Report: ‘GTA 6’ Has A Female, Latina Protagonist, One Half Of A ‘Bonnie And Clyde’ Duo

GTA Vice City

Rockstar

A new Jason Schreier report is out on Bloomberg and for once, it appears to be a bit of good news, rather than detailing horrific working conditions at one developer or another.

The bulk of the story is about major changes that Rockstar has tried to make with its games, company and culture to become less of a “frat house” than it was accused of being previously. Changes include shelving potentially offensive content (a cop-focused GTA Online mode in the wake of George Floyd’s death), not punching down as much (an attempt to avoid jokes about marginalized groups) and less crunch and better benefits for employees (GTA 6 is planning to add more content post-release so mega-crunch doesn’t need to happen for initial release, hopefully).

There is also some significant news about GTA 6 itself, as the report here says that one of the game’s two protagonists will be a Latina woman, one half of a duo modeled after famed bank robbers Bonnie and Clyde with two playable leads. This would be the series’ first playable female protagonist outside of create-a-characters like GTA Online.

GTA Online

Rockstar

Also in the report is information about how the scope of the game has been reduced. Originally the idea was to have sprawling zones modeled after chunks of North and South America, but that has since been slimmed down to a return to Miami/Vice City instead. Reportedly, the smaller scope will lead to more substantive content later, new cities and missions, though even the current version has a lot more interior spaces than past games, so it’s still probably bigger overall. It’s unclear whether these new additions would feature single player story content or be GTA 6 Online things, given that GTA 5 never had any significant single player story content added once GTA Online became its golden goose.

From the sound of it, after cleaning house of some controversial figures from the studio, there appear to be real, meaningful changes that have been made at Rockstar, which have reshaped not just the studio, but at least some of the plans for GTA 6 itself. I can already see some obnoxious debates about GTA 6 going “woke” if it loses some of its “attitude” with these changes, but we’ll save that theoretical controversy for another day. While I’m sure things aren’t perfect, these sound like significant, positive changes being made at the company since GTA 5 was released, which is great to see.

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