We are back. After a long sojourn to the centre of the self, I return—having completed a journey of discovery where I reflected on what I really wanted from modding GTA 5: my true desires, true capabilities, and where I want to take this whole thing as we walk, together, into the future. I speak to you now of the wisdom I have gained from my vagabond travels, behold:

I've put roving packs of hostile cougars in the game now.

The mod to put loads of cougars in Grand Theft Auto 5 is called Cougars, which is easy to remember, and it boasts "seven special cougar types" and four difficulties. Cougar time is initiated with a tap of the delete key, at which point you may choose either Catnap, Furmidable, Feral, or Catastrophe mode, which I am led to believe affects the volume of the cat hordes dispatched against you and the potency of their armaments.

Naturally, I opted for Catastrophe, kicking off a sort of pseudo-game-show opening where Franklin, Trevor, Michael, and Franklin's celebrity bodyguard were all fleeing angry litters of cats. Then we were off, with me—as Franklin—desperately dodging leaping cougars, some of them armed with heavy machine guns, some wearing body armour, some with traffic cones for reasons known only to God. Then I teleported, and the cougars followed me.

This process continued for a few minutes before I realised that, most likely, I was not going to reach my goal of a private jet waiting on the runway at Los Santos International. I performed a rare purposeful teleport to bring myself home, at which point about 56 quintillion cougars attempted to kill me. I solved this problem with an explosive micro-SMG.

When I boarded the plane, I was told I had won, and a man with a cougar for a head and a parade of dancing regular cougars behind him all congratulated me. I teleported away in the middle of their performance. It is good to be back.

Grand Theft Auto's radio stations have long stood as an integral part of the series' whole vibe—either offering time capsules of the times each game was set in (Vice City), or offering a realistic blend of classic and modernity a la Grand Theft Auto 5's excellent music curation.

I've been just a tad giddy to discover what awaits me in Grand Theft Auto 6's car stereos when the game launches on November 19, which has me surprised that Rockstar teasing six of its upcoming stations earlier this month completely flew under my radar.

Well, now I've had a gander and listened to all 12 minutes of its DJs bantering and a peppering of bangers between. And I gotta say, I'm already jazzed to speed down Leonida's highways with some of these stations at full volume.

Rockstar's licensed music curation rarely misses, and that very much seems to be the continuing trend with Grand Theft Auto 6. While we don't know just how many radio stations there are in total yet—this is the first game where we'll be able to tune in to both terrestrial music stations and podcasts, it being 2026 and all—but the six that were teased were the exact kind of flavours I've come to expect from the series.

There's Latin station Cocoteo FM, classic country Back Country Radio, African channel AfroBANK FM, all-out metal hub The Chamber 106.6, pop banger central Flash FM, and hip-hop destination Dirty South Classics. I'm already 100% here for The Chamber's setlist, being an elder emo and all, with bands like Black Sabbath, Pantera, and Slayer making their way onto Leonida's airwaves. But I'm also jazzed to see newer blood on the scene, like Bad Bunny's appearance on Cocoteo.

My biggest interest was in Flash FM, though. Non-Stop Pop has become such an iconic radio station for me, thanks to some excellent song choices and Cara Delevigne's delightfully deadpan delivery. It doesn't seem like I'm going to be disappointed, though—Alex Consani takes up the mantle as model-turned-radio-host alongside the excellent artist Robyn (of Bulletproof fame), and hearing one of my favourite songs in MGMT's Electric Feel is all the confidence I need in Rockstar's keen ear.

While the previews do show criminally little interactions between the hosts (it seems like Grand Theft Auto 6 is going for duos across all its stations, presumably for some easy back-and-forth banter), I'm sure there'll still be satire in droves to come.

Here's each radio station currently teased, along with each song present in the preview. You can check out a brief description of each station along with the audio previews over on Rockstar's website:

Back Country Radio

• The Conversation - Hank Williams, Jr. & Waylon Jennings
• Need a Little TIme off for Bad Behaviour - David Alle Coe
• Don't Come Home A-Drinkin' (With Lovin' On Your Mind) - Loretta Lynn

Cocoteo FM

• EoO - Bad Bunny
• Si Es Trucho Es Trucho (Remix) - Axel Rulay ft. Farruko & El Alfa
• Canalla - Romeo Santos & El Chaval de la Bachata

AfroBANK FM

• Joha - Asake
• Gye Wani - Pat Thomas ft. Ebo Taylor
• Shay'sana - DJ Lag & Robot Boii ft. Kamo Mphela

The Chamber 106.6

• I - Black Sabbath
• I'm Broken - Pantera
• Raining Blood - Slayer

Flash FM

• Good Ones - Charli xcx
• Electric Feel - MGMT
• Midnight Sun (Girls Trip) - Zara Larsson & PinkPantheress

Dirty South Classics

• Like a Pimp - David Banner ft. Lil' Flip
• Who Dat - JT Money ft. Solé
• Born N Raised - DJ Khaled ft Trick Daddy, Rick Ross & Pitbull

Edge magazine unleashed a whopper of a 16-page feature all about Grand Theft Auto 6 earlier this week. After poring over every paragraph multiple times, one thing really stuck out to me: It feels like Rockstar is pushing for a more realistic, grounded experience.

Those two words might sound like an absolute nightmare to some GTA aficionados. It's not like the series has never known how to be serious or gritty—see Grand Theft Auto 4—but it's always facilitated chaos with relative ease. Outlandish weapons, an easily gamed wanted system, NPCs that feel more like props to be mowed down than anything with a personality. If I wanted to hop in and wreak a little criminal havoc for a while, I wouldn't find much hardship in wriggling out of trouble as soon as I was bored.

But it sounds like creating that sort of pandaemonium in GTA 6 is no longer as free as it once was. Police will remember what you looked like, if you were working alone or alongside an accomplice, and any weapon you were carrying. It'll use that information to fight back against the anarchy you orchestrate. It's not just police presence, either. Edge describes chaos as a third participant—no longer just your own, but the way the world reacts to your behaviour: would-be vigilante NPCs stepping in, carjackings going wrong thanks to modern tracking technology.

And you know what? I'm completely here for it. Sure, we're perhaps losing a little bit of that all-out, sky-high criminal power fantasy. I'm probably not going to be able to pull a rocket launcher out of my invisible butt arsenal anymore—Edge notes that larger weaponry instead gets stored inside your car—and I wonder if the world is going to let me lob a hundred sticky bombs at a plane without consequence anymore. But when it's all in the name of a more detailed, more involved-feeling world? I honestly believe that a little bit of grounding is going to make it feel all the more satisfying.

Puzzling out how to gradually return to the shadows is that little extra bit of flavour I've been craving from the series. Even if it is something as simple as a wardrobe change, the modern-day equivalent of going and getting your car spray-painted mid-chase. But co-head Phil Hooker also describes things like jumping on a bus out of sight of any CCTV or witnesses—if police didn't see you get on the bus, there's no way of figuring out where you ended up once you're safely distanced from the scene (or scenes) of the crime.

And ultimately, I don't feel like a more detailed, realistic reaction to my crime sprees dulls their buzz. I don't think Rockstar is trying to stop people from playing the game the way they always have, but instead inviting more ways to let the chaos ripple out and a greater incentive to work strategically on reeling things back in. And while it might feel a little different initially—at least, I should hope it will with 13 years of technological advancement behind Rockstar since GTA 5—I'm confident that the level of depth these sorts of tweaks afford will have even the most hardcore pedestrian-mowers in our midst converted before long.

I may rob casinos, steal cars, and occasionally drive on the sidewalk, but I'm not a monster, and I don't want the civilians in Grand Theft Auto 6 to think I am. Well thanks to the souped-up morality system there will be a bit of space for some redemption.

Rob Nelson, Rockstar North's co-studio head and head of development went into greater detail about what GTA 6's "Criminal Profile" involves during an interview for Edge magazine and how players will have some authority about how the world will react to them.

The Criminal Profile will track your actions as Lucia and Jason on a scale from "Professional" to "Irredeemable", represented by angel and devil icons. It's not necessarily encouraging you all to be saints who disengage with any form of violence and follow road traffic laws to a tee, but you have to be mindful of how much violence you doll out.

Fights don't need to always end in death, a professional criminal may incapacitate their opponent instead of putting a bullet between their eyes or perhaps try to get information or whatever they want from them via less violent means, at least at first. You may try to intimidate or perhaps bribe your way to the best ending. Rockstar has confirmed that your Criminal Profile will affect how the story pans out and so it's certainly something to keep an eye on, if you're gunning for a specific storyline that is.

We've already learned a bit about the Criminal Profile before thanks to an IGN preview in which Nelson also explained how the decision to include such a responsive system stemmed from the fact that the devs didn't want player characters to become too powerful.

"There isn't a right or wrong way to play this game, but consistent actions may have an impact in terms of how the world reacts to you and how the narrative plays out," Nelson says. He also explained how small acts of kindness can redeem you. So, if you see some litter lying around, put it in the bin and if you have a free moment perhaps go to the local park and feed the birds.

Yes, Grand Theft Auto is a videogame series where you drive fast cars and occasionally mow down the odd pedestrian here and there. I like that. It's nice. I am looking forward to also doing that in Grand Theft Auto 6. But the thing I'm really excited to do? Hop on a bus, baby.

Out of all 16(!!) pages from Edge magazine's newest megafeature on Rockstar's upcoming meteor, a teeny-tiny paragraph about Leonida's public transportation system is the one that's got me feeling all giddy. Similarly to Red Dead Redemption 2, the game will feature a fully functioning train system, as well as a bunch of bus routes to help you get around Leonida the old-fashioned way.

And, according to head of development Phil Hooker, they're systems that he has extensively tested to ensure their reliability. "I'm obsessed with making sure they always turn up," he told Edge. "So, anywhere in the middle of playing, I'll just go: right, we're going to get the bus to where we're going. I've memorised all of the routes."

I kind of love it, I can't lie. It really feels like Rockstar is paring down the criminal power fantasy a tiny bit and offering more grounded, realistic ways to exist in its world. Which might make some hardcore pedestrian-mowers a little furrow-browed, but it seems as though the developer is trying to create various levels at which people can engage with the chaos and zaniness the series has typically offered.

As much as I'm also a member of the crime spree brigade, something like a public transportation system is one of those details that's going to make Leonida feel alive in a way we've not really seen from the series before. It feels fitting for a story like Jason and Lucia's, too—it seems like they don't quite want the all-out criminal fame of previous protagonists, and allowing them to engage with more practical methods of getting around feels like the perfect way to play into that.

It's not just a cutesy way to roleplay an everyday commuter, either. Hooker also highlights making use of the buses and trains as a way to evade the watchful gaze of the police. "If they don't see you get on, and then you get out of the 'wanted' area, why would they search the bus unless they see you get onto it?"

More than anything, Edge's feature now has me desperate to go buy a beer, a pack of smokes, and jump onto a bus to watch the world go by. Though the only place I think Hooker is wrong is that he's been rigorously ensuring everything turns up on time—I dunno how things work in Florida, but the true realistic experience would be to have no buses turn up for ages until two or three arrive bumper-to-bumper. That's the true public transportation experience, after all.

Anyone tells you that love cannot be measured. That it's a feeling deeper than any other emotion which has bound humanity together since the dawn of time and therefore cannot be quantified is lying to you. You absolutely can measure it, and I'd go as far as saying you can even rank people on it, which is exactly what Grand Theft Auto 6 is setting out to do.

The recent mega piece by Edge has revealed that GTA 6 players will be able to measure Jason and Lucia's closeness in a four-point scale which we're coining as the boyfriend-o-meter.

It's confirmed that you can switch between characters in GTA 6 so you'll likely have to show up for your other half no matter who you're playing as. Activities like taking long romantic walks on the beach, working out at the gym together, and driving around so your other half can doomscroll will all work towards boosting your score.

The relationship between Lucia and Jason certainly seems to be more involved than we first thought, but that's not to say it will take centre stage or be overly important. Your actions will have narrative consequences but only within a narrow scope of possibilities.

