What GTA 6's Extended Look tells us about Vice City, Lucia, and the biggest creative launch of the decade

I've got a confession to make. Well, two actually. Firstly, I'm a massive fan of video games. Secondly, I never really played GTA 5.

I've been a gamer since my dad brought home a ZX Spectrum in the mid-80s. The version with the squidgy keyboard. I lost entire days to Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy, aged just seven. Then came an Atari ST in the '90s, with Gauntlet and Bomb Jack, and a bunch of lads from my cul-de-sac huddled around the computer for hours on end. Later, I took a PlayStation to university, where Wipeout, Street Fighter and a bunch of Rizlas dominated my time when I should have been studying.

I'll still happily lose a weekend to anything with a decent backstory. But GTA 5 gave me three men to play as and no other choice. So somewhere around 2014, I put the controller down and never ventured into that virtual world again. I wasn't protesting or anything. I just couldn't relate.

Now there's Lucia Caminos. A female lead in a Rockstar Games game. Someone hand these guys a medal. Like many avid gamers, I watched the 'Extended Look' on Netflix today – a 26-minute-long trailer that gave us the longest footage we've ever seen of the much-anticipated game. GTA 6 launches on 19 November, which is a Thursday. That's a long weekend I can look forward to, then. I'll definitely be taking a few extra days off.

From an art and design perspective, what do two trailers, a box-art reveal, and a half-hour showcase tell us?

At last, a female protagonist

Happy days. Lucia is the first female lead in the series who isn't an extra or a prostitute you can beckon to your car. She's one half of the story. An actual lead I can play. And I can switch between her and her co-star, Jason Duval, more or less whenever I like. (I'm hoping I can just stick with her, if I'm honest.)

This matters so much. Games are the biggest entertainment industry on the planet. Even bigger than film and music combined. GTA 5 is the single highest-grossing entertainment product ever made, with around 230 million copies sold worldwide. And it's always reflected the zeitgeist.

That, of course, isn't always a good thing. Yet Rockstar says it's just satire and a bit of fun. Fair enough. But for as long as I can remember, women have been strippers, girlfriends, and not much else.

GTA 6 reflects a different one. Lucia isn't the punchline or the prize. Oh, don't get me wrong. The male gaze is still very much there. She's beautiful. She wears revealing clothes. And she very much has her feminine moments. Wallpapers you can download from the official Rockstar website mostly show her as the sidekick. But maybe I'm reading too much into it. Whatever. She's a character with a criminal record, a bad temper and a plan. And the game treats her relationship as its emotional spine.

If GTA is a snapshot of where popular culture sits, then it shows we've made some progress. I appreciate the irony in that sentence. I know this is still a game about violence in a man's world. But hey, it took 13 years and a billion dollars to get a woman behind the wheel of a stolen car.

No longer just a "pretty face"

The footage released today shows a female character with depth. She's not like the classic fools we see in old horror movies, pathetically tripping over logs and inevitably getting killed. She's got a backstory. She's fresh out of prison and wearing an ankle tag. That's where the game kicks off. There's a bit where she fights without a gun, and at one point, she sees off an attacker with the spiked heel of her shoe.

In another bit that made me laugh out loud, she's standing in a hot-pink apartment, asking Jason to pick out which dress she should wear for cocktails at a rooftop bar called Effluvia. The domestic scene shows that Rockstar is having fun with this. Throwing in things you'd expect in a rom-com, not a game about crime.

This will interest anyone who designs characters for a living: Rockstar reportedly toyed with a four-lead version of the game before settling on a couple. Which, given what I understand about plots and movies, works best. With two people, there's tension. They have history, talk, fight, and share a flat together. It's something we can all relate to.

Then there's the animation. Wow. I still can't get over how the light hits the characters' faces. And the hair! Wow, the hair. It moves as it does in real life. These are incredible details for a girl who began her gaming career with 8-bit graphics.

