Scrabble together all the various, disparate nuggets of information released about Grand Theft Auto 6 since its big Netflix premiere, and you might spot a pattern emerging: Rockstar is going full, Red Dead Redemption 2-style realism with GTA 6. In fact it sounds like it’s going even further. Forget the breezy, plug-and-play, occasionally almost brainless action of previous GTAs, where you could steal any car in sight and mow down crowds of bumbling, shrieking NPCs with abandon. Forget the game you play half-blazed at 3am, or illicitly but easily aged 12, or simply on autopilot to casually unwind from everyday life. GTA 6 sounds like it’s shooting for real life itself. In fact it might actually be so real that at times it’s downright awkward.

Here’s a few examples, from what we’ve seen so far. The Wanted system is changing so you now no longer escape the police by driving really fast and getting out of their giant mini-map radius for long enough – or maybe, at most, giving you car a new paint job. Now, you might need to change your hairstyle, your outfit, your vehicle, whether you’re travelling with your partner, or – as Rockstar North co-studio head told our peers at IGN – you might need to just get out of the car and run away on foot, finding shelter in the game’s apparently vast network of back alleys.

Then there’s the new Criminal Profile system, which seemingly records your deeds, cruel and kind, and impacts the way people might react to you in the world as you explore it – no more consequence-free rocket-launching your way out of trouble. And probably no more ‘see how many cars I can blow up at once by parking them at a petrol station and throwing a grenade’ without a few people taking notes, either.

You’ve also got your relationship to think about – apparently details as small as whether you hold your door open for your partner will impact your relationship, which then impacts how the story unfolds. You can do crimes together or apart. Then on top of that you’ve got your health to worry about, with your appearance and stats (those exact stats yet to be specified) impacted by how much you eat and probably what you eat, whether you go to the gym, or whether you’re quaffing bougie smoothies from your safehouse fridge or smashing back the beers. The promise is a San Andreas-style system and then some.

And then of course there’s the question of whether you can actually steal the car in the first place. Now, high-end parked vehicles are unyoinkable in the early game – unless you carjack an in-vehicle driver the old-school way – as they come with their own security systems, only bypassed with skills you gain as you progress through the game. And they’ll come with a GPS tracker for good measure, requiring you to drive extra fast to outrun its location capabilities. That’ll tally with the fact that driving itself, particularly at high speeds, will be “more challenging” in GTA 6, per Rockstar North co-studio head Rob Nelson, thanks to roads being denser and narrower – to, again, more accurately reflect the real world of Miami and the wider Florida area. Even beyond that there are things we saw in the leaks over the past few days, such as a storage system in your trunk, that suggest maybe you can’t whip out a minigun from your back pocket any more, plus the apparent need to even re-fuel your cars as you drive them.

So the overall picture is fairly clear already, even before anyone outside of Rockstar seems to have played it: GTA 6 is intentionally pushing for realism, and will by design come at the cost of the famous ease at which you can play it. Ease which, if I were to guess, has probably played an enormous part in its unprecedented success, particularly in how GTA consistently breaks out of ‘core gamer’ containment into the typically less patient mainstream. It seems a gigantic risk.

It’s also one I’m frankly delighted Rockstar is taking. For all the “do I also have to manage my bowel movements” comments I’ve seen (and enjoyed), and for all I have genuine concerns about whether this might actually be fun (and don’t get me started on the seemingly RDR2-like controls – there were a worrying amount of occasions I tried pressing a button to pick up my hat in that game, only to inexplicably punch my horse), I am actually glad Rockstar is doing this.

This is, at its core, exactly what we’ve all been talking about for the past however many months or years or aeons we’ve been in this games industry forever-crisis. Too many decision-makers have been playing it agonisingly, irrationally safe. And ultimately it’s been to their own detriment. Rockstar, here, has the privilege of making something that’s as close as any game has ever come to a guaranteed success. It has an unfathomably large budget. It has seemingly as long as it likes to make it. And with that unparalleled privilege it’s chosen to actually be ambitious. Not ambitious as it’s typically used in video game writing – read: a big and expensive map with nice graphics. Ambitious as in trying to do something that is not remotely easy.

It’s also perhaps less of a risk when you start to think about what’s truly taken off over the past few years. Elden Ring. Baldur’s Gate 3. Even Animal Crossing: New Horizons. These are games that found their way onto the BBC, that your friend who doesn’t play games played, maybe even bought a Switch for during the pandemic. And crucially, these aren’t “casual” games, by most definitions. They’re games with deep, sometimes very deep mechanics, systems that require you to go out of your way, to fail, or to grasp at suspended meaning. The more I think it through the more I’m talking myself out of this being a risk at all. Difficulty and awkwardness can sell too, particular at a time where people increasingly yearn for friction, against the uncanny smoothness of modern digital life.

That said, making refuelling your car fun is still going to be very difficult. As is making me peg it through bins and backyards instead of driving a faux-Ferrari to escape the police. As is managing my Tamagotchi partner and being a not-that-evil baddie and manually scanning every car before I decide to nick it. Rockstar may or may not pull that off. But it could – just look at how good that big Netflix showcase was. And if any studio has an obligation to try, it’s this one.