But that probably still won't help to calm the growing discourse of people who seem to think that playing GTA 6 is essentially cheating on your partner. I personally think that this is just a psyop propagated by people who don't like having fun, and that no real sensible person would see roleplaying a healthy relationship in a videogame as cheating on your significant other. Especially as you play as both characters; it's essentially just playing make-believe with a couple of dolls, but I digress.

Who knows, though? Weirder things have been known to happen on the internet, so maybe there is an army of people angry at the notion of their significant other getting one videogame character to kiss another one.

I will, however, be relationshipping to the max. This is a competition which I plan to win and in the process of doing so show all of Leonida just how capable and fearsome my skills are at cultivating a healthy and strong relationship.

I don't mean to be contrarian (which is rare for me), but I've been generally unfazed by the hype for Grand Theft Auto 6. It's not that I don't think it'll be good—I'm actually damn near certain it will—it's just that none of what Rockstar has focused on so far in its marketing speaks to me all that much.

Anyway, throw those equanimous sentiments out the window, because an anecdote from Edge magazine's new mondo-feature on GTA 6 has convinced me this game is actually an immersive sim, and now I'm bouncing off the walls in anticipation. Chatting about his experience actually playing the game, Rockstar head of development Phil Hooker told a story about the time he deployed a bit of unorthodox crowd control to prepare a store for a heist.

"Recently I was robbing a store that was full of people," said Hooker. "I wanted to get rid of them, because they'd be witnesses who would cause me trouble." What did he do? Well, in GTAs of yore, your options would have been pretty limited, but GTA 6's dovetailing systems gave our man an opportunity. "I basically started picking fights with them, provoking them and then immediately defusing it.

"I didn't actually get them into a fight—I'd just go: 'Ah, sorry, leave it'. Then they would leave the store, so that would clear them out and I could rob it more cleanly." It's one of the things Hooker says he, and Rockstar generally, focuses on in testing: "meeting new NPCs, for example, trying different ways in which to interact with them, trying to find ways to combine the features in ways we maybe haven't thought about."

Forgive me, but is that not the most immersive sim stuff you've ever heard? A sandbox crammed with systems that can collide—or be manipulated—in ways the developers themselves never even expected, to the delight and satisfaction of a creative player? I say it is, and it's quite honestly made me more excited for Rockstar's quadrillion-dollar baby than any glossy trailer. Put it in my hands, please, and then let me use those hands to pick up a crate that turns translucent when I do it.

Rumor has it that GTA 6 will come to PC relatively quickly after the console launch, though Rockstar typically puts at least seven months between console and PC launches.

Grand Theft Auto 6's NPCs are so incredibly complicated, it briefly sent the studio into a bit of a "horrifying" spin, requiring an entire team of writers and producers to be assembled just to handle the workload. This has since been doubly confirmed by the studio in a recent mega-preview from our friends at Edge:

"This same philosophy governs the streets," the preview reads, "Rather than relying chiefly on procedural systems to assemble interchangeable crowds, Rockstar established an entire Los Angeles-based team of writers, directors and producers devoted to making Leonida's NPCs more individually realised."

According to the feature, that meant creating an absurd number of animations: "The studio art-directed every [NPC], creating around 600,000 animations."

What's more, "these pedestrians are assigned personality traits that help determine how they respond: temperament, aggression, where they are, what they have seen, and how the player has behaved towards them. Different districts have their own demographic and professional textures."

As for what a "professional texture" actually is, Rockstar North co-studio head Rob Nelson goes into more detail: "Who's going to be aggressive? How many people are going to go for a weapon? How many are going to test me?" Nelson says, repeating the same self affirmations I make daily in the mirror.

The preview continues: "The old GTA pedestrian, a kind of moving prop waiting to panic when the player points a gun, has here splintered into a kaleidoscopic range of possible reactions. Back on the sidewalk, that abstraction suddenly becomes practical. The man with the dog has decided that Jason's stare constitutes a test.

"He squares up, then unclips the leash from the animal's collar. Nelson turns and runs. The dog gives chase. A flock of pigeons bursts into the air. Finally, the animal loses interest and trots back to its owner. Jason slows to a walk, selects a pack of cigarettes from his inventory, lights one, takes a drag, and continues down the street."

Really, the way the preview puts it, GTA 6 seems so thoroughly complicated you could legitimately just sit there and people-watch for a bit: "On the opposite side of the road, Nelson spots an arrest taking place. A suspect is being cuffed by two police officers, who have left their vehicles unattended. He sneaks up to one, clicks the boot open, pulls out a shotgun and slings it onto his back, before walking on, leaving a puff of cigarette smoke curling in the air. We have been watching for three minutes."

Is this sort of immersive sim, top-end simulation particularly necessary in a videogame that, in its purest form, is about wildly driving vehicles and committing crimes? If you're Rockstar, clearly it is, and I can't say I'm not impressed by the amount of craft reportedly on display here. We'll see how it all holds up when millions of people are playing.

On console, that is—we're still waiting to hear about a GTA 6 PC launch date. Rumor has it that the wait won't be too long, but we're not holding our breath.

You can read Edge's GTA 6 feature story over at GamesRadar.

It is not hyperbole to say that GTA 6 is the most anticipated videogame of all time. That'll happen when one of the most acclaimed game developers of all time takes 13 years to finally put out a new game in one of the most popular series of all time.

That's a hell of a lot of pressure for the army of developers at Rockstar. In a conversation with our friends at Edge for the magazine's big inside look at GTA 6, Rockstar North head of development Aaron Garbut spoke about meeting the series' absurd standards.

"We can't just trot out something that's what people might expect, or that was the easy thing to do," he says. "We've not compromised on the scale, the detail, the interactivity, the story, the open world."

Despite the studio's famously secretive posture, Garbut says the team is very much aware of the galactic expectations, and deployed an illustrative metaphor to communicate how he thinks they've managed to meet them.

"I feel like we've built a pyramid on Everest."

While my mind instantly goes to an eventual GTA 6 mod that'll let me ride a giant pyramid down the biggest mountain in Leonida (will fake Florida have mountains?), I have little reason to doubt Garbut's claims here. Impressions, leaks, and Rockstar's own communications suggest that GTA 6 is doubling down on the systemic details that elevated Red Dead Redemption 2 from 'GTA with horses' to a crime-forward life sim.

That game's missions were Rockstar's familiar brand of organized crime, but the things you spent time doing between them were quite new for a mainstream game: Eating, drinking, grooming yourself, camping, browsing, and making small talk with locals. These actions often had some gameplay ramifications, but it was common to perform because it felt like the human thing to do.

Grand Theft Auto has experimented with these little human exercises for a long time—eating healthy in San Andreas, going on dates in GTA 4—but Rockstar's aims for GTA 6 sound like we'll be making little choices like this constantly. Maybe they'll end up being overboard for some, but I for one can't wait to set out on a mission and realize I need to stop for gas.

There's still no announced PC release date for GTA 6. Rumor has it that it won't be a long wait, but we'll believe it when we see it. Rockstar usually puts at least seven months between console and PC versions, and it took a year-and-a-half for GTA 5 to come to PC.

I knew Grand Theft Auto 6's map was going to be big, but I hadn't expected Rockstar to proclaim that it is, in fact, almost as big as the maps from its last three games combined. An absolute whopper of a feature in the latest Edge magazine revealed a little bit about the sheer scale of Leonida, and hoo-boy, is it a big one.

Vice City and its surrounding areas are said to be almost as big as Grand Theft Auto 4, Grand Theft Auto 5, and Red Dead Redemption 2 combined. Which, considering the size of the latter two, is saying something.

But as we all know, quantity does not necessarily mean quality, and boasts about the size of a videogame world are sometimes followed by empty, unexciting expanses. Rockstar seems keen to express that GTA 6's map is not just sprawling, but also dense.

Co-studio head Aaron Garbut told Edge that Grand Theft Auto 6 contains "an order of magnitude more interiors" than the developer's previous games, for a start. That's something I'm pretty excited about personally, as someone who delights in interior design and absolutely hates running head-first into fake doors like Wile E. Coyote barrelling into painted tunnels.

It's not just interiors that have been given a lot of love, though. "Every back alley is as densely detailed and interesting as the others," Garbut says. "You can go anywhere, any random location, and so many people have thought about that location."

The tepid reception to the scarce stretches of Grand Theft Auto 5's northern areas like Senora Desert informed the creation of Leonida's outer reaches, too, which gives me hope that even Leonida's more barren biomes will have plenty to offer.

Garbut says that even after years of development, there are still areas he's yet to explore. That sense of minute detail within such a vast landmass is the thing that has me most excited to poke around this fictional Florida—from soaking in every tongue-in-cheek parodied brand plastered across billboards, to the pockets of life that'll undoubtedly populate street corners and back alleys. If Leonida is as rich as Garbut describes, then I imagine I'll be spending an awful lot of time making note of every little touch.

As for when we can do that on PC, there's still no official word—only a rumor that the wait won't be long. We're not placing any bets at this point. A seven month gap between console and PC is typical for Rockstar, and GTA 5 took a year-and-a-half to make the jump.

While Grand Theft Auto 6 doesn't have a confirmed PC release date yet, we do know it's coming to PS5 and Xbox Series X & S on November 19. Now, we also know that the game file console gamers will need to download is going to be a very big boy indeed, boasting a file size even bigger than Red Dead Redemption 2.

Reportedly, Grand Theft Auto VI will clock in at a total of 210 GB on PlayStation 5. That's according to PlayStation Game Size on X, who unearths file sizes for upcoming console releases by snooping around the PS Store's backend. I'm sparing a thought for anyone with a creaky internet connection (though at least you can pre-load the game on consoles from November 12, one week earlier).

That 210 GB figure is enough to make your head spin, even if the fully downloaded game doesn't actually end up taking quite that much space on your SSD. That said, a game spread out more than a fifth of a 1 TB drive's total capacity definitely stings during the memory supply crisis.

For comparison's sake, GTA 6's download size is markedly bigger than the 115 GB of available space Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 required at launch. You won't find me tearing through DMZ, but I'm likely still going to have to do some SSD spring cleaning in the not too distant future if those rumours about a Q1 2027 PC release for GTA VI are to be believed (Personally, I think Lauren's prediction that we'll be waiting until at least November next year is more likely).

Currently on PC, Steam says you'll need 105 GB of available space for predecessor GTA V Enhanced. That same game takes up 105.3 GB on PS5. As for Red Dead Redemption 2, Steam recommends 150 GB of space, while the PS store recommends a minimum of 89.20 GB. Obviously, file sizes can fluctuate significantly between updates and bundled-in online modes. But still, based on these two examples alone, I may have to dig deep to find space on my PC for GTA 6.

The biggest game on my rig right now is Silent Hill: Townfall at 73.55 GB, while the biggest game on my Steam Deck is Baldur's Gate 3 at 148.24 GB. Beyond that, I'm much more one for indie darlings—which is just as well because James pointed out to me that GTA 6's file size is roughly equivalent to 3500 copies of Balatro, and 6000 copies of Animal Well. I dread to think just how many times those indie projects' production budgets Rockstar spent developing GTA 6…

Rockstar employees will hold a vote on union recognition over a two-week span in November that will perfectly bracket the studio's launch of the console version of Grand Theft Auto 6. If the vote carries in favor of the union, the IWGB Rockstar Game Workers Union will become the biggest game industry union in the UK, giving employees a voice on matters including pay and bonuses, overtime, redundancies, flexible working arrangements, and generative AI policies.

The terms of the recognition deal have been under negotiation between the union and Rockstar management since July, but unionization efforts have been underway for much longer. The process came under intense scrutiny in October 2025 when the studio fired 31 employees in what the IWGB claimed was "the most brazen act of union busting the games industry has ever seen." Rockstar alleged that the fired employees were leaking GTA 6 information in a public Discord; the matter is now before an employment tribunal in Scotland.

