You probably could’ve guessed this part: GTA 6 will bring back the series’ wanted system. You’ll still build up stars as police try to take you down ever more aggressively, but Rockstar’s making some notable tweaks to the system in order to encourage players to play in different ways.
“The wanted system in GTA 6 requires that someone witness the crime, or an alarm needs to be set off for it to be reported to the law,” Rockstar North co-studio head Rob Nelson tells IGN. “One star is not going to be too difficult to get away from. You can see with these little icons on-screen, the police know what we’re driving, so we should just jump out of the vehicle. They also know we’re a couple. You could split up, and that will also help lower the police’s perception of you.”
We see this demonstrated in the GTA 6 extended look, where a story mission has Jason and Lucia driving a client away from a group of very persistent cops. Here, we see that the wanted level can go up to six stars – GTA 5 had previously been capped at five stars.
Just below that, we see four icons representing how much the police recognize about Jason and Lucia: their clothes, their faces, their car, and the fact that they’re together. Later in the mission, they break direct contact with the cops, turning four white wanted stars into four red ones, presumably indicating that the police are still hunting you but are not in active pursuit. They swap vehicles, removing the car icon from the screen, and watch a cop car that doesn’t recognize the new vehicle roll right on by.
“We put a lot of work into how you can navigate the world, trying to make everything as smooth as possible to really encourage this type of gameplay where you are running and getting out of the car, jumping and climbing fences,” Nelson says. “If you get three stars in the city, it can sometimes be challenging to get away in a vehicle, unless it’s a very fast vehicle or a sports bike. Your best option is usually to do this – get off the streets and get on foot into the alleys.”
How long is GTA 6? About 80 hours, according to one Rockstar dev’s playthrough.