GTA 6: 8 Confirmed Details You Need To Know

It's nuts to think that we're coming up to GTA V's ninth birthday. The world-conquering open world game - which has seen a release on three different console generations and is still being updated with new content - simply won't die. Thanks to the multiplayer suite, GTA Online, the sequel has performed better than anyone could have dreamed of, and regularly takes positions on lists of the top 10 best-selling games of the month.

With the title being so pervasive and popular in the culture then, it might be easy to forget that yeah, Grand Theft Auto VI will one day hit shelves. As the follow up to the second best-selling game of all time, GTA VI has been subject to no shortage of leaks over the years, with some sources purporting it to be a Narcos-inspired take on cartel crime, while others teased a continent-spanning sandbox extravaganza.

While the validity of these leaks has always been brought into question, the most reliable GTA VI information yet was recently unveiled in a Bloomberg report by reputable journalist Jason Schreier. While the report - which itself corroborated a 2018 leak from Inside Gaming on 'Project Americas' - mainly peeled the curtain back on developer Rockstar's transformation of its work culture, it also offered tantalising gameplay and release date tidbits about the next GTA, which have since been expanded upon by other reliable journalists.

So, here's what to expect from Grand Theft Auto VI!

One of the more intriguing things about the development of GTA VI is just how long Rockstar has been working on it. Bloomberg's report confirmed that it has been in production on and off since 2014, and unsurprisingly plans for features and mechanics have changed in that time.

One major revision from the original pitch has been to scale back the scope of the game's map. Axios game journalist Stephen Totilo (via Eurogamer) revealed that initially the sequel was set to go bigger than ever, featuring four playable characters and a story that would take fans across three different American cities. This was hinted at in the Bloomberg report as well, which detailed the initial vision for the game had it featuring a map comprised of "large swaths of North and South America". This also corroborates a 2018 Inside Gaming report which leaked that South America would be explorable in the title.

While that sounds tantalising - and the kind of ambition that would justify a decade of development time - Rockstar has understandably scaled things back since. Creating just one of its intricately-detailed sandboxes takes years of hard work, and three would have only resulted in an even longer wait for GTA VI.