"This November, we have the chance to make gaming history not once but twice. As all our hard work, skill and creativity are experienced by GTA VI players for the first time, our voices will now be heard for the first time too," Rockstar Game Workers Union committee member Shanti Easton-Steel said.

"For me, this vote comes down to ensuring employees at Rockstar get honesty and openness surrounding the decisions that affect them. When management choices are kept hidden, we can't properly address issues like the gender pay gap, the uneven and ever-changing policies on overtime pay, or the concerns many co-workers hold around job security post-release. This is our moment to secure a window onto the decisions that shape our lives, and a seat at the table to improve them. I'm immensely proud of the games Rockstar gives its fans—I want to be equally proud of the voice Rockstar gives its staff."

We're proud to share that in a few weeks' time, Rockstar staff will get to have their own say over union recognition. From pay and pensions to parental leave and overtime, this recognition agreement is a chance for workers to be involved in the decisions that shape their lives.

— @rsgworkersunion.bsky.social (@rsgworkersunion.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-10-27T22:22:57.195Z

"For anyone who cares about the games industry or the people who keep it running, this vote is just as historic as the game release. But for workers at Rockstar, it is so much more personal: it is fundamentally a choice about whether you get to have a say in how your day-to-day life is organised," IWGB Union president Alex Marshall added.

The vote to recognize the union will run November 12-26, the week leading up, and then the week after, GTA 6's November 19 launch on consoles. Rockstar hasn't commented on the looming vote, but Rockstar head of publishing Jennifer Kolbe indicated in Bloomberg's recent look at the making of GTA that the studio won't fight it: "We go where the team goes. So if they want a union, they will have a union."

We are just three weeks out from the release of Grand Theft Auto 6, which you can tell because it has cleared the release calendar around it like the Chicxulub crater. Ahead of the big day, our friends at Edge magazine visited Rockstar's Edinburgh development HQ to chat with the studio's leaders and put their eyes on GTA 6 in action. That's right folks, it's officially happening. This thing is officially almost a videogame you can play.

The result? The 16-page cover story coming in Edge #430, on sale October 29. They've really been cooking over there, bringing us a bunch of exclusive new imagery, interviews with Rockstar head honchos, and a special gatefold cover with artwork of Jason and Lucia, about whom I already have very strong feelings.

If you're in the UK, you're in luck, because you can pick up the GTA 6 special edition free, plus 13 issues of Edge at 38% off the price you'd pay at the newsstand if you subscribe at this link.

Outside the UK? Don't fret, because new subs will get a free digital edition of the GTA 6 special issue if you subscribe here.

And wherever you are, the full 16-page feature will drop here for everyone to read for free on October 29, coinciding with the release of the magazine.

It's lavish, lovely, and in-depth—so all very Edge, and if you're one of the approximately 8 billion people who are desperate to know more about the most-anticipated game in Rockstar's history (or, well, just history in general, probably), you're gonna want to feast your eyes on it.

Now this is a marketing campaign I can get behind: It looks very much like Rockstar is teaming up with Florida-based brewery Tripping Animals Brewing to bring a trio of Grand Theft Auto 6-themed beers into the real world. That's right—Pißwasser is finally real.

The discovery was made by Grand Theft Auto site GTAVice.net, which found labels for Pißwasser, Patriot, and No Mames Vice City—a re-branding of Tripping Animals' No Mames Lager—in the US Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau database.

Sure enough, they're in there, although I had to use Hopgrail to dig up the labels: The No Mames Vice City label was approved on October 9, while the Pißwasser and Patriot labels followed on October 15.

So what's in the cans?

NO MAMES VICE CITY

6% ABV American lager

This looks to be a re-brand of Tripping Animals' No Mames beer, so here's what the brewery's website has to say about it: "Bright gold and effortlessly crisp, No Mames blends flaked corn and traditional malts for a smooth, dry lager with subtle floral hops and a hint of sweetness. Clean, crushable, and brewed for easy drinking, anytime."

Patriot and Pißwasser are not yet on the Tripping Animals site, so for those we will go with what we can pull from the TTB database, which frankly isn't much:

PATRIOT BEER

4.2% ABV American lager

A very American lager, the GTA Fandom Wiki says Patriot Beer is possibly inspired by Sam Adams, although it notes that the color scheme of the label is more akin to PBR. Personally I think it's more likely a prescient take on Real American Beer, which is basically a GTA-style parody beer, except it's real. Real American.

PIßWASSER

4.2% ABV lager

The king of GTA beers, Pißwasser is of course a pilsner, it says so right on the label. Now, your local beer nerd is probably leaning forward in his chair to tell you that pilsner is a type of lager, but my local beer nerd, who is me, says that yes, that is technically correct, but it's important to be specific about these things. Otherwise you get people telling you that Rolling Rock and Warsteiner are basically the same, and next thing you know you're in a fistfight with Bill from your grade 10 geography class and then somebody calls the cops and you end up running through people's back yards and tripping over shit and ripping your pants, and nobody gets any beer. Who needs that kind of chaos?

Anyway, none of these brews are confirmed as actually happening at this point, although given their appearances in the TTB database, not to mention Rockstar's largesse with its rental of basically the entire state of Florida to promote GTA 6, it's all but certainly real. It's also an obvious fit, particularly given the meta-popularity of GTA's in-game beer brands.

The bigger question for me is, how do I get some? Promo beers tend not to be great, but No Mames holds a very respectable 85 rating on Beeradvocate, and Tripping Animals seems quite well regarded overall. And let's not forget the all-important bottom line here: it's beer.

Sadly for me (and anyone else not living in Florida who'd like to score a few cans) Tripping Animals distribution appears quite limited: The brewery's website indicates its beers are only available in and around—you guessed it—Miami. Ah well.

Grand Theft Auto 6 is set to launch on consoles on November 19. I would expect the GTA beers to show up by then too.

Saint Moses the Black, who converted from a life of crime to one of ascetic anchoritism, once told his brothers that if they had aught to learn they need only sit in their cells: "Your cell will teach you everything." I am following his example. I am trading in my life of crime for one of contemplation. I am returning to my cell.

What I mean is, Los Santos Customs has to briefly go on hiatus but will return in the near future. Anyway, today I was an Uber driver with a gun.

I installed Goober & Goober Eats – Realistic Rideshare & Food Delivery, which introduces the gig economy to the hot streets of Los Santos. The premise is simple: you're an Uber guy now. You can bring up your phone (not the regular phone you use in regular GTA 5, but an entirely new, work phone that the mod summons into being and binds to a different key). Then you mark your labour as commoditisable and off you go.

It's all quite well-ordered. A helpful line on your map guides you to your pickup, then a second takes you to your client. Of course, as we all know, I can only obtain a car by teleporting into the nearest one, which was a minor issue, but for the most part I had no problems picking up my order.

Delivering it was another matter. My destination was in San Andreas' far north, easily a couple minutes' drive away (and that's if you manage to not get shot to death, caught in a gang war, or flattened by a passing flying truck). I teleport every 50 seconds to random places on the map.

I gave it the old college try, though, putting pedal to the metal in an attempt to deliver a burrito at physics-defying speed. It was only when I was teleported into immovability between two pylons in a cable car station that I decided it simply wasn't gonna happen. My paralysis did at least give me time to appreciate my notifications, which told me "The Nihilist Sailors have entered Los Santos". Indeed.

I quickly manually teleported to my destination and dropped off the order. I made like $100 or something. Then, just as quickly, I was whisked to the airport, where a group of furries shot my bodyguard to death.

I'll be honest, I wasn't sure if today's mod counted. A peek behind the curtain: sometimes I select a mod to try for this feature and it doesn't work. Just plumb does not function. In those cases, I discard it and find another one. It's hard to write something about nothing.

Today's mod did not work. Mostly. I installed WeedFarm (based on PlantationV), which should, in theory, let you "Grow, harvest, and sell weed in GTA 5 with a full-featured farming system."

It does not do this. The farms? Present. The dealer you sell to? Also there. The various individual particulars of the mod, in general, are all correct. And yet try as I might, I cannot harvest a single paltry bud.

I believe this is due to golf and also a jetpack. You see, the controls from WeedFarm (based on PlantationV) are apparently unalterable. Although it comes with an .ini file—which with other mods will often let you rebind keys—it has no obvious means of changing its controls. Bringing up its uber-menu is bound to F3. Also bound to F3: my street golfing mod and jetpack.

This is an issue, as every time I attempt to bring up WeedFarm (based on PlantationV)'s master menu, I start golfing and the game asks if I want to equip a jetpack. I don't! I want to farm weed! I want to farm weed but I am compelled to golf!

It's an awkward situation. I did try visiting the dealer—perhaps he'd let me sidle into the mod somehow—but no luck there either. At one point, I punched his front door in frustration, at which point I learnt all my melee attacks detonate on impact now, and I don't know why.

World War 2 Canadian air force pilot John Gillespie Magee Jr once wrote, in his poem High Flight:

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
of sun-split clouds,—and done a hundred things

He was talking about Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, his favourite game and an icon of the PS2 generation of consoles. In San Andreas, tucked away in the Verdant Meadows Airstrip, the player could locate a jetpack, and tumble through the skies of Las Venturas like a glorious errant star. GTA 5? No jetpack. This is why it's an inferior game.

Until now. I have installed Aerowing - Wearable Jet Pack & Weapon System. Or, well, I installed it, tried to launch the game, crashed my PC, rebooted, tried to launch the game, crashed the game, rebooted, then launched the game.

It's a strangely lavish mod, I'll give it that. You don't just tap F and sort of limply ascend, which is mostly how it went in San Andreas. No, you get a whole animation, the camera circles your guy as he does a possibly-copyrighted Iron Man pose and launches himself skywards.

Then off you go, a speedometer in the corner measuring your courage as you glide along, launching one of three weapons: SMG, plasma, and "tube," which I'm pretty sure is just SMG again.

It's a rollocking good time, and it'll be even better once I find a way to proc it that doesn't also proc my street golfing mod. Until then, with silent lifting mind I'll tread the high untrespassed sanctity of space, put out my hand, and touch the face of God.

We won't get to play Grand Theft Auto 6 when it launches for consoles on November 19, but they can't stop us from watching the Grand Theft Auto 6 launch trailer! So, let's do that.

It's definitely a trailer for a GTA game, but this one feels a bit more restrained to me than what we've seen in the past—or maybe more focused is a better way to put it, with a greater emphasis on character and narrative than the chaos of the previous games, or even the previous GTA 6 trailers. There's definitely a cinematic flair to it—makes me feel like I'm settling in for the season-ending two-parter of a Michael Mann series from a decade or so ago.

So what's cooking in our newest trip to Leonida?

"Jason and Lucia have always known the deck is stacked against them. 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."

The musical choice is interesting: Rather than the licensed music of the first two trailers (Tom Petty's Love is a Long Road in trailer one, The Pointer Sisters doing Hot Together in trailer two), this tune is a new track from Justice, an electronic duo who composed the GTA 6 score. If you dig it, here's the full version—it's pretty good!

We still don't have a release date, or even an official announcement, for the PC version of GTA 6, although there's no doubt one is coming—it always happens, sooner or later. A recently floated rumor said it'll be out sometime in early 2027, just a few months after the console debut, but I'm not buying it.

It's a classic move: A villain, or sometimes a hero, inserts himself into a seemingly inescapable situation. Danger everywhere—no way out! But just as the good guys (or bad guys) are about to pounce, he holds up the pin he's pulled from the grenade under his coat, forcing everyone to back off! Escape is at hand!

That seems to be the strategy now adopted by notorious Grand Theft Auto 6 leaker Cyberleek, and by "seems to be," I mean they stated it outright. In a message posted to their now-defunct website but preserved by GTA VI News on X, Cyberleek committed to not releasing anything more about GTA 6—including its ending, which at this point remains unknown—as long as Take-Two lets everything slide.

"CL has the ending. It was considered," the message states. "It would punish Take-Two greatly—but ruin the experience for the gamers, who did nothing wrong. Take-Two would show CL no mercy—why should CL show any to them? Still: Take-Two was punished enough.

