GTA VI Just Explained Who Teaches Jason and Lucia Crime
The most interesting thing in Rockstar’s new LOVE Magazine interview isn’t another GTA VI screenshot.
It’s Raul.
Because the more Rockstar explains Jason and Lucia, the more it sounds like these two are not arriving in Vice City as fully qualified professional criminals with a LinkedIn profile that says Bank Robbery, Organised Crime, Advanced Getaway Logistics.
They’re young. They’re flawed. They’re inexperienced.
And they need somebody who actually knows how the place works.
That somebody is Raul Bautista.
Rockstar describes him as an older, experienced criminal who knows the Vice City underworld Jason and Lucia don’t yet understand, and who can bring them into the sort of bigger heists they wouldn’t naturally have access to.
That immediately makes him more interesting than “cool older criminal in white suit.”
He may be the reason GTA VI’s criminal progression makes sense.
Want the bigger picture before Raul starts handing out advanced criminal education? Head to our GTA VI hub for everything Rockstar has actually confirmed so far, without the usual internet séance.
Jason and Lucia apparently have to learn how to become serious criminals
This is what caught me.
Crime games usually have a slightly strange relationship with experience.
You can start the game having robbed approximately one petrol station and twenty minutes later somebody is asking whether you fancy stealing military hardware from a fortified compound because apparently criminal networking is incredibly efficient.
Raul gives Rockstar a much better way into that.
Jason and Lucia don’t know everybody. They don’t understand the entire criminal ecosystem. They haven’t somehow memorised every corrupt businessman, fence, smuggler and professional psychopath in Leonida before the opening credits.
Raul does.
So instead of bigger jobs appearing because the game has decided your XP number is sufficiently sexy, they can appear because Jason and Lucia have met somebody capable of opening those doors.
That sounds small, but it changes the whole shape of criminal progression.
You’re not just unlocking missions.
You’re getting deeper into the world.
And Raul can be the bastard holding the keys.
That also explains why Rockstar seems so interested in making Jason and Lucia vulnerable in the first place. If they were already unstoppable criminal masterminds, Raul would basically be expensive scenery. Give them blind spots, inexperience and things they genuinely don’t know, and now an older career criminal has an actual function.
He can teach them.
Influence them.
Possibly lead them into something considerably worse than whatever they thought they were signing up for.
Which, frankly, is how meeting an experienced bank robber should go.
Rockstar had already started filling in Jason, Lucia and Leonida before LOVE Magazine arrived with another wheelbarrow of details. Catch up on our previous Game Informer coverage and see how much clearer the pair are becoming.
Lucia sounds like she’s being written as a person first
The LOVE interview also gives us more on Lucia.
Rockstar writer Alexa D’Agostino says parts of her own immigrant-family background influenced the character, while the writing team wanted Lucia to stand alongside characters like Arthur Morgan and Niko Bellic as a fully realised protagonist.
That is not exactly setting the bar at ankle height.
Arthur and Niko work because they still feel like people when the shooting stops.
They have histories. Contradictions. Weaknesses. Beliefs. Things they regret. Things they don’t regret nearly enough.
Rockstar seems to be aiming for that same kind of depth with Lucia and Jason.
They can be wrong. They learn from each other. They’re deliberately written as flawed and vulnerable rather than two interchangeable murder mannequins with excellent hair.
And again, that circles back to Raul.
If Jason and Lucia have things to learn, then the people around them can genuinely change them.
That’s far more interesting than the usual videogame character-development system where emotional growth is measured by whether the shotgun now has a larger magazine.
Rockstar is apparently writing the people you normally run over too
Then there’s Leonida itself.
Rockstar says election signs, campaign robocalls, political talk shows, radio commercials and other bits of everyday cultural sludge are all part of making the state feel alive.
That’s nice.
Then you discover there is an actual dedicated pedestrian-dialogue writing operation.
Now I’m interested.
Because pedestrians in open-world games are normally treated like decorative wildlife. They walk around, say one of eight things about the weather, panic when you mount the pavement and eventually become part of an insurance claim.
Rockstar is apparently going much further.
Open-world writer James Horton describes the dialogue work as deeply technical because what NPCs say has to connect properly with game systems, relationships and the situation in which the player encounters them.
There are writers whose job is essentially to make sure some random Leonida resident has the correct opinion at the correct moment while Jason is standing nearby wearing a ski mask and holding a shotgun.
That is magnificent.
Rockstar also reportedly spoke with locals, police officers and gang members during its Florida research.
Which means somebody, somewhere, had to professionally ask a gang member whether Rockstar’s imaginary criminals felt authentic enough.
Imagine explaining that expense claim.
Purpose of trip: criminal authenticity.
Meals: $46.
Taxi: $31.
Conversation with gang member: apparently invaluable.
This is an absurd industry and I hope it never becomes sensible.
If GTA VI is making you wonder why more games don’t let us properly inhabit the criminal side of things, our Best Crime Games hub is where the respectable citizens leave the room.
None of this means Rockstar has invented sentient pedestrians
There is a limit to what we can take from all this.
Rockstar is explaining how it writes the world and what it wants Leonida to feel like.
That does not mean every NPC has a secret life, three mortgages and a complicated custody arrangement.
It doesn’t prove GTA VI has some revolutionary new simulation where every pedestrian remembers what you did last Thursday and has already discussed it with their mother.
We simply don’t know how deep that side of the game actually goes yet.
But I don’t think that makes the interview less interesting.
It tells us what Rockstar is trying to build.
Jason and Lucia are not being presented as finished criminals. Raul appears to be their route into a larger criminal world. Leonida is being written with enough cultural detail that Rockstar has dedicated people to worrying about what ordinary residents say, what they listen to and what political nonsense is being pumped into their ears.
That all fits together.
The characters are supposed to feel like they belong in a place.
And the place is supposed to feel like it existed before the player arrived and immediately drove a stolen car through a pharmacy.
That’s much more useful than another screenshot of Lucia in a diner.
The screenshot tells us she found lunch.
Raul tells us who might teach her how to rob the place.
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