I Can't Wait to Ignore the Main Story of GTA 6

Published Nov 15, 2026, 3:00 AM EST Jen Glennon is a New York-based journalist and editor with more than a decade of experience covering games and entertainment. She has previously worked at Kotaku, Inverse, and Newsweek. Jen joined Polygon in 2025 and has a relentless appetite for Final Fantasy, Yakuza, and Costco rotisserie chicken. Have fun robbing stores, I'm going snorkeling Screenshot: Polygon via Rockstar Games It's hard to believe, but after years of waiting, we're less than a week away from the launch of Grand Theft Auto 6. Tons of people are planning to take time off from work or school in order to sink their teeth into Rockstar's newest adventure. Many of them will be diving headfirst into Jason and Lucia's story, taking on high-stakes robberies to see how the couple's ascent through Vice City's underworld plays out. But for me, the "grand theft auto" of GTA 6 is actually the least intriguing element of 2026's most anticipated game. I couldn't care less about shooting people and stealing cars. I'm far more excited to explore the vast, glorious sandbox Rockstar has created. One of the major draws of Sega's Yakuza series is that it provides a fantastic virtual tourism experience. When I visited Tokyo for the first time, I walked out of Shinjuku Station and knew exactly where I was, having spent so much time as Kiryu running around the streets of Kamurocho. I'm hoping for a similar kind of experience with GTA 6. I've never been to Miami, but I'd like to go someday. Now I can check out all those cool Art Deco buildings and take a fan boat through a swamp without spending IRL money on bottle service. Pound for pound, video games are the cheapest form of vacation out there, and this one's shaping up to be a doozy. I'm also looking forward to meeting all the wonderful weirdos Rockstar has crafted to inhabit this dazzling sandbox. One of my favorite elements of Red Dead Redemption 2 was simply talking to people and watching their reactions. If you kick off a fistfight in Valentine's saloon and get thrown in jail for the night, passerby will scold you and warn you not to "cause trouble" the next few times you visit. My favorite memories of that game have little to do with hunting O'Driscolls — it's all the dumb shenanigans I bumbled into while ignoring the main campaign, like doing an oopsie and shooting a man when I just wanted to steal his sick raccoon-skin cap, then getting run out of town by multiple lawmen and racking up a hefty bounty as a result of my thieving ways. GTA 6 promises to up this kind of immersion by several orders of magnitude. Back in August, thanks to a New York Times feature about the game, we learned that Rockstar created an entire studio just for NPCs. "Once we managed to accomplish that level of interactive fidelity in a more sparsely populated version of America 100 years ago, we were already imagining what it would be like if we could do that at the scale and density of a modern environment," Rockstar North co-head Rob Nelson told the Times. If GTA 6 feels more like Red Dead 2 than GTA 5, I'd be delighted. Based on what we've seen in the Netflix Extended Look and various previews of the game, GTA 6 will have literally dozens of minigames and optional activities to distract me from the central plot. These include fishing, jet skiing, mini-golf, scuba diving, lifting weights, hunting, racing, fan boating, billiards, basketball, and parachuting. There's even an in-universe animated TV show, Macca and Friends, that I'm sure is going to be ridiculously in-depth, just like Red Dead 2's movie theater in San Denis. I mean, I guess I'll shoot some people in GTA 6 if I really have to, but honestly? I'm just here for the vibes. Free sign-up Get Polygon’s Wishlister newsletter A weekly cheat sheet to what you’ll eventually love to play. No buying, no commitment — just saving for later. Sign up free Free. Unsubscribe anytime.