"The ending stays unpublished. Proof: the latest leek—clips from the final missions, out of context, revealing nothing. The dead man's switch is active—story spoilers only. Left alone, it never fires. Whoever removes CL chooses it."

A dead man's switch, generally speaking, is a switch built to be triggered if its operator is incapacitated. Miles Dyson, for instance, blew up Cyberdyne Systems with an improvised dead man's switch in Terminator 2 (not that it did much good) and Roger Murtaugh did the literal grenade-pin thing in Lethal Weapon while trying to save his daughter from Shadow Company goons. There are variants—in Point Break, for instance, Rosie was ordered to kill Johnny Utah's girlfriend if Bodhi didn't check in by 3, to ensure Johnny's participation in a bank robbery.

My own personal favorite dead man's switch comes from Hawk the Slayer:

That particular variation on the theme notwithstanding, dead man's switches are meant as last-ditch failsafes: If something bad happens to me, something much worse will happen to you.

It makes me wonder if Cyberleek's sudden withdrawal and proposed détente with Take-Two means that they're starting to feel the heat. Take-Two takes this sort of thing seriously as a matter of course, and you can bet it's going to go extra-hardass on anyone who messes with its biggest game ever, which GTA 6 unquestionably is. I have no doubt that life for Cyberleek will become very unpleasant, very quickly, if and when they're ever caught.

The problem Cyberleek faces, of course, is that their leverage—assuming it's real in the first place—has a very short shelf life. In six weeks at most, the GTA 6 ending will be out there, at which point there will be no shot left to shoot.

At best, then, this threat grants Cyberleek an extra month to find a deeper hole to hide in. And even that is wildly optimistic: Take-Two might be operating quietly, but I have no doubt that it's also operating furiously, and that there's not much of a mood to play 'I won't if you won't' games.

Cyberleek also defended their cryptocurrency ask, saying it "was always a donation, never an investment," and denying that a rugpull happened; they also said they wouldn't release the full build of GTA 6, with "full story mode, played to the end," because their memecoin market cap didn't hit $30 million.

Following my experience being abducted by a small yellow taxi, something has become clear to me: I need a means to escape. The trauma of my kidnapping experience cannot be repeated. I have installed Eject for Grand Theft Auto 5, a mod that lets you punch out of vehicles at a moment's notice.

"A simple little fun script that allows you to eject from vehicles and parachute down," reads the mod's description—a claim which is 50% true. You can, indeed, eject from vehicles at the push of a button, but the parachuting down part is more of a screaming plummet. We make do.

The mod's defaults are relatively anaemic. Its "Force" setting sits at a measly 150. 150 what? No idea, but that's a small number, so I immediately increased it to 10,000. I also tried increasing it to 100,000, which seemed to crash the game on launch.

And then, off I went, sailing through the streets of Los Santos in my shiny car in the night (sometimes in the day) and whacking the eject key to hop out. The mod has not quite mastered preservation of momentum, so my attempts to, for instance, leap across an overpass and land safely back in my car, met mostly with failure. And by mostly I mean entirely.

Still, it did let me do this, so I'm calling it a mixed success.

A GamesBeat report claims that Grand Theft Auto 6—which still hasn't been announced for PC—will launch for PC sometime within the first three months of 2027. If correct, that means the game will drop, at most, just four months after its initial release on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S consoles.

GamesBeat cites "four industry sources familiar with the studio's plans" in its report, all of whom requested anonymity. Rockstar has not yet commented on the claim.

It's a surprising claim. Earlier this year, we predicted that GTA 6 won't likely appear on PC before November 2027, mainly because that's just how Rockstar rolls. We always have to wait.

The Unfortunate Timeline

• Grand Theft Auto 3: 7 months between console and PC release
• Vice City: 7 months
• San Andreas: 8 months
• Bully: 2 years
• GTA 4: 7 months
• Red Dead Redemption: 14 years, 5 months
• GTA 5: 1 year, 6 months
• RDR2: 1 year

Compared to that, a four month break between the console and PC releases, and possibly less, seems downright snappy, especially given how the gaps between GTA games themselves have grown over the decades.

Courtesy of Wikipedia:

Not only would a Q1 release of GTA 6 on PC be an unusually brief break, it also puts the game in the midst of the post-holiday hangover, when we're all doing our best to nurse our bruised and battered bank balances back to health.

And that, I think, would feel especially egregious in the immediate aftermath of this year's holiday season, which for gamers will be driven by the release of GTA 6 on consoles. Rockstar loves the double dip, but punching the button again so soon after the console release would surely be viewed dimly by a not-insignificant number of people who would prefer the flexibility and power of the PC, but really don't want to wait for it.

Of course, if Rockstar or Take-Two confirms the GTA 6 PC release date really is that close—Take-Two's next quarterly financial report takes place on November 9, which might be a time for such a thing—some no doubt would wait for it, cannibalizing launch sales to some extent.

There's no shortage of people on social media saying they will indeed wait to buy GTA 6 if the PC version is indeed coming that quickly. That feeling may be even more widespread than it appears, given how much GTA 6 costs: At $100 for the premium edition and all the exclusive content it contains, you can understand why people might be more reticent about buying it multiple times than they were for earlier games in the series.

How about you?

Anything's possible, of course, and I would never presume to have a better understanding of these things than Strauss Zelnick and the rest of the GTA brain trust. But I also wouldn't bet on it—and for now I'm definitely taking all of this with a grain of salt. I've also reached out to Rockstar to ask about it, and will update if anyone answers.

What's the greatest moment in a videogame? Finding the truth of what happened at Red Mountain in Morrowind? Catching every pokémon in Pokémon? Something inscrutable in Final Fantasy 14?

All excellent answers. All wrong. The greatest moment in videogames is repeatedly dropping shipping crates on Quiet's head in Metal Gear Solid 5 until she decides to become your comrade for life.

Naturally, I had to bring this experience to Grand Theft Auto 5, and I did it using Just Cause 3 Rebel Drops [.NET], which allows you to summon Tardis-like containers filled with goodies at any location in Los Santos. Tap the L key, choose from your list of summonables. Bish bash bosh, done.

Of course, what you can summon is guns (I have them all) and vehicles (they speed off over the horizon as soon as they appear), so mostly what I have been using the technology for is to attempt to drop crates on my bodyguard. It's tougher than it might sound: the crates land haphazardly, without much rhyme or reason, and my bodyguard is a wily fella—quick on his feet.

Still, it is great fun to spawn a jumbo jet in the middle of an intersection and watch the world have to try to encompass this new and undesired aspect of its reality. Even the jet isn't into it; as soon as it appears, its wheels fly off like a buck shedding its antlers. It's as if the game knows reality has departed from an acceptable baseline and it's trying, as best it can, to return to it. It fails, but you have to respect the attempt.

Meanwhile, in the background, the furry gang continues to wage war on the vikings.

I have never seen an episode of Rick and Morty in my life. Here is what I know about it: there is a man who is a scientist, a boy, they sometimes play that one Blonde Redhead song, and the whole thing evinces very strong reactions in people—Sichuan sauce and whatnot.

Obviously, my understanding leaves something to be desired. I set out to educate myself. I installed Rick, Two Crows, and Morty for Grand Theft Auto 5. At the tap of a button, all the bounty of the TV show becomes available to you: a boy of adjustable size, guns that are lasers and light rings, a car that is a flying saucer, and poké balls that generate black holes (distinct from the poké balls that are poké balls, which are also installed in here somewhere).

It's all quite fun. Smack F7 and Trevor becomes Rick (or perhaps Morty), bedecked in a labcoat and a filthy t-shirt. The ambient chaos of Los Santos proceeds around him: natural disasters, vanished exterior cells, flying cars.

The world has found a rhythm now, I think; it proceeds without me. As I toss black hole poké balls at people and shoot them with lasers, a notification pops up from some other mod and tells me "The American People have been wiped out." I see.

I cannot for the life of me work out how to actually pilot Morty's (or perhaps Rick's) flying saucer, though. I can just make it rise and fall. Occasionally it rotates in the air. No matter, as I am quickly teleported to a drinking hole in northern, rural San Andreas. I throw a poké ball behind the bar and walk out.

Outside, a tornado is consuming an entire battalion of furries. My bodyguard, irresistibly attracted to the black hole making a mess inside the bar, is stuck to an external wall like iron filings to a hidden magnet. He screams. I know how he feels.

Cyberleek has been uploading footage of Grand Theft Auto 6 since August, most recently a 25-minute video featuring co-protagonist Jason totally nude. Given that GTA 6's November 19 release is just over a month away, on console at least, it seems natural that interest in these kinds of leaks would wane. Cyberleek has found a new way of generating hype: promising to leak a build of the game if their memecoin's marketcap goes up another $26 million or so.

"Here's the deal, nice and clean. CYBERLEEK hits 30 million marketcap, the build goes out – full story mode, played to the end, credits and all. Don't believe it has full story mode? Ask for what you want to see, and it gets provided. Take-Two gets one way out: physical disks and a public apology. They can take it at any moment. Or they can gamble that CL is bluffing. Everyone knows which one they'll pick."

The other half of the deal suggests that publisher Take-Two Interactive could prevent this by releasing GTA 6 physically and apologizing, presumably for not releasing it on discs in the first place. Which will never happen, but does fit with Cyberleek's previous history of cosplay Robin Hood consumer rights complaints.

We know that Cyberleek has access to a playable build since one of the previous leaks ended with the word LEEK being machinegunned into a wall to prove the point. But an early build of GTA 6 seems like the worst possible way to play it on PC, though after the Xbox streaming thing turned out to be a bust, maybe there are people who don't want to wait?

Personally I'm looking forward to a slow November where I might actually get a chance to catch up on this year's other releases, like The Blood of Dawnwalker and that Hellraiser game that just came out.

I really don't know how to build up to this one. Grand Theft Auto 5 is Doom now, okay? I put in a mod that imports DOOM2.wad into GTA 5 and now that's what the game is. There are demons. The game is first person. I have a minigun and a BFG. That's the truth of the matter and we're all just going to have to find some way to live with it.

The mod is Doom 2 in GTA 5 Hell On Earth (D2IGTA5HOE), and it does all those things I said. Hit F9 and the game you are playing shifts from GTA 5—usually a third-person open-world acting game—to Doom 2, an FPS from 1994. You need to provide your own .wad—everybody be cool. No one call the cops.

The world remains, mind you. You don't warp to Doom 2's levels. Instead, you roam Los Santos with an arsenal of weapons from id's seminal shooter (gross). You can take on taxis with your super shotgun, fight cops with a plasma cannon. It's two great tastes that taste incomprehensible together. Hit F10 and the game goes into Hell On Earth mode—authentic Doom 2 enemies start manifesting in the street.

One issue, of course, is that F10 is also my button for activating flossing and Superman mode, so I can't play Doom 2 GTA 5 Edition without a full quarter of my screen being taken up by a (still utterly Arabic) flossing UI screen and various Kryptonian powers sometimes activating. One of those is super speed when I sprint, though, which is at least appropriate for Doom Guy.

Anyway, here's a gif of me fighting demons and armed furries at an airport with Doom 2 weapons while a tornado closes in.

Cyberleek, the anonymous someone who's been sharing clips apparently taken from a Grand Theft Auto 6 development build, has returned after a hiatus with a new, 25-minute-long video that's circulating in places like the r/GamingLeaksAndRumours subreddit and social media.

The most notable thing about the clip—or most noticeable, at least—is that protagonist Jason spends much of it naked. His genitals are fully modelled, physics and all, which isn't too surprising given we previously saw fully nude NPCs in another of Cyberleek's GTA 6 clips.

It remains unknown whether players will be able to walk around in the buff in the retail game, as Cyberleek presumably has access to developer tools. A floating tank seen partway through the clip makes it apparent that at least some console command shenanigans are at play. It's also notable that NPCs do not react to Jason's nakedness, and that the video shows first-person driving, a feature GTA 6 was previously reported not to include.

