Every Grand Theft Auto VI trailer has sold the same thing, two people in love and on the run from the law. Jason and Lucia are the Bonnie-and-Clyde couple at the center of the game. Rockstar Games has now confirmed their relationship is not just story, but rather a system that you shape as you play. How far it goes is one of the few things the studio still will not confirm.
We have watched this relationship build across years of marketing. The first trailer, second trailer and even the launch trailer all gave us a couple with troubled pasts, a steamy shower-kiss scene that set fans off and a partnership that always looked one argument away from falling apart.
The Edge hands-on turns that romance into something you can measure. According to the interview, the closeness meter sits on a four-point scale that climbs the more time the two spend together, whether that is a walk on the beach, a gym session or a long drive with one of them at the wheel and the other on their phone. The wider Edge preview runs through every relationship activity and the gameplay that surrounds it. What matters for the couple is that the bond is something you feed or neglect.
This is a different kind of couple than the series has built before. Franklin, Michael and Trevor were self-serving and opportunistic, thrown together by circumstance and held together by money. Jason and Lucia start from an emotional history as well as a professional one. They aren't just partners who tolerate each other for a score, they are two people trying to decide whether they have a future. As in Grand Theft Auto V you can switch between the two leads, but here the switching carries the kind of emotional weight it never did with the old trio.
The goal here is no longer to pile up money and status, it is to work out what kind of life the two want as individuals and as a couple. We start them wanting to be together and wanting to give the relationship another shot, co-studio head Rob Nelson said, but as the game goes on it is yours to keep or yours to lose. Even the Criminal Profile system feeds into how their story unfolds, so how you treat the world bleeds into how the two treat each other.
The one thing Nelson would not answer though is whether the couple will end up married based on how you handle it.
The couple's intimacy is a big part of why the game has and will continue to trend, for reasons that are not always about story. A wave of nude leaks has kept Jason and Lucia everywhere, though those leaks do not confirm full nudity in the finished game. What the preview confirms is more telling. Intimacy is another dial you control, part of the same closeness system. Even Edge's screenshots of the two carry it, Lucia aiming from a car window while Jason drives, the pair sharing a quiet moment over a convertible, Lucia alone under the club lights.
How Jason and Lucia's relationship works in GTA 6
Element | What we know |
|---|---|
Closeness scale | A four-point meter that rises the more time the couple spends together |
How you raise it | Beach walks, cycling, gym workouts after buying a membership, driving around together |
Character switching | Swap between Jason and Lucia when the story allows, as in Grand Theft Auto V |
What you can shape | How close and intimate they get, even the legal status of their relationship |
Marriage | Nelson refused to confirm or deny whether the couple can marry |
What you cannot do | Pull them apart or quit crime, they are on the run together |
Keep or lose | The relationship starts hopeful and is yours to keep or yours to lose as the story goes |
Criminal Profile | Behaving as a professional or an irredeemable criminal feeds into how their story unfolds |
The relationship is the one part of the story the trailers cannot spoil, because part of it is yours to uncover, cultivate and grow.
Jason and Lucia have anchored our coverage of GTA 6 since the official reveal. We pulled everything confirmed about the two of them into one place. The gameplay, the world and the leaks all orbit the same question. Everything Rockstar has shown points one way, a crime story that lives or dies on whether two people can hold on to each other.
Rockstar left the marriage question open for a reason. Whether Jason or Lucia make it is the one ending the trailers cannot spoil, because part of it is yours to write.