One of the most intriguing creative decisions Rockstar made with Grand Theft Auto 6 is reducing the number of playable characters from three to two. Since sequels typically operate on the rule of ‘bigger is better’, the logical progression would have been to add even more playable characters to the roster.
It turns out that Rockstar did indeed consider this. Speaking to IGN, studio co-head Rod Nelson explained that a GTA with four protagonists was on the table. But Rockstar decided against it due to concerns about spreading the player’s attention too thin.
“As the narrative unfolds, we’re quite conscious to try and make sure that players have enough time with each character,” Nelson explained. “After doing GTA 5, we talked about different ideas of ‘Do we have more characters? How do we follow up three characters? Is it four characters now?’ But we worried about diluting the amount of player time with each, and therefore player connection with those characters.”
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This fear of diluting that time spent with each character is also what led Rockstar down the path of two protagonists. “The question became: how do you make players feel like ‘I love them both'” Nelson adds. “Chemistry is a notoriously hard thing to do in any sort of entertainment. Either the characters and the actors that embody them have it—or they don’t.”
Nelson adds that “everyone involved worked at that pretty hard” and believes that the team eventually “got it.” Having watched the extended trailer that recently aired on Netflix—the relationship between the two characters was certainly the element that stood out most to me.
For example, there’s a moment toward the end of the trailer where Lucia gets beaten up and tossed down a flight of stairs. In the spectrum of horrible things that can happen to a GTA character, this is relatively minor. But I was surprisingly shocked by it, because everything shown up to that point had invested me in Lucia and Jason’s relationship—more than I ever felt about any of the characters in Grand Theft Auto 5.
Obviously, there’s plenty more to Grand Theft Auto 6 than just its two protagonists, like its world that’s three times the size of Red Dead Redemptions 2’s, and the fact it has a more nuanced version of the honor system seen in Rockstar’s most recent Wild West adventure. But I increasingly believe it will be that central partnership that defines it over the other GTA games, especially since Rockstar appears to be sticking to the script when it comes to campaign mission design.
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