IGN did see a naked Jason during a cutscene in an official preview of GTA 6, but "thanks to some carefully positioned camera angles, his modesty remained entirely intact." So we just don't know, although it wouldn't be the first time a GTA game included full frontal male nudity of a prominent character, which occurred in GTA 4's The Lost and Damned DLC.

GTA 6 co-protagonist Lucia also appears topless in the Cyberleek clip, facing away from the camera and wearing a thong. Whether the underwear was the leaker's choice, or if GTA 6 unevenly enforces modesty, is also unknown.

A new era of videogame dong?

Whatever level of nudity GTA 6 ultimately does or doesn't allow—and once it's on PC, you can be sure that modders will make sure nothing is disallowed—it's a bit surreal to see how not-a-big-deal it all is after once experiencing Fox News hosts being scandalized by alien boobies in Mass Effect.

I want to say that things sure have changed since GTA's infamous Hot Coffee 'sex minigame' incident, but have they? We're certainly far from a golden age of people being chill about things; you can't throw a stone on the internet without hitting some new sect shouting about its brand of traditional values (and the dietary supplements that complement it).

And yet it didn't seem like an especially big deal to conservative critics when Baldur's Gate 3 casually gave its characters detailed nude bodies and underwear lore. If it was, I didn't see it—perhaps it's just harder to stand out in today's noise bath of discourse.

Probably more relevant is that games just got more mainstream and have an older audience on average, and so they now have an easier time getting away with all the things Hollywood does.

As Andy observed recently after reaching out to infamous GTA critic Jack Thompson: "...Grand Theft Auto won. Netflix airs its special, the NBA wears its uniform, Walmart sells it, middle-aged cops and politicos buy it, and the state of Florida wraps itself in it."

Oh, and about Cyberleek: They're back to claiming they've got a "project" underway that you should help fund. I don't recommend that. Take-Two and Rockstar continue to look for the culprit, but we haven't heard any new developments on that recently.

Let's get one thing out of the way: I think we, as a society, as a people, are generally fine with furries at this point. The phenomenon of ragging on furry subculture has been, gladly, consigned to the dustbin of history. It's a 2010 disease from which we have convalesced. Let nothing I write from here on be taken as a slight against them.

That being said, it is very funny to give someone in a fursuit a gun and a military objective.

I have installed, well, two mods actually. The first, preliminary mod is Gang and Turf Mod, which adds a sort of gang war system in the vein of GTA: San Andreas. Different factions will wage war over areas of Los Santos, from the heart of downtown up to the podunk rural hamlets in the north.

Then I installed the main course: Furry Gang for Gang and Turf Mod, which festoons the city streets with murderers in wolf outfits who are here to take their corners with blood and gunpowder. There are other gangs—gangs installed by default with the base mod—but I honestly didn't pay much attention to them. Some of them were in suits? They truly all got steamrolled by the marauding bands of fursuited raiders.

Like an embedded reporter in a war, I followed one band of armed furries into battle. Dodging cars, they dispatched most of their foes pretty quickly, but then a tornado manifested and started whipping them into the sky. At one point, I punched one of them, mostly out of overstimulation. Then I got eaten by the tornado too. Then I teleported somewhere else. Nearby, on a ridge, was a single furry in a purple suit, immobile and gazing, planning some future conquest.

All of these things happened.

It's hard to imagine now, but a little over 20 years ago the gaming world was absolutely scandalized by Hot Coffee, a mod to activate abandoned code in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas that enabled CJ to have interactive sex with his girlfriend.

The game was re-rated as "Adults Only" by the ESRB in 2005, forcing it off retail shelves—this was a time when retail shelf space mattered—and it was banned outright in Australia. Even the US Federal Trade Commission got involved, complaining that Rockstar and Take-Two Interactive "did not tell consumers that the game discs contained potentially viewable nude female characters and a potentially playable sex mini-game."

22 years later, with Grand Theft Auto 6 on the verge of console release, it all seems rather quaint. From the ESRB's newly posted rating, here's what we've got to look forward to in GTA 6:

• Blood and Gore
• Intense Violence
• Mature Humor
• Nudity
• Strong Language
• Strong Sexual Content
• Use of Drugs and Alcohol

All of which adds up to an M rating—that is, "generally suitable for ages 17 and up." PEGI, the European game rating agency, came down a little harder, rating it 18+ in a since-deleted listing that also noted the presence of "detailed decapitation" and "frequent and prominent" drug use.

How did we get from there to here? Well, we grew up—literally. The Entertainment Software Association said in 2025 that the average gamer in the US is 36 years old and has been playing for 18 years: That's police, politicians, and parents who all came up playing games (including GTA) and view them as no more remarkable than a spicy episode of Miami Vice.

The societal collapse that some alarmists anticipated, meanwhile, failed to materialize—well, it failed to materialize as a result of games, anyway. But a sudden uptick in violent crime and killings, sparked by "murder trainers" like GTA, Call of Duty, and Halo? It never happened. If anything, we've seen the opposite: As gaming has become increasingly mainstream, and the number of gamers has gone up, violent crime has seen a decline over the last two decades.

You could argue, I suppose, that the mainstreaming of Grand Theft Auto represents social desensitization—a loosening of the standards and decorum that made certain kinds of mature content much more taboo. But after years spent bearing witness to the moralizing hand-wringing that gave us the Satanic Panic, the Parents Music Resource Center, the bloody-minded determination to keep the Comics Code Authority alive despite its complete irrelevance, and of course the creation of the ESRB, I'm more inclined to think that what we're really doing is slowly figuring out what actually matters, and acting accordingly.

Plus ça change...

An infamous voice of criticism from this distant generation has not softened his position, however. With GTA now a mass-market entertainment franchise, no more frightening than a typical Marvel movie, I reached out to former attorney Jack Thompson; 20 years ago he was notorious among gamers for his determined, often theatrical efforts to link violent videogames to real-world violence and have them stringently regulated as a result, and I was curious how he felt about Florida's embrace of the GTA marketing machine, and the changed world we live in.

Thompson was such a high-profile presence on the videogame scene of the late 1990s and early 2000s that he was portrayed by Bill Paxton in The Gamechangers, a BBC Two docudrama about his long-running feud with Rockstar co-founder Sam Houser.

Thompson, who lives in Florida, is clearly unhappy with various GTA 6 promotional partnerships being enacted across the state. "If you don't understand that government promotion of commercial interests is fascism then we have very little to talk about," Thompson told me. "Ask the County Sheriff what she thinks about this unholy corporatist alliance."

I had in fact asked the sheriff, and the sheriff's department told me that it is not concerned by "promotional decisions [made] by private businesses or organizations." I relayed this to Thompson, who accused me of drinking the "fascist Kool-Aid," likened me to Joseph Goebbels, and told me to stop bothering him. He elaborated on that, very slightly, in a subsequent email: "The problem is your work proves you are not an honest journalist."

I feel a bit bad about that. I thought that with nearly 20 years of water under the bridge, Thompson may have softened, or at least reached a place where he could reflect soberly on the way the world has changed. That clearly hasn't happened.

Maybe that's understandable, because—and this isn't meant to be triumphal, I'm not spiking the ball, it's simple fact—after a life and career spent warring against it, Grand Theft Auto won. Netflix airs its special, the NBA wears its uniform, Walmart sells it, middle-aged cops and politicos buy it, and the state of Florida wraps itself in it. And here we are—we're fine. To me, that's a good outcome, but to someone who bet everything on the irresistibly corrosive impact of GTA? The absence of chaos and catastrophe—that everything is fine, at least in the sense that violent videogames didn't herald the end times—might just be a little disappointing.

The diary of my time with Grand Theft Auto 5 so far consists, in the main, of struggles with cars. The perfidious automobile, the horseless carriage, has run rampant in Los Santos for weeks now, causing all manner of chaos as I attempt to live my life and do backflips and what-have-you.

Time to put them in their place. To do so, I have utilised Toy Cars – Make any car tiny, whose nature is right there in the name. The pitch is that you can transform any car you drive into its Micro Machines equivalent, shrinking them down to fit in a child's hand, keeping "your original vehicle visible, sounding, and behaving like itself while using a hidden RC-sized chassis underneath to provide miniature collision, suspension, and road physics."

This is not quite how it goes for me.

As ever, this is not the mod's fault. It seems to work well. After teleporting my way into a car (they are mostly too airborne to hijack normally), I drive around a bit and tap F7—the magic car-shrinking key. This is where it all goes to pot, you see.

The shrinking bit? Works great. My car—a taxi—instantly transmogrifies, becoming a Lilliputian replica of itself. Then it all goes off the rails. Somehow, for reasons that will forever be beyond me, I think the game stops registering the car as having a driver. If it's not a player-character vehicle, it suddenly becomes subject to the laws (or lack of laws) that govern every other car in the game: it careens off like a scared horse, bouncing off walls, ducking under low arches.

It is entirely beyond my control and I cannot get out. If I hit F—the traditional button for exiting a car—a notification pops up that there are no deer nearby. This is saddening news but not immediately relevant to my being taken hostage by a car.

Fortunately, I can return the car back to scale with another tap of the F7 key, but I am somewhat sad. For a moment there, I thought I could live the Borrower life I always dreamt of. Maybe some other time.

We still don't have a PC launch date for Grand Theft Auto 6, or even official confirmation that it's ever going to come our way, even though we all know it is. But for one brief shining moment, fans on PC had hope that maybe they'd be able to backdoor their way into the cool kids club—that despite the absence of a PC version, they might be able to play it on November 19 anyway, without having to shell out for a new game console.

Alas, the word has come down from on high, and that word is: "No."

The ball got rolling when The Verge reported on October 6 that Xbox had secured the exclusive right to deliver GTA 6 via streaming platforms—that is, Xbox Cloud Gaming. And that would presumably make the game playable on PC, as Xbox Cloud Gaming is accessible through any PC rocking Windows 10 version 20H2 or later.

You'd almost certainly have to sign up for Game Pass Ultimate to access it, and you'd need a better internet connection than mine to make it work, but even so: Grand Theft Auto 6, on PC, on launch day. Holy guacamole!

Alas, it is now time to lock eyes with the metaphorical skull in your hand and ponder that dream, that faraway hope, and all that has brought them low—which in this case is Xbox chief strategy officer Matthew Ball, who delivered the bad news on X.

"While the excitement for GTA 6 and Xbox is great to see, it has also led to some misreporting," Ball wrote. "We are looking forward to launching GTA 6 on Xbox November 19, though the game will not be streaming exclusively or to PC."

That's some real infinite jest, alright! Which I think is applicable to the whole situation: I actually buy the argument that it's better to develop a game of this scale within the constraints of consoles and then expand to the greater (and more unpredictable) power of PC later, and I have no doubt that Rockstar and Take-Two also enjoy the tighter constraints on the user end of things too: You're not going to find shenanigans like Joshua Wolens' effort to mod GTA 5 into GTA 6 in the worst way possible on a PlayStation 5, after all.

But I also think PCG's Ted Litchfield hit the nail on the head with his analysis: "Rockstar banks on a second revenue bump from its games' PC releases, a little afterburner of profit that includes no shortage of PC-favoring players who buy the game twice." There really is no dip like the double dip.

Anyway, some of the responses to Ball's message complain that the message is vague or ambiguous, although I'm not sure how: There are questions, sure, most obviously how Xbox will stream GTA 6 without making it accessible to PCs that can normally access streamed Xbox games. It's a fair point, and I suppose if one has an inflated sense of optimism and squints at the statement just right, a faint glimmer of that hope might remain. But to me, 'will not be streaming to PC' seems pretty cut-and-dried: Our long, wintry wait will continue.

A shift in the fabric of reality: I launch Grand Theft Auto 5 and, following the now-customary hitch-and-stutter loading screen that can last anywhere from 10 seconds to five minutes, Franklin spawns into his familiar void apartment. Within seconds, he begins plummeting, screaming.

All of this is fine and normal.

