GTA 6 Is Doing More With Two Protagonists Than GTA 5 Did With Three

The Grand Theft Auto 6 extended look has finally arrived, and what’s clearest already is that even though it’s got one fewer protagonist than its predecessor, these two playable protagonists are going to be a seriously big deal. Of course, that’s not to hate on Michael, Franklin, or Trevor, who gave Rockstar three insane lives to cut between, three skill sets, three houses on three corners of the map. But what Grand Theft Auto 6 appears to be building with Jason Duval and Lucia Caminos seems undeniably narrower and heavier, like an honest-to-god partnership in both the narrative and gameplay senses.

Truly, Grand Theft Auto 6: An Extended Look was all business, showing off roughly half an hour of PS5 footage with little explanation beyond that. It did quite the job of speaking for itself, too, especially in showcasing what’s changed since Grand Theft Auto 5 shipped the switch wheel in 2013 and built its best heists around it. The big difference here, as I see it, is that Jason and Lucia keep occupying the same scene, whether the player happens to be holding both of them, and that’s incredibly exciting.

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GTA 5’s Trio Does Switching Differently

Rockstar Games

Image via Rockstar

For as much love as Grand Theft Auto 5 truly deserves, it’s no less true that, by and large, Rockstar chose to scatter its leads across Los Santos and keep them there. Michael had the Rockford Hills mansion, Franklin had the house up in Vinewood Hills, and Trevor had a trailer out in the desert. Their friends, their hobbies, and their story threads were largely constructed as separate, and the switch wheel existed to ferry the player between them.

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Certain smaller missions had more than one of the crew, and the heists were where switching largely earned its keep, but outside those set pieces, free-roam really only ever held one of them at a time, unless you wanted to call them and deal with a very finicky system for the Three Man Army achievement. But that was by design: when asked by IGN’s Greg Miller before launch how the mechanic came about, Rockstar’s Dan Houser traced it to a suggestion that the leads share missions, which he said “takes away all the boring bits from the missions.” When speaking to Chris Suellentrop at the New York Times around the same period, Houser framed the trio as three separate stories played inside one game, interwoven rather than fused:

Both answers describe intersection—three lives crossing at useful points—rather than two people operating as a single unit.

GTA 6 Can Keep Two Characters On the Same Path

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Image via Rockstar

Image via Rockstar

GTA 6’s switch clearly serves a different purpose, as the extended look opens with Jason and Lucia heading in together to collect from a dealer named Raymond on behalf of Boobie Ike. The sequence goes wrong in the way these sequences do, and police raid the building, but while the player only controls Jason, Lucia never becomes scenery, covering him through the firefight and calling out threats he hasn’t clocked yet. In that instance and others, it seems that whichever protagonist you aren’t controlling will shoot alongside you and pitch in on robberies.

The following chase sequence, featuring new character Raul Bautista, goes even further by outright splitting control in the encounter. Lucia takes the wheel while Jason and Raul hold off the pursuers from the back, but in practice, the player moves between those roles as the chase develops. Rockstar just described this to Dazed, too, the magazine it handed its first official deep dive into the game: when a job spirals into a car chase, the switching system lets you drive one moment and fire on pursuers from the passenger window the next.

The Megamundo Job

The final narratively entrenched example from the preview came when Jason and Lucia were shuttled to act as hired bodyguards for one Andres de Leon at a corporate party. The characters get separated across different floors of a skyscraper when gunmen attack, but they still coordinate by phone; Lucia flags the situation to Jason at the top of the encounter, and later, with Lucia unarmed, Jason allows her to sneak away by sending a grenade-rigged body down an elevator to the floor below. Grand Theft Auto 5 had its cooperative moments and live switching, but rarely were both braided together like this, where the narrative connection and the mechanical one are doing the same work.

The Partnership Exists Beyond The Mission’s End

What nailed this new direction for the switch mechanic was one of the previewed, interspersed bits of free-roam footage: a player-controlled Lucia strolling into a convenience store that Jason was already in the middle of robbing. That co-presence is what Grand Theft Auto 5 never offered, and, according to Rob Nelson, head of development and co-studio head at Rockstar North, players can run the pair as a couple or send them off to cause trouble independently, switching seamlessly whenever they’re together. That design will clearly be a big deal here, as he also pushed back on the idea of protagonists as blank vessels for player whim:

Their story becomes a journey you share with them.

That said, it seems that the system tying Jason and Lucia together leans in the same direction as the duo’s narrative possibility, which really is the operative phrase. Dazed reported that food affects the pair’s weight, exercise visibly builds muscle, and that long stretches without sleep show on their faces, alongside a relationship layer in which choices carry repercussions that extend beyond a Red Dead-style honor meter. If both characters are continuously present to register these changes, the player’s payoff is only likely to be greater.

The caveat to all this is that nobody has yet explained how far the proverbial leash runs; nothing yet officially describes what is and isn’t possible mechanically in plain terms, and how that pans out might make all the difference in how the system is read—be it as a polish-and-density upgrade to GTA 5’s existing system, or as a truly structural change. My wager is that it’s both, as I’m sure what’s carried over is improved, and the Megamundo sequence and the free-roam co-presence aren’t the same shape as anything GTA 5’s trio did. And should that bet hit, it would be the one very specific instance in which GTA 6 is doing more with less.