GTA 6 is about to put us in the shoes of power couple Jason and Lucia, but while different age ratings suggest a more explicit game than GTA 5 with sex scenes and more, Rockstar North co-studio boss Rob Nelson also says that the devs wanted to get intimacy “right.”
Speaking to IGN earlier this year in an interview that’s now been published in full, Nelson specifically addresses GTA 6’s handling of “physical intimacy” after IGN points out how bad many other games have traditionally been at doing so.
“We don’t want to be so bad at it,” Nelson begins. “These characters feel very right together – they really do. For anybody that wants to play around with the idea of role-playing their relationship, it’s amazing. So many people on the team have connected with the characters. But physical intimacy is a huge part of a relationship, and so it has to be done right. Like anything that we do, we have to iterate and try things and iterate on it until we figure out what feels right.”
He reiterates: “We definitely want to err on the right side of it.”
It’s at this point that IGN suggests that there are certain minigames that you wouldn’t want to see show up, to which Nelson laughs, and says: “I think that’s right.”
Although it’s not mentioned by name, the very likely implication here is that Rockstar doesn’t want a repeat of GTA: San Andreas’s notorious Hot Coffee moment. The scrapped minigame allowed CJ to have sex with his girlfriend, and while it wasn’t meant to be playable in the final version of the game, that didn’t stop it from being datamined and later made available by modders.
The controversy and backlash surrounding the Hot Coffee incident was enormous, though I’m sure that legal drama isn’t Rockstar’s concern with GTA 6’s portrayal of sex. Rather, it sounds like it’s about handling how it’s presented in the right way – not that it’d take much improvement from rhythmically moving the control sticks and filling an “excitement” bar.
Exactly what Rockstar has in mind remains to be seen, but GTA 6’s recent PEGI 18+ age rating states that we can expect “scenes of intercourse and occasional scenes of sexual fetishes,” so make of that what you will.