But something new: Franklin carries a duffel bag with him into the abyss now, and I am unsure as to why. My guess is that it is a byproduct of my newly installed mod, ScamV, which "turns Los Santos into your digital playground." Let the possibilities unfurl ahead of you—"Take on the role of a cyber-criminal, exploit vulnerabilities, use cloned cards, and build your underground fortune."

Mostly, though, it has given me a bag. Don't get me wrong, I am sure that all of these things would be present in a regular installation of ScamV, but unfortunately ScamV in my world is forced to compete with an armageddon of other mods: the flying cars, new interiors, deleted exteriors, credit ratings and so on.

So mostly it is a bag. But wait, there is also this—the possibility of walking into a bank, any bank, and interacting with the teller by paying in fake cheques. "You don't have any fake cheques," the game tells me when I attempt this. It does not tell me where or how to obtain them. Kafka-esque. Five stars.

THEN:

NOW:

WHAT?

Vice City and Leonida, the fictional city and state that serve as the setting for Grand Theft Auto 6, are largely based on Miami and the state of Florida, and Rockstar and publisher Take-Two Interactive are moving heavy and hard to leverage that real-life inspiration to promote GTA 6 as its console release gets closer.

The sheriff made no bones about her position on the matter when the proposed partnership came to light in September, however, characterizing the game as exactly the sort of thing Miami-Dade shouldn't associate with.

"Grand Theft Auto is a videogame franchise built around criminal activity," Cordero-Stutz said at the time. "Its fictional world includes murder, robbery, drug trafficking, carjacking, violence against law enforcement, and other conduct that the men and women of the Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Office work every single day to prevent."

It was a hard line in the sand, but it didn't add up to much. Despite some opposition from local positions, much of it predicated on similar law-and-order concerns, those PR campaigns have moved ahead. The City of Miami Beach voted in September to approve a 'discreet' campaign, for instance, while the Kaseya Center, a downtown arena in Miami that serves as home of the NBA's Miami Heat, took a rather less subtle approach, erecting a massive "Welcome to Vice City" sign on its roof that can be seen by travellers flying into Miami International Airport.

The Kaseya Center campaign became even more prominent in October when the Heat, one of the NBA's highest-profile teams, became directly involved via the Night in Vice City campaign, a one-night-only promotion that will see both the arena and the team rebranded in Vice City livery. It is, as former US President Joe Biden once said, "a big fuckin' deal."

(It also revealed that our UK team does not know ball, but that's a whole different kind of problem.)

I thought the sheriff might take issue with such a high-profile embrace of a videogame she had so wholeheartedly decried just a month ago, Despite her previously-expressed opposition, though, she seemingly has no issue with the Heat hopping on board.

"Sheriff Cordero-Stutz’s comments focused on the proposed use of publicly owned facilities and infrastructure, including public transportation, transit stations, and Miami International Airport, to promote Grand Theft Auto 6," a sheriff's department representative told PC Gamer. "Her concerns addressed the message conveyed through the use of these public assets. Those comments were not directed at promotional decisions by private businesses or organizations."

I'm not sure how much of a difference the public/private thing makes in a practical sense—public or private, 'Miami is becoming Vice City' is the very high-profile crux of the campaign—but in spite of the many years passed since the Hot Coffee scandal, it's a needle that some are still trying to thread. The promo campaign approved by Miami Beach, for instance, will be managed by Boucher Brothers, a "hospitality management" company in Florida: Advertising materials will appear on things like Boucher Brothers chairs and umbrellas, rather than on city property.

Those chairs and umbrellas may appear on city property, which makes me think that trying to put some sort of minimum safe distance between them and the responsibilities of civic leadership might be largely moot.

On the other hand, the outright alarmism of days past has clearly receded. The glitzy rebranding of Miami and other parts of Florida speaks for itself, and Cordero-Stutz's admonishment notwithstanding, police don't seem too worried that pretending to be Vice City is going to turn Miami into actual Vice City: During the Miami Beach debates, for instance, one city commissioner said an officer he spoke to laughed off concerns about the impact of the game and promotional campaign on the city. Crass commercialism isn't really my bag but as someone who was around for the entire Jack Thompson era, I have to admit that this is kind of nice to see.

La Rochefoucauld once wrote, "What grace is to the body, good sense is to the mind." He wrote this some time before the release of Grand Theft Auto 5, and was likely referring to Mirror's Edge instead.

Regardless, it holds true today. And you know what? Whatever their qualities, the gentlemen of GTA 5 simply don't have much grace to them. They are lumpy, ambling figures, and move like young children unused to their bulk. I have rectified this using Back Flip Mod—a mod for back flip. "Simple backflip for Single Player," it says, with an alarmingly cavalier attitude to capitalisation and style-guide coherence.

But it's true. Now, with a tap of page down (enormous shoutout to the author for choosing page down, by the way: one of few keys left on my keyboard not already colonised by another mod) the lads of Los Santos will, whimsically, backflip in place. Then they'll get very pleased with themselves for pulling it off.

"There's a chance the backflip fails and your character ragdolls," notes the mod's author, which is delicious. Of course, in my testing so far, failures happen not mid-backflip but more at the conception of the backflip idea.

That is to say, you hit the backflip button and—if the dice roll deems it to be a failure—your character collapses immediately, without even moving. In fairness, many of my own ideas and impulses fail in precisely the same way.

Age ratings for Grand Theft Auto 6 have begun rolling in, and unsurprisingly it's a game built for grown-ups, receiving both a Mature rating in the US and an 18+ rating by the ESRB. PEGI went a little further than the other ratings boards when slapping GTA 6 with an 18 certificate, however, going into such specifics about the game's adult content that it inadvertently revealed new mechanics and systems.

As spotted by GamesRadar+, PEGI's rating (which has now been deleted from the organisation's website) stated that Grand Theft Auto 6 "features strong graphic violence, strong sexual themes, and use of illegal drugs". In and of itself, this isn't revelatory—although Grand Theft Auto doesn't tend to be especially sexual (unless you count Trevor's startling re-introduction in Grand Theft Auto 5).

But it's the details supplied by PEGI in each of these areas that are of greater interest. On the violence front, PEGI stated that "Violence is bloody with a high degree of realism, with certain weapons being able to cause greater damage such as detailed decapitation and dismemberment." That's a significant change from previous GTAs, where violence was mostly blood-pools, bullet-wound decals, and enemies flopping over in physics-driven animations.

As for depictions of drug use, PEGI described it as "frequent and prominent" with players able to "use illegal drugs directly from their inventory". PEGI then cited an example whereby "cocaine can be carried around by the player and snorted directly from their hand at any time". That's a wild level of detail, and I'm curious about what, if any, mechanical implications getting wired will have in GTA 6.

Turning to those strong sexual themes, Grand Theft Auto 6 will apparently feature "scenes of intercourse and occasional scenes of sexual fetishes". More specifically, GTA 6 also seemingly features a strip club minigame where players can "pay for private dances" and "the game allows the player to move their hands onto the dancers' breasts and buttocks."

The latter of these sounds very GTA, but I am curious about how the sequel will handle the former. What most intrigued me about August's gameplay reveal was how much effort Rockstar put into depicting the relationship between Jason and Lucia—which apparently doesn't have to be romantic, but does support playing the pair as a couple in a long-term relationship.

Hence, it'll be interesting to see whether sex is played for laughs or taken more seriously as part of that romance (the likely answer is 'both'). Either way, it won't be long until we find out. Grand Theft Auto 6 will be released on consoles on November 19, although when it will come to PC remains up in the air.

The promotional blitz for Grand Theft Auto 6 continues rolling out, with the latest example being a cover feature in Love, a fashion magazine that only publishes two issues a year. I guess you've got to reach the people who don't know what the Miami Heat is somehow.

One of the things the feature focuses on is the satirical side of Grand Theft Auto, mentioning that in GTA 6, alongside radio talk shows and ads, you might overhear a robovoiced phonecall for a political campaign. The world will be full of real-world details, but amplified.

"It needs to wash over you when you're sprinting down the busiest street in the city, hearing snatches of a hundred different conversations as you go," according to James Horton, whose job title is writing director: open world. "If you shift your focus onto something new, it's going to fill the frame, and it's going to push back."

"If you are going to put all this effort into creating a version of today's world, it has to be more over the top, more insane, more in your face," Rupert Humphries, senior vice president of narrative said. "Otherwise, you could just go outside and live in the real world."

GTA 5 was already making fun of how invasive social media has become and how people don't believe what their doctors tell them. Even GTA's own voice actors have pointed out that the world's so weird now it's difficult to parody. Rockstar is determined to try, though. "There is a big focus on not just holding up a mirror, but on making everything satirical, larger than life, and more grotesque", Humphries said.

"Sometimes you need things to feel realistic to help with immersion, and conversely, sometimes you need to forego realism in favour of what's convenient for the player", said Rob Nelson, head of development and co-studio head at Rockstar North.

The other focus of the article is on Lucia, GTA's first fully voiced woman protagonist, and on her relationship with co-star Jason. "We wanted both protagonists to be vulnerable, tough, flawed, right sometimes, wrong sometimes, able to learn from each other," game writer Elizabeth Gauvey-Kern said. "That's what we felt made them authentic, and a great team."

“When you are focusing on writing a fully realised person with their own wants," added game writer Alexa D’Agostino, "you're going to get something perfectly imperfect—with clichés, but also undeniably real."

At 8:35 am Central Time on Friday, October 2, PC Gamer audience development manager Cameron Bald shared a Twitter post by fan account GTA 6 Countdown. Miami's NBA basketball team, the Heat, is doing a cross-promotion event with Rockstar, "A Night in Vice City." The team will temporarily rebrand, though from what I can tell it's as "Vice City" and not "The Vice City Heat," which feels weird but what do I know.

None of us were particularly enthused by the branding exercise, but noted negative nelly and Glasgow-based PCG online editor, Fraser Brown, took particular umbrage, wondering "Who the hell doesn't know GTA is coming?" Cameron offered a fairly compelling rebuttal: "The super-casual types who are still on a PS4 and need convincing that GTA 6 is worth getting back into games over." Lead SEO editor Lauren Morton likened it to a chocolate bar at the checkout counter: This isn't an exercise in persuasion, but flooding the zone.

Fraser was not persuaded, doubting the efficacy of the campaign. We got our first indication that something was amiss at 8:54 am. "A basketball stunt is so much more niche than, say, the Netflix trailer," Fraser argued. Niche? The Miami Heat? The multi-billion dollar NBA franchise with three championship victories to its name? The one that signed LeBron for a while in the 2010s and made everybody mad (I don't really know ball either)? That Miami Heat?

Then, the whammy: "I guess it's gonna land differently with Americans. To me, this is insanely niche. I had to google Miami Heat."

Brits Who Don't Know Ball Count: 1

More step forward

I was just logging on to work myself at this time, and was floored at what had transpired. I let Fraser know that this was the most British thing he had ever said. PC Gaming Show editorial director Jake Tucker tried to liken it to the international popularity of British football clubs, which did not help, because Fraser also does not follow footy. Lauren pointed out that Fraser was effectively saying, "I don't see the marketing value of sports because I don't follow sports." Fraser dug in.

"I get using sports teams for marketing, but it feels niche when it's one local sports team in one country. But maybe Miami Heat is an extremely big deal all over the world. I would never know!"

I pointed out how I've seen guys in Russia wearing Chicago Bulls jerseys, to which Fraser responded that he was aware of the Bulls and has even owned merch. If there is one takeaway from this whole debacle, it is not the manifest weakening of America's global cultural hegemony. It is instead the continued dominance and recognition of America's finest city, the Windy City. The City of Big Shoulders. Chi-Town, baby. Did you know we have a pope?

"I have heard of the Miami Dolphins," Fraser remarked, perhaps as some manner of conciliatory gesture to his American colleagues, "but only because they featured in Ace Ventura."

Then, the other shoe dropped: "[To be fair], I also don't know what a Miami Heat is," news writer Joshua Wolens, who lives in England, unhelpfully proffered. "But I generally assume I don't know most of what's happening in the modern world."

