GTA 6 Has ‘Big and Small Choices’ in Its Story, As Rockstar Takes Red Dead Redemption 2’s Player Agency to the Next Level

It may be difficult to imagine now, but there was a time when people were disappointed that Red Dead Redemption's protagonist, John Marston, would not be leading Rockstar’s 2018 sequel. Arthur Morgan was an unknown, and it was somewhat unthinkable that he could mean more to anyone than the already established Marston.

Rockstar, of course, knew that would be the case. And so, during the production of Red Dead Redemption 2, it put a lot of careful thought into crafting Arthur’s tale, with the aim of ensuring Mr. Morgan could both connect with and reflect players better than even John had. And now, several years later, that same issue has been on Rockstar’s mind while creating GTA 6 protagonists, Jason and Lucia.

“One of the things we are interested in exploring with these games – and it’s something we did probably most consciously on Red Dead Redemption 2 – is the idea of how much of this character is them and how much of it is you, the player?” says Rob Nelson, Rockstar North’s co-studio head.

We spoke with Nelson as part of a recent visit to Rockstar North, and he told us about how important it is for player agency and choices, both “big and small” to permeate through the studio’s stories and the characters at the centre of them.

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“For example, Arthur – as we played through Red Dead Redemption 2, sometimes it felt like ‘Why am I listening to Dutch?’ He's clearly crazy,” says Nelson. “You know – ‘Why am I helping these people? I don’t even know them.’

“People would ask us that, and we would say, ‘Well, because Dutch saved you when you were 15 years old, when you didn't know how to read.’ And they say, ‘Me? He Saved Arthur.’ So, we tried to do a couple of things to address this. We added an element to the story where Dutch is the only one who knows where Arthur’s money – and all the gang’s money – is, to try to create a secondary, more player-centric motivation.”

“So, if it was not enough for you as the player to just take Arthur's loyalty to Dutch at face value and go along with it, we'll also try and give you a personal reason as the player to be invested for your own sense of wanting something for you,” Nelson concluded.

One way you could build stronger bonds within the world of Red Dead Redemption 2 was to spend time at camp and talk to each member of the Van Der Linde gang. While a great many games feature conversation between the player’s character and NPCs, RDR2’s dialogue system supported both narrative-driven chats and incidental small talk, the latter of which contributed to the camp’s truly authentic atmosphere. This is something that Rockstar also aims to carry over into GTA 6, with Jason and Lucia’s safehouses across the fictional state of Leonida operating more like the interactable camps of the Wild West than traditional Grand Theft Auto homes have done. It’s a continuation of Red Dead Redemption 2’s commitment to characters leading the studio’s stories.

“We needed to make sure we had missions where you spent time with each member of the gang to try and get to know them to help the player form a connection with them,” explains Nelson.

“Another thing we tried to do to enhance the player’s connection to their character in that game involved any of the kind acts that Arthur was able to perform,” he continued. “Originally, many of them were mandatory, but that felt wrong. So, we started taking them off the main story flow and just making them optional. So, you as a player were required to go and meet his ex-girlfriend, Mary Linton, but you didn't have to help get her little brother out of the cult, and you didn’t ever have to meet her again.

“We tried to make sure that a lot of these things were optional so that, hopefully, if you wanted Arthur to have some sort of redemption arc, you felt more strongly connected to it because you helped him achieve it as a player,” Nelson adds.

That feeling of shaping your own Arthur and deciding which end of the honor meter he ended up at is a masterstroke of open world storytelling. It makes every action count, from small-time theft to life-or-death decision-making. Again, it’s something Rockstar is looking to build on in GTA 6, with its equivalent of the honor system, Jason and Lucia’s Criminal Profiles, changing depending on the outcome of every choice, big and small. This, alongside how you choose to make them bond romantically, will affect the story, much like how Red Dead 2’s would change in specific moments, such as whether a prowling wolf or peaceful deer appears in Arthur’s dreams.

“We also made very subtle changes to the cutscenes and [Arthur’s] stated motivations for things”, Nelson explained. “If you were high honor and if you as the player had been showing that you cared about these things, Arthur would tell John, ‘Get out of here when this is going down. Do it for me; it would make me feel...good, I guess.’ But if you had low honor, he didn’t say that. He said, ‘Don’t be an idiot’. And it wasn’t black hat versus white hat – it was just figuring out how to not make Arthur too sentimental, if that was not the way you were playing.”

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“Interestingly, some people would get the low honor ending that resulted in Micah shooting Arthur in the head, and they would die face down in the dirt, and they’d say, ‘Why did that happen to me?’” Nelson laughs.

We don’t yet know how many different endings GTA 6’s story may have, or how drastically it can change depending on the state of Jason and Lucia’s relationship and their Criminal Profiles. It certainly seems like we’ll need to spend plenty of time outside of those main missions in order to make their bond with each other, and in turn, our bond with them, ring true.

“There are lots of choices, big and small. The small ones add up to mean something, some big ones mean a lot in the moment you make them,” reveals Nelson.

“It’s interesting to play around with and explore these ideas, and we are definitely continuing down this path with GTA 6,” he continues. “With the relationship, we start Jason and Lucia off wanting to give it a shot, but just going through the story and playing missions together may not be enough to keep them together. You’ll have to keep them together by spending a bit of time together in the open world, and then hopefully that will reinforce your connection to them and increase your investment in their story.”

Simon Cardy is a Senior Editor at IGN who can mainly be found skulking around open world games, indulging in Korean cinema, or despairing at the state of Tottenham Hotspur and the New York Jets. Follow him on Bluesky at @cardy.bsky.social .