The noise around the game

As predicted, the hype around GTA 6 online is overwhelmingly male. Yes, most surveys put women at somewhere around half of all players. It's just that women don't tend to pick up games like this one. That might well change now there's a female lead.

Over the last two years, we've had trailer breakdowns and "here's everything we know" videos on YouTube, and they've mostly come from men. As you can imagine, they're pretty excited about the strip club (with the most realistic boobies yet, no doubt). And there's a lot of obsession over weapons and cars. When Lucia does get a mention, it's often as the "girlfriend" in a Bonnie and Clyde caper, as if Jason is the whole thing, and she's the plus-one.

Then there are the memes. Instagram keeps showing me "my wife during the GTA launch" jokes, usually with a picture of Homer Simpson slumped in front of the telly. I left a comment on one of them, "Would be great to see a version of this with Marge or Lisa", but got no response. There are also loads of men jokingly pulling a sickie while a "long-suffering woman" rolls her eyes in the doorway. Ok, it's harmless enough. But notice who's holding the controller in every single one of them. In my house, it's also me. And I'll be the one hogging the sofa come mid-November.

I don't think any of this is malicious, by the way. It's just the ecosystem of commentary around big games. It's built by and for a particular audience. It just hasn't caught up with what it's commenting on.

Sadly, gaming does have a dark side. In 2014, Gamergate saw women who made, wrote about, or simply criticised games bullied off the internet. They received unbelievably vile threats that made headlines in The New York Times and were discussed by the United Nations. Over a decade later, women who stream on Twitch have made a grim little genre out of it. I watch clip after clip of what happens the moment a female voice comes over the headset in a lobby full of men. "Get back in the kitchen" is the softer insult... You can imagine the rest. It's depressing, yes. But also hugely satisfying when said women beat them all to win the session.

So when I see the content around GTA 6 skews male, I'm not describing a mild imbalance in a neutral space. It's more that, historically, it's a space that has made a point of telling women they aren't welcome.

It's why Lucia means so much to me and other female gamers. Rockstar, the biggest creative studio in the biggest entertainment industry, is saying she's the player now, too. They took their time. Half the people I know who watched the Extended Look are also women who, like me, sat out GTA 5. There's a new audience these days, and I'd love to see more of that reflected in online content. Right, rant over, back to the game.

Florida in all its glory

GTA 6 is set in the fictional state of Leonida, with Vice City (Rockstar's Miami) at its heart. The art direction shows that the studio has done some serious homework on the location.

I love how hardcore fans become obsessed with the detail. They've been comparing trailer stills with real shots of South Beach and finding them almost identical. Everything from the Art Deco frontages of Ocean Drive and Wynwood's murals to the famous causeways that link the islands together.

The similarities don't stop there. And as expected with GTA, real places get fictional names. There's the swampland region called Grassrivers, inspired by the Everglades, and alligators and flamingos throughout (I hope we can shoot them – I loved hunting in Red Dead). And then look at the details, and you see ray-traced reflections on the water, too. It's ridiculous... in a good way.

Then there's the satire. Rockstar's take on the world. Graphic designers will love spotting scenes stuffed with parody brands. Sessanta Nove is a luxury fashion house, inspired by Louis Vuitton. We see Patriot Beer return. And there's a dollar bill reading "United States of Paranoia". There's even an entire segment built around a fictional social feed that looks suspiciously like the one we doomscroll from our sofas.

Someone had the glorious job of designing all these fictional logos, not to mention all the billboards, adverts, and fast food establishments – even the commercials on the telly in Lucia and Jason's flat.

As you'd expect, Rockstar avoided politics, viral trends or anything that would date the story too fast. They didn't want the dialogue to feel stuck or take sides.

Some nostalgia for diehard fans

The box art is always something us creatives look forward to the most. Revealed in June, it's a near shot-for-shot homage to the original 2002 Vice City cover. A comic-book mosaic the franchise has used since GTA III, only this time soaked in neon lighting and modern Florida.

