The recent GTA 6 “extended look” on Netflix wasn’t’ very clear on whether you can swap between its protagonists Jason and Lucia at will. Apart from a moment where the camera pulls away from Lucia and back down to Jason miles away, there wasn’t a lot of swapping going on, especially during the action.
According to an interview on Famitsu with Rockstar North’s co-studio head Rob Nelson (translated by GamesRadar+), the ability to swap characters will depend on the mission and where you’re at in the story.
“During the story, there are times where you can’t switch from one character for some reason,” he said. “There are some missions where you are free to switch as much as you want, but there are some sections where we want you to experience it from a certain character’s perspective, like GTA 5, so we limit switching.”
As an example, Nelson said you used to be able to swap between Jason and Lucia during a mission early on in the game, but the team decided it would make more sense for Jason to take the lead with his military background. Other missions, like the one we saw in the extended look where the two are escaping a bank robbery, will do the swapping for you. After firing at the cops as Jason in the backseat, you’ll be put in the driver’s seat as Lucia so you can make your getaway.
The mission where Jason and Lucia are under attack at the end of the extended look, however, will let you freely swap between them, Nelson said. We don’t see this actually happen, but I think I can see how it would play out, especially if part of the objective is to survive long enough to reunite the two by the end.
Nelson makes it sound like the in-mission hot swapping will be reserved for pivotal moments in the story and everything else will be locked to one or the other. I had hoped that maybe GTA 6 would be a co-op game disguised as a singleplayer game, but it looks like we’ll have to play by Rockstar’s rules. That said, we already know you’ll be able to freely swap outside of missions thanks to Dazed’s preview of the game, so there will be plenty of time to see what kind of mayhem you can cause with that kind of power at least.
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