Grand Theft Auto VI already has a first trailer and a minute and a half of video, as little as it may seem, gives a lot of reason for comment. And this is what we are going to do. With this first trailer confirmations and speculations make way for it. We know that GTA VI will have a female protagonist for the first time in the history of the franchise and we also know that the action will take place in Vice City (the fictional version of Miami and Florida), but what else does the new from Rockstar Games have in store for us?
Ten years have passed since the launch of GTA V and, saying this is obvious, the world in 2023 has little or nothing to do with the one we had in 2013. When GTA V came out, the discourse about social networks, smartphones and The Internet was new and emerging. It had been just six years since the first iPhone and everyone was using Facebook. On the other hand, Instagram was an application for photographs, having 100,000 followers on YouTube was a lot and no one had yet considered that something like TikTok could come to exist.
Grand Theft Auto has always been characterized by mixing madness and crime with satire and criticism. The protagonists are usually gang members and thugs – bank robbers in GTA V – but the entire game usually orbits around those fault lines that divide and characterize American society. In GTA V, Facebook was called Life Invader, they got right into Mark Zukerberg and parodied TV shows and ads.
An important part of the first GTA VI trailer is dedicated to showing TikToks of crazy things in Vice City. Smartphones are no longer a new and strange tool, they are an extension of the human body and the trailer is full of people recording and sharing everything they see and what happens to them. In fact, it is likely that there will be a TikTok-style application in GTA VI and, knowing how ambitious Rockstar Games are, it could even be functional.
Another great novelty is Lucia, the first female protagonist of the franchise. The trailer anticipates how the story will start: a couple of criminals, a kind of Bonnie and Clyde of the underworld who will rise in the criminal world of this fictional Florida. In GTA V we controlled three protagonists, so it would not be surprising if in GTA VI we could alternate between the two members of this couple. But the trailer gives special prominence to Lucia, probably because she is the big news.
GTA VI is not the first game in the franchise to be set in Vice City and it is likely that elements from other titles will return, such as the possibility of buying and managing illegal businesses. This already happened in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (published in 2002), a game heavily inspired by Tony Montana’s criminal rise and Brian De Palma’s Scarface in general.
At the time of writing, GTA VI Trailer 1 has over 51 million YouTube views and 6.5 million likes. To put it in context: the first trailer for GTA V, 12 years after its publication, has 96 million views and 2.1 million likes. The Grand Theft Auto VI phenomenon is of absurd dimensions. And it was to be expected.
The level of affection and detail shown in the trailer is sickening. The number of characters seen on screen (almost all unique and different), the lighting systems and the different environments (from swamps and beaches to skyscrapers). It’s something that only seems possible at Rockstar Games. And best of all, it seems believable. It’s not like with the first Watch Dogs trailer, where everyone knew that Ubisoft was lying to our faces.
Enrique Alonso from Eurogamer Spain explains it very well in his analysis of the trailer: the level of detail we see “does not depend on the technology, it depends on the budget and the armies of workers that Rockstar Games has.” This is why it is credible. It’s crazy, but if in Red Dead Redemption 2 the size of the horses’ testicles changed depending on the temperature, why should we distrust this trailer?
GTA VI will arrive on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series We do not know what will happen with GTA Online and we have not seen gameplay of the game either. So, far from ending here with this first trailer, the GTA VI Hype train has just left the station. 2024 will be a busy year and it is worth not losing track of what’s new from Rockstar Games.