Brits Who Don't Know Ball Count: 2

It was around this juncture that Fraser agreed to be subject to a formal write-up on PC Gamer dot com. I am not bullying my coworker. Buffalo-based PCG news writer Lincoln Carpenter helpfully reframed the argument at this time as well: "It's not so much that the Miami Heat specifically is a big deal. It's that NBA teams, as a rule, are big deals." Lincoln also shared Forbes' estimated valuations of the most expensive NBA teams in the world vs. the most expensive football clubs. For what it's worth, the basketball teams are more expensive.

At 9:06 am, UK-based social video editor Paul Broughton introduced the new argument that "basketballs are a myth created by 2K to sell their annual videogame," but I think it would be dishonest of me to add him to the counter. The work chat conversation then moved in different directions, but I was haunted.

Dateline: Lunch

I took my lunch break to play some of the Dark Souls 2 Seamless Co-op mod with PCG senior guides writer Sean Martin and freelance contributor Tyler Colp. I remarked on the Fraser/Miami Heat situation, and how I couldn't get it out of my head.

"What is the Miami Heat?" Sean sheepishly asked. Sean is also English.

Brits Who Don't Know Ball Count: 3

At almost the exact same time, former PC Gamer editor-in-chief Samuel Roberts, who has returned for some freelance work and is also an Englishman, entered the chat. I thought he was a man of the world. I thought surely he would know ball.

"I learned what they are two hours ago!" Sam informed us. "I'm aware of the Miami Dolphins." Unlike Fraser, Sam did not come by this knowledge through the works of Jim Carrey, but rather some kind of hazy osmosis through American podcasts. Sam did know about the Bulls though (Chicago baby da Bulls baby etc.)

Brits Who Don't Know Ball Count: 4

Then things took a turn for the strange. Senior editor Christopher Livingston, who has lived in the United States his entire life (and also Orlando, Florida for five years), revealed that he also probably couldn't have placed the Heat prior to this morning's events. Man, what the fuck.

Americans Who Don't Know Ball Count: 1

I can't stress enough that I'm not a basketball guy. I don't know why this lack of Miami Heat brand recognition is bothering me so much. Is this how my UK colleagues feel when I don't know what a chip sandwich, Mr. Blobby, or a bank holiday is? I feel like I'm being pranked.

There is no more room in hell—the dead are at the beach. Grand Theft Auto 5, already burdened and bedraggled by the parade of mods I have inflicted on it, must now contend with a new disorder: revenants from beyond the veil.

I have installed ZombieInfection, which adds zombie and, indeed, infection. In any given populated space, you will look about yourself to notice that some of Los Santos' denizens are more bloody and shambling than usual. This is because they have been rejected by the grave.

Whenever these undead pedestrians brush up against other city-dwellers, the latter converts instantly to the horde. Before long, what began as just two or three bloodied weirdos becomes a city-threatening catastrophe, which is both horrifying and a good way of demonstrating the power of exponential growth.

Fortunately, zombies are just as prone to the impact of tornadoes, cars, fire, and so on as anyone else. They're also rather slow. More often than not, they get taken out by one of Los Santos' countless ambient threats before they can do any real damage. A lesson for mayors everywhere.

Shockingly, the curse of the undeath is so strong that it can somehow break my own aura of immortality. Franklin—you may have noticed from previous articles, where he does things like surviving tornadoes and being used as a ramp by cars—is invincible in my GTA 5 install. But let a zombie brush up against him for long enough and he will succumb to the afterworld like any other mortal. It's very scary. Happy Halloween.

Warhorse Studios co-founder Martin Klima is just putting it out there: He isn't a fan of the Grand Theft Auto series, and has no interest in playing GTA 6 when it debuts on consoles on November 19. Nonetheless, he's hoping that it's at least as big a hit as everyone expects it to be, for one particular reason: so other studios (like his) can take advantage of the opportunity to increase their prices, a move he believes is necessary for the survival of the industry.

The Grand Theft Auto series "doesn't appeal to me at all," Klima told PC Gamer in a recent interview, and not only that, he doesn't understand why everyone else is so gaga over them either. "I am not going to be playing GTA 6 unless I'm somehow forced to," he continued. "And the reason why it is so popular—it beats me. It's something which I just fail to understand."

Klima emphasized that he bears no ill will toward the GTA games or Rockstar, and in fact he thinks "it's really good that somebody is making these games that are really technologically marvels." And he hopes that when GTA 6 finally does arrive, it lives up to the hype.

The game industry is facing a big problem, in Klima's estimation. Games are ridiculously expensive to make, a trend that is likely to continue for the foreseeable future, as computing power continues to increase and gamers accordingly expect the complexity and scale of new games to match. But the new revenue streams needed to support those endeavours just aren't there: Audience growth has been more or less maxed out, and digital marketplaces are already providing maximal returns on units sold—as Klima put it, "We destroyed retail, and we took all their money."

The Covid-19 pandemic created an "artificial demand" that goosed things for a while, but that's faded away, as evidenced by the subsequent slash-and-burn wrought by industry executives who grossly overextended themselves and are now forcing others to pay the price. So, what's left?

"The last thing you can do is to increase the unit price," Klima said. "That would help a lot, but everybody's scared to death about it. Now, hopefully, GTA will blaze the trail, and it will allow us to increase the cost."

Rockstar and Take-Two are the only ones "who can afford, or who can dare, to increase the price of games, which I think is long overdue and also necessary for this business to survive," Klima said. "So I wish them all the luck."

I find the admission refreshingly honest: Not every game executive out there is willing to admit that they really want to jack their prices but won't do it until they can put the heat for it on someone else. That's typically the sort of thing you hear from industry analysts: In May, for instance, Bank of America securities analyst Omar Dessouky called for a higher price on GTA 6, not just for the good of Rockstar and Take-Two, but for everyone. If the next Grand Theft Auto can succeed at a higher cost, it will "raise the price point for the entire industry," he argued.

After months of speculation, Dessouky got his wish: Take-Two confirmed in June that GTA 6 will launch at $80, $10 more than conventional big-budget games—although by locking a significant amount of content in the more expensive Ultimate Edition, it's effectively a $100 game. That's a hell of a price, but even so I suspect Klima is going to get his wish too—and once the GTA 6 price normalization has set in, we're going to see quite a few more expensive games in 2027 and beyond.

Disregard that other thing I said. Grand Theft Auto 5 no longer only launches in windowed mode. It now only launches in fullscreen mode. We're choosing not to investigate this and are just hoping the whole thing works itself out.

Another thing to disregard: what I said earlier about Hulk: Ultimate Destruction. The greatest game of all time is, in fact, 2009's Prototype, which is about being a really angry flu who can take on the appearance of anyone he eats. You can turn your arm into a sword, you fight some sort of flesh-Christ in Times Square. There's a lot going on.

Anyway GTA 5 is like Prototype now, in that I have installed Shapeshifter V. This allows you to immediately become any pedestrian you happen to stealth attack, to no real discernible end. It is quite novel, though. So an outfit you like? Take it. Also, take the in-fit. You are a great roving blob on a quest to consume and to replicate.

I am fairly certain that the act of becoming a new person doesn't change your voice, so do brace yourself for the piercing screams of Shawn Fonteno to emerge from the throats of old men and young men as they find themselves whipped up in a passing tornado or teleported a few thousand feet into the sky.

But these are bagatelles. Overall, shapeshifting is another fascinating patch in the great GTA 5 tapestry I am forging. I just have to remember to only launch that tapestry in full-screen now. Or maybe tomorrow it will be windowed again. What an adventure.

Sometimes you have to roll up your sleeves and do what's necessary. No sentimentality, no squeamishness—just pure, solution-oriented bluesky thinking. This philosophy once guided Maximilien de Robespierre and now it guides me, in my equally epochal struggle to simply make Grand Theft Auto 5 boot in spite of the vast cargo of mods I have now encumbered it with.

Long story short: the game ceased to launch even in windowed mode, which had hitherto been a surefire way to coax it from its deathbed. After many restarts and a lot of graphics noodling, I was forced to ask myself if this was it. If this was the end of my GTA journey.

Then I started deleting essentially random files from the game's directory and now it works. So let that be a lesson to you.

Now that's out of the way: new mod. This one is called TornadoV and what it does, you see, is it adds absolutely ginormous tornadoes to the already somewhat hectic map of Los Santos (or what remains of it). Hit F5 to configure your tornadoes, hit F6 to spawn them.

That last bit is a point of concern, as F6 is also my button to enable noclip and jet about the map at speed. So I can't do that without summoning a twister now, I guess. Okay.

It's good fun, anyway. Franklin really does go to pieces as the mod stuffs him in an express elevator to God's kingdom. As for the rest of the world, well, with everything in a constant state of explosion, fracas, and breakdown, a slowly migrating whirlwind really just sort of blends in.

There is an anxiety to my movements now. The stench of death lingers about Grand Theft Auto 5 like petrichor after hard, hot rain, and I am nervous that any addition will finally nudge it over the edge.

As we've previously established, the game now only launches properly in windowed mode, and once it churns through all the modifications I have burdened it with, it deposits me in an empty void where Franklin Clinton's house used to be, sending him tumbling through the abyss. Every time I load GTA 5, Franklin screams.

Anyway, I added a new mod. It's called Fortnite Floss Dance [OIV] and it adds "Smooth looping Floss dance, same speed as Fortnite." Convenience is its philosophy: whenever you begin flossing, music will play automatically, so you don't look weird. Don't like the music? Its volume is controlled by a slider. Also, the entire UI is in Arabic, which I did not expect when I downloaded it but which adds something indefinable that I like a lot.

What to say? Franklin flosses now. He flosses indiscriminately, indefatigably. Nothing can deter him. The ongoing chaos of a semi-deleted Los Santos does not faze him. His endlessly perishing and replenishing bodyguards do not concern him. Smash him with a car and he will only right himself and keep going. There is only him, the music, and a command in a language I do not speak but which I must assume reads 'Begin flossing'.

Videogames are so cool.

Can a game go on life support? Can it begin, in its dotage, to show signs of the ailment that everyone knows—but would never say—is the thing that will one day bring it down for good?

Grand Theft Auto 5 can. Installing my latest mod, Dynamic Traffic Colours, has brought my installation of the game to the point that it's failing death rolls. It will only launch in windowed mode, now. Trying to fullscreen the game before it has loaded will leave you suspended in the void. Quite literally: you will reside in an eternal black screen from which escape is impossible, unless you hold CTRL+ALT+DEL.

Anyway, once I was in and windowed, I encountered a mystery. The point of Dynamic Traffic Colours is to mix up the hues of Los Santos' cars. I think it is doing that, but with a conservatism that borders on timidity.

For the most part, the cars I see (and, to be fair, many of them more-or-less implode on spawn) are the same humdrum colours you get all the time. But then, like a vision, you get a car that's a garish mix of tints, sailing past you and into the side of a building.

So I don't really know what's going on there. Perhaps it's a lesson to change my thinking. Rather than letting me gorge myself on clown cars, the mod presents them like rare, nourishing treats: oases in the windowed desert. I'm thankful for that.

I have filled a yawning void in the soul of Los Santos. I have returned the heart to a heartless world. I am a teacher, a healer, a gardener of human happiness. My efforts have ensured the general flourishing of society and the wellbeing of the spaceship Earth.

Grand Theft Auto 5 has Working Hotdog Vendors now.

Based on the evidence, Rockstar probably intended the hot-dog-purchasing experience in GTA 5 to work much as it did in GTA 4. Why didn't it? A mystery. Dundee was busy working on horse testicles, or whatever it is they do up there, and forgot.

Anyway, it works now. You can now stroll up to the meat-slingers of Los Santos beach and give them five (thanks Obama) dollars for some sort of fleshy tube in a bun. This is electrifying.

The hot dogs heal you, just like in real life, but my favourite part is how they interact with the random-teleport mod I hucked onto my teetering GTA 5 pile just yesterday. One moment you'll be handing over your money, the next you will be perched atop the not-Hollywood sign, lazily chowing down on your grub. Also, the bodyguards that the celebrity mod has assigned you will keep manifesting in thin air next to you before plunging to their deaths. This does not interrupt the hot dog consumption process.

