazines on the racks can be taken down and read, and every pedestrian was designed by someone, down to their clothes.

Starting from the bottom

Anyone who plays as a chaotic sociopath is in for a surprise, the feature warns: you have to be more careful than ever.

• At first, Jason and Lucia can only hotwire low-end vehicles and pick basic locks. No stealing whatever car you like, no walking into a bank: the bigger jobs come later. "These guys are a younger couple with their backs against the wall," Nelson says. Narratively, it doesn't make much sense for them to go out and cause as much carnage as possible.
• Jobs take planning. You scope out the target, whether a gas station or an upscale mall boutique. You can disable cameras or steal the footage, and find back doors and safe codes to get in without pulling a gun on anyone and get out before witnesses arrive.
• Skip the prep and things escalate fast. In the demo, after a couple of small-time sprees, they hit a well-protected jewelry store. Lucia holds the guards at gunpoint and they surrender; but upstairs, while Jason empties the safe, another guard opens fire. Jason knocks him out with the butt of his gun, they flee on a stolen motorbike, and the chase, with cop cars and helicopters, spans half the district. Back at their car, they stash the cash, change clothes and lie low on the outskirts until the heat dies down.

"Project Americas" and ten years of research

• The game has been in development in some form since 2015, when the team made its first research trips to Miami. Back then its codename was Project Americas, reflecting a later-abandoned idea to set it across two continents.
• It was announced in December 2023 and delayed twice.
• According to the feature, the budget and team size have quadrupled since GTA V. The team numbers close to 5,000 people, and the cost of over $1 billion is an independent estimate Rockstar won't confirm.
• Nelson says the big shift was going from being limited by technology to being limited by people: you can throw money at the problem, to an extent, but it's no guarantee of making something good.
• Kolbe on wrapping it up: the team would never stop working on this game if they had the choice. Nelson admits it's really hard to close it down.
• Why one gigantic project after 13 years and two console generations? "They could have made GTA 5.5, and done it faster," Kolbe says. "Ultimately, that's not what they wanted." Nelson: "You have to take big swings. It can't be just more of the same."

From the online preview: early Miami trips included a police ridealong in South Beach, a nightclub until 4am and odd bars in the Keys. A GTA outside the US? "Never say never, but there's still so much to do in America."

The other side: the Glasgow tribunal

The feature doesn't dodge the "slightly strained atmosphere" at the studio. In Glasgow, Rockstar is still defending at an employment tribunal its dismissal of 34 employees last year, who say they were fired over union organizing. The case was due to wrap up in October but will now drag on right up to launch. A few days before the visit, Jennifer Kolbe testified in that case while former employees and IWGB union reps protested outside. It's the same dispute behind the union vote that opened on November 12.

Will you look after Jason and Lucia's relationship, or play the way you always have? Tell us in the forum.