There's a speedboat, sports car, chopper and alligator. Look closely, and you'll spot a 'Vice Baby' tattoo on one of the characters' arms. It's a lovely bit of design continuity that shows Rockstar understands the value of its own visual assets two decades on.

Will the whole world stop?

If you're not a gamer, this next bit will blow your mind. GTA 6's second trailer was watched 475 million times in its first 24 hours. The budget is rumoured to be somewhere north of $1bn (some say it's closer to $2bn). This would make it the most expensive piece of entertainment ever made. Newzoo reckons it'll sell between 37 and 51 million copies in its first week of launch alone.

And then there's the point my husband made: productivity. A figure of around $1bn (around £750m) in lost US productivity is predicted. It's a rough calculation that assumes 1.5 million Americans take the day off and multiplies that by the average worker's contribution to GDP. And that's just the States.

Whether that's true, who knows, but I love that a car-tuning firm in Simi Valley, California, called Burger Motorsports, has already posted a notice announcing a "company-wide operational pause" on 19 November after staff warned they'd be in 'Vice City' that day. It's quite possibly the smartest bit of PR I've seen in a long time. Bravo Burger.

Is all this just a bit daft? All this fuss over a video game. I don't think so, not as someone passionate about creativity. This is a piece of design that shows us what can happen when a studio is given 13 years, a couple of thousand staff, and a colossal budget to make something it cares about.

Rockstar has delayed the release twice, apologising both times. But it was never going to launch GTA 6 until it was ready. Too much is riding on it. I love that it also confirmed the single-player campaign has no microtransactions and that no generative AI was used to make the game's content. Wherever you stand on this debate, it's a statement of intent about craft. Every bit of those 80 hours of story (that's how long a playthrough takes, according to Rockstar North's co-studio head, Rob Nelson) was drawn, modelled, animated, and voiced by humans.

An important note about the madness

I've got to be honest. GTA is violent. Gloriously, cartoonishly, sometimes uncomfortably so. There are carjackings, shootouts, drugs, gangs, and all that jazz. It's been the series' bread and butter since the top-down days. When you heard a bunch of Hare Krishnas, you'd throw your car around to find them, mowing them all down in one go. The 'Gouranga' bonus was always a nice dopamine boost.

Only this time the graphics are insanely good. They're so realistic I can only imagine the fresh round of calls for bans once the footage of a six-star police chase does the rounds on breakfast telly. That debate has been around since 1997. It'll pop up again, no doubt.

So here's my other confession. The other day, an Instagram post popped up in my feed showing a still from a film of a bearded man at the wheel, jaw clenched and eyes streaming. It was captioned "me driving through my first pedestrian on GTA 6 after years of waiting". I laughed out loud because I am also looking forward to this moment, along with all the crazy rampages and the shootouts. And I'm the gentlest, kindest 48-year-old woman you'll ever meet. I rescue spiders from my bathtub. Toads from swimming pools. I pat strangers' dogs on my walks. And I donate to charity. But come November, I'll be in Vice City doing unspeakable things.

All my male friends are the same. They don't hate women. And they'd never hurt a fly. And yet, here we all are, patiently waiting for the chance to steal a sports car and outrun the cops once again.

See you in Leonida then

Believe me when I say this... Creative Boom will be forgotten on 19 November. Oh, there'll be content that week; it'll just not involve me. I'll be somewhere near Ocean Drive with an ankle tag and a bad idea, finding out whether Lucia and Jason's relationship survives the plot. Whether Rockstar has indeed made any progress. Hey, I might find myself putting that controller down once again.

Whatever happens, GTA 6 will reveal what the most ambitious art department in games has been up to since 2013. We'll debunk all the rumours, like... is it true our characters age the longer we play? Can we get better bodies if we hit the gym or destroy them with too much junk food? Is the map three times the size of Red Dead Redemption 2's? These are all the things myself and millions of other gamers can't wait to find out. Book the week off. I know I will.