It's great. GTA 5 should have been like this the whole time. I can only hope that GTA 6, with its budget of 'roughly Saddam Hussein's gold bullion reserves,' will let you fully experience hot dogs.

It's the greatest challenge I've yet faced. Not in Grand Theft Auto 5, in life (I was a sheltered child). Forget hit squads, forget running a billion-dollar privacy-invading company, forget bad credit, forget the absence of gravity. My enemy now is space itself, the third dimension. Maybe spacetime. Never been clear on what that is.

I have installed the Random Teleport Challenge, which is not a challenge in the American Gladiators sense but more of a challenge in the debilitating disease sense. Every 50 seconds, the game whisks me to one of 28 locations scattered across GTA 5's map. I have no list of which locations these are, which makes the whole thing quite exciting.

I don't know how you live your life, but for me, it's actually quite disruptive to find myself randomly spatially displaced every 50 seconds. It's probably how the Quantum Leap guy felt, if he sometimes Quantum Leapt underneath a truck.

It's a confusing and disconcerting time. Utterly impossible to plan for. But you know what? It taught me an important lesson, probably. Not sure what it is yet, but this seems like one of those things people turn around at the end of and say they learnt an important lesson, so there must be one in there somewhere.

This will probably make it quite difficult to experience mods going forward. I may have to edit an .ini file. Or maybe I just live like this now, ever jaunting. Ever lost in the creases of the sheets of the universe. Just check under the nearest truck; I'm probably there.

Every nation has its kooks—excepting of course the Swiss—but there's something utterly American to me about the UFO sighting. It's probably something to do with the sheer size of the place. A tired, potentially hopped-up trucker, trundling across the endless plains of… whatever state has endless plains in it, spying something mysterious and illuminated in the canopy above? That's America to me.

Also America to me: the Grand Theft Auto videogame series, so it was only natural that I bring real UFO visits to Rockstar's fake LA. I installed UFO Sightings, "a simple script that spawns a UFO at random locations throughout the map."

Its aim is to be eerie and mysterious, which is probably why it limits UFOs to appearing at night. I didn't know that at first, though, so I spent quite a lot of time flying around Mount Chiliad at high noon, trying and failing to find visitors from other worlds. I did find the now-ever-present swarms of hitmen trying to kill me, though, so I had fun.

Once I realised my error, I nudged the game clock forward. Voila! All of a sudden, a distant part of the map glowed red. "UFO sighting reported" declared a pop-up. My reaction was swift—I immediately took flight (I have Superman powers; don't worry about it) and headed towards the marked zone.

Now, look, here's where things didn't quite go as I planned. In my idyllic visions, the American spaceman-spotter sees a hazy disc in the middle distance. He squints, he rubs his eyes, he thinks but is never sure that the object he's looking at is aliens, and there is no one in a 10-mile radius to back him up when he talks about it later. His defining trait is uncertainty. If he speaks, he becomes a disbelieved outcast. If he keeps quiet, the questions haunt him to his grave.

The truth wasn't quite so romantic or secretive: My UFO appeared about 30 feet in the air over an intersection in downtown Los Santos, flashing with enough enthusiasm to immediately kill anyone who's even familiar with epilepsy.

I guess it worked out. At some point, possibly in response to me shooting it with my laser eyes, it stopped flashing and began to ascend, eventually vanishing completely. Maybe I never saw it. Perhaps it was never there at all.

Have you heard? Crazy Taxi is coming back. As a game, yes (with some rather off-putting gen-AI mixed in there), and also as a movie. You may have heard this. What you have not heard is that I, personally, am bringing Crazy Taxi back. I am bringing it back to Los Santos, to Grand Theft Auto 5.

Simply put, I have installed the aptly-named Crazy Taxi Mod, which has populated my doomed and bedraggled city with a new variety of quest: a taxi quest. A crazy taxi quest.

Approach a yellow circle and the game will prompt you to hit H. Hit H and you will enter a world of point-to-point transportation. The mod gives you a selection of cars, all yellow, and none of which I can remember because all the cars in my game are seized by irresistible movement, which means they immediately jet off the vehicle-select screen as soon as they appear.

An added consequence of this behaviour is that you have to choose a car quickly. The mod will teleport you into the one you've chosen, whatever its location. Wait too long, and the car you want to drive will have either taken flight or ploughed into the side of a building and exploded.

Regardless, once you're in, it's pure Crazy Taxi. You've got a time limit and the sidewalks have punters. Pick them up and your time limit extends. The goal is rapidity, to keep your pickups and dropoffs frequent enough that your time limit is actually growing in the aggregate, rather than depleting.

Or it would be, but my various fares keep getting scared off by the rolling gang war that Los Santos has, at this point, descended into. Or they get hit by cars, or shot by my bodyguards, or they have bad credit maybe. Who knows? Point is, they sometimes fail to actually get in the car, leaving me idling my big yellow taxi forlornly at the side of the road, eternally.

But aren't we all doing that in some way, when you think about it?

What happened

• On September 10, Rockstar Games published new mod guidelines on its website, which it says are intended to "maintain a fun, creative, and welcoming place for players and content creators."
• The guidelines are seem primarily targeted at mods for the FiveM and RedM platforms, which Rockstar acquired—along with their developers—in 2023.
• Rockstar says mods must "respect our games": As part of its "right to set limits on how others can use our games and brand," the studio says mods can't expand or modify official storylines, missions, and characters, and can't combine settings and characters from different Rockstar franchises.
• Rockstar says modders can't incorporate other intellectual property or real-world likenesses, and forbids cheat menus or modifications that interfere with its official multiplayer and online services.
• Rockstar calls its official modding platforms "the exclusive licensed home for our community to monetize their mods," forbidding alternative monetization or commercialization of mods for its games.

Do these guidelines have any teeth?

Like Rockstar's more formal terms of service and platform license agreements, these guidelines are the sort of standard rhetorical armament a company equips itself with when in case it needs a quick fix for something egregious: If a mod emerges that could give the studio a legal or financial headache, all it'll need to do is tap the sign before giving the offending user-generated content the boot.

Of course, those guidelines are theoretically more difficult to enforce on platforms the studio doesn't own. For Rockstar, removing a mod that breaks its commandments is easy enough on FiveM. But if that mod's on a third party site—like the one our Josh Wolens used to murder a charmander on the streets of Los Santos—making that problem go away isn't so simple. House rules are a lot harder to enforce at someone else's house.

That hasn't stopped Rockstar in the past, however: In 2021, it sent takedown notices to a number of modding projects that reverse-engineered, restored, or reimplemented elements of older GTA games. It announced and released its trio of GTA Trilogy remasters later that year.

It might feel minnowish compared to modern open worlds, but Los Santos is still a schlep to get across. Whether you're on a bike, in a car, or hoofing it on-foot, it takes a while to get from the city itself out to the northernmost boonies. Well, no more.

Flights V is a mod that turns GTA 5's airports into, ah, airports. That is to say, you can now rock up to a desk in the terminal, pick up a ticket, and jet off (as a passenger) to one of a select few other points on the map: LSIA, Sandy Shore Airfield, McKenzie Airfield, or Paleto Bay International Airport.

I'm not entirely sure that the real-world LAX airport maintains routes to podunk personal hangars out in the middle of the desert, but America is a strange and bewildering place.

It is a replication of the true airport experience par excellence. You know how in airports you can choose what kind of plane you want to travel on, and how the space between the jet bridge and the plane itself is protected by a vast bank-vault door? We've got that. You know how the departures lounge is filled with dead-eyed half-people staring listlessly into the void? That's here too.

Okay, that one actually is accurate, I guess.

My only issue is that actually trying to board a plane can sometimes result in an infinite loading screen. This is inexplicable. It is assuredly not related to previous mods that have deleted a vast swathe of the exterior world map, nor my attempts to carry NPCs on my back into the plane. It's just plane travel, you know? They always find ways to make it a little bit worse.

As reported by IGN, a trove of data from Rockstar has made its way online, with the big ticket items being Grand Theft Auto 5's source code, remnants of canceled GTA5 singleplayer DLC, as well as an early version of GTA6's map that can be loaded into the prior game.

It's unclear how or why the data is making the rounds now, but the consensus appears to be that it was first extracted from Rockstar in the infamous 2022 Lapsus hack that revealed GTA6 to the world.

GTA YouTuber TJGM has a video and a number of posts on X covering the long-rumored Liberty City project. The gameplay in the video comes from a canceled mod, and not the leaked material. The most notable thing TJGM showed off is a map of audio loading zones contained in the leak: The demarcation for coastal ambient audio could be turned into an effective map of the multi-island city. This iteration of Liberty City would have been larger, and possessed a different layout from its most recent predecessor in GTA4.

User affmal on Twitter has been sharing screenshots and findings mostly focused on the Agent Trevor files, which appear to be more intact and substantial than the Liberty City stuff. Affmal has shared a full mission list, and has been loading map and model data into GTA5 to explore. The coolest thing affmal has shown off, for my money, is an underwater base map like something out of Deus Ex.

TJGM has a few posts showing screenshots of an early version of GTA6's map loaded into GTA5, with markers (unclear if from Rockstar for dev purposes or placed by the user) denoting areas like "Alligator Farm," "Coast Guard," and "Disused Theme Park." The map is "very unfinished" according to TJGM, and reportedly dates to 2015. He has three posts showing corresponding locations from this unfinished map and GTA6's trailers side-by-side for comparison.

This is only the latest development in a GTA6 build-up that has been defined by major leaks, and it's possible there is still more to be uncovered in this tranche. GTA6 itself will finally release on November 19, but not on PC. While Take-Two boss Strauss Zelnick acknowledged that "the PC platform is becoming more and more important" in a recent meeting, there's still no word on when we can expect the hotly anticipated crime sim on our system of choice.

Grand Theft Auto 6 is coming! Not to us on Team PC, mind: It will eventually, but right now it's a strict console exclusive. Why? Hard to say: Publisher Take-Two Interactive has taken pains to reassure PC gamers that they're very important and loved, but also, y'know, not now.

The latest reassurance to gamers on personal computers came during Take-Two's annual shareholders meeting, held yesterday, during which Take-Two chairman and CEO Strauss Zelnick was asked about the potential impact of PlayStation 5 Pro shortages—ironically, driven at least in part by the looming launch of GTA 6—on the company's plans for releasing the game on PC.

After clarifying that the question is really about "the cadence of PC launches," Zelnick continued, "The strategy of the company is over time, generally speaking, to launch for any platforms for which there's a meaningful audience. But that isn't always the case, and certainly if platforms were no longer viable, we would change that strategy. And I would note that the PC platform is becoming more and more important to our company over time."

So, what does that mean? Essentially, that Zelnick doesn't want to talk about it: GTA 6, for better or worse, is a console exclusive, and that's clearly where the studio's focus is.

Which isn't to say Zelnick's response isn't confusing, but that's something of an ongoing pattern: In May he said PC can account for up to half the total sales of major game releases, but that GTA 6 is debuting on consoles because Take-Two is focused on "serving the core consumer," which apparently does not include PC gamers—those gamers who, you may recall, can account for up to half the total sales of major game releases.

Those struck me as inherently contradictory statements, and saying the PC is "becoming more and more important" when it's clearly already very important doesn't really clear that air. I can understand why Zelnick wouldn't want to just come out and state the obvious reason for holding back GTA 6 on PC—double-dipping—but if he did, we'd at least be able to relax and say, 'Well, yeah, that makes sense.'

Speaking of not wanting to talk about things, Zelnick was also asked about GTA Online during the meeting, to which he reminded attendees that GTA 6 is "a singleplayer experience," and that GTA 5 Online "continues to be a robust business for us" that Take-Two will continue to support. The CEO of Twitch thinks GTA 6 multiplayer will come out next year, but it's not entirely clear whether he's speculating or relaying inside info.

Grand Theft Auto 6 is set to launch on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S on November 19. We'll get it someday.