When it comes right down to it, when you’re making a big-name title in a long-standing franchise, you almost always have to add something new or significant to the game to help it stand out from what came before. If you don’t, then you run the risk of being dubbed “repetitive” or not “embracing the full potential” of what’s right there. For GTA 6, we still don’t know much about the game’s full story or the gameplay that we’ll be partaking in. Instead, Rockstar Games has focused its first two trailers on the relationship between the protagonists, Jason and Lucia. And that simple fact has people wondering what “special systems” might be tied to them.
Specifically, Polygon put out the notion that Rockstar could use the “Honor Mechanic” from Red Dead Redemption 2 and implement it into GTA 6, but in a different way than what came before. In their Western title, the honor mechanic was used to showcase how civilians and certain other characters reacted to Arthur Morgan, depending on how he handled his business and treated others in places like towns.
Here, though, it could be used to define the relationship between Jason and Lucia. Specifically, if you control one and make a move that the other doesn’t approve of, it alters their relationship and could have long-lasting effects. While we know that they are both main characters, we haven’t been “let in on” how freely we’ll get to control who we control and when.
If taken to its fullest, this could turn the game into more of an RPG with its story, with there being multiple endings that could be affected by the choices the player makes as Jason and Lucia. That would certainly be a twist on what has come before, and could allow players to truly “feel the consequences” of what they did in the game, and then do another playthrough to see whether they like the results of other choices they didn’t make before.
So, what could some of those alternate endings be? The trailers tease the story’s focus on Jason and Lucia trusting each other and having to work together to survive. So, it could be that one ending sees one betray the other, leading to dark moments and beats. Or, the two have so little trust in one another that they have to fight one another to get out of the final campaign mission.
Or, if you play it right, they survive with their love intact and live happily ever after.
We’ll see next May if Rockstar went down this path.
