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There is apparently a new difficulty option in Grand Theft Auto Online that Rockstar still won’t show or tell us.
Lucas7yoshi shared this information on Twitter on December 17, 2025:
An update was released to all platforms, presumably to fix some bugs.
Tragically, it has not added the wanted options that are inexplicably hardcoded off but nonetheless present in the code.
Lucas7yoshi shared a picture showing that there is a new option for the Wanted Level. The option is to Clear on Death, and you can toggle it to either On or Off.
Explaining Grand Theft Auto Online’s Wanted Level System
Grand Theft Auto Online has a Wanted Level system, as is the convention in the franchise.
Like Grand Theft Auto V, Grand Theft Auto Online caps the Wanted Level from six down to five stars. But that doesn’t mean it’s simpler for the player.
In fact, what it actually means is that the game is harder. Even at the one star Wanted level, police officers are allowed to shoot you on sight.
The way Grand Theft Auto Online works now, there are only three ways to remove your Wanted Level. Of course, if you can go undetected by the police for a set amount of time, you go scot free.
The higher your Wanted Level is, the longer you need to go undetected. But that’s the cheapest way to get out of it.
If you can afford it, you can also call Lester to pull a favor. This time, you will have to pay Lester more to get a higher Wanted Level removed.
If you can’t pull off either of these, you’ll lose that status when your character dies. That isn’t the optimal option, but it could be the fastest.
What Will This New Option Do?
The new option allows you to raise the difficulty, if you want to. If you toggle Clear on Death off, that raises the difficulty.
That means that even if your character dies in game, when you log back in, the police are still looking for you. You can potentially die again and again until you either escape the police or bribe Lester.
We don’t know if the police will be staking you out where your character lives, but that’s because it hasn’t been enabled yet.
We think Rockstar has already figured that out because they would not have added the option in otherwise. It wouldn’t be worth the effort of adding the code in if they don’t plan to use it.
So now we’re left wondering when Rockstar will enable this option. Maybe it’s something to help keep Grand Theft Auto Online players happy for the long wait for Grand Theft Auto 6.