GTA 6’s second trailer flexes Rockstar’s unparalleled ambition and sells players on two games in one

With the cry of gulls, GTA 6 returns to us. We’re back in Rockstar’s spin on Florida and we’re here for, what exactly? A story trailer? Well, it’s complicated.

And those birds are a decent way into the complications, as it happens. I write to inform you that there are birds in three of the first four shots of the new trailer. There’s a gaggle of gulls flying over the establishing shot, then birds – geese? – flying in V formation when we’re on the ground. Then in shot four, with the hero on the roof, those gulls are back, less orderly than the geese, and acting very much like the wayward pedestrians of the sky.

What’s with all the birds? Probably nothing! It’s unlikely to be a quiet suggestion that GTA’s finally going full ornithologist, I’m sad to say. I mean, I’d love that. But I think if there is a point to details this small and inconsequential, it’s something very simple, but also very Rockstar. Hey, this game has birds in it, but also multiple types of bird.

This is the world Rockstar moves in these days, a world in which every part of a trailer is picked over and deconstructed. A world where every element is sounded out for range and extravagance and design excess. There’s plenty of room for that in the new trailer, but because of all this, there’s also something fascinating about the trailer as a whole. Something that I think speaks to the kind of game GTA now is. If this is a GTA 6 story trailer – and other smarter people have pointed out it’s not brilliant at setting up its story – it can no longer be just that. It has to cater to the audiences for both sides of Rockstar’s game. It needs to offer stuff for the story people, but also the people who are here for the sandbox.

In other words, while GTA 6 may look like a movie at times, there’s a huge difference between a story you’re going to watch for two hours and a world you’re going to live in for – what? – over a decade, if GTA 5 is anything to go by. Any trailer needs to reflect that. And if anything illustrates the split nature of GTA as a series, it’s the highway shot we get early on.

It’s a lovely shot, but it’s also dense. The character is travelling from A to B: that’s the plot sorted. But there’s a road sign filled with place names to mull over and deconstruct – that’s for the fans who remember the lineage. Then there’s a plane overhead, and a truck towing a jetski. It’s less a trailer for a film at this point and more an advert for a bunch of new toys that you’ll soon get to play with, all wrapped up with a bit of nostalgia: back to Vice City!

It feels like almost every sequence in the trailer is like this, designed for two audiences, at least, with very different concerns. As we move from a kind of realism in the early sections to a montage of excess once Lucia’s out of prison we get things that could be story beats – romance, robberies, cinematic sunsets. But we also get airstrips, night clubs, yachts, social media. We get climbing on buildings, being chased by choppers, shooting while driving, a bit of kicking people around.

Jumping between cars, stealing cars off trucks. All of this stuff: yes, Jason and Lucia are getting up to some serious hijinks in this game, but it’s also telling sandbox fans that the game will be wild. You will be able to drive all sorts of things, interact with the environment in all sorts of ways. There’ll be fighting but also dancing. The world will be chaotic and Floridian even before you’ve fired a gun.

I say all this because I’ve seen this trailer a number of times now, and in different situations. I’ve watched it cold, with no idea what was coming, and I’ve watched it alongside a series superfan. And the superfan, I swear, was watching something completely different to me. They were looking beyond the heroes in every shot, into the background, reading bumper stickers and T-shirt slogans and harvesting in-jokes, but also just looking at the skyscrapers and how tall they are, and wondering which ones they’d get to jump off. They’d look at the sunset and compare it in their mind to the way GTA 5 handled sunsets, and what it might mean for the lighting. They were looking for plot points, but they were also wondering whether that control pad on a table in the apartment sequence means you can play video games within this video game, and maybe you can level the apartment up as you get richer.

It works, I think, this split-focused trailer of a game that will be both a story and a wild environment in which anything at all can happen. It works in part because this is ersatz Florida, and with that you get a shift from capturing the memorable architecture of LA or New York to a place where the buildings may not be quite as famous but the milieu is increasingly crucial.

And it works for a deeper reason, I reckon. While GTA 6 is promising you an interactive world, and also trying to set up its cinematic story, it’s also promising you that its story will be cinematic, and that’s a rather nuanced proposition. I keep coming back to the shot of the prison guard – the pause before he replies to the hero, the way he turns in his chair, the way his voice is distorted by the window mic. It’s a story beat, but it’s also an attempt to capture a performance, and to capture a sense of a real person in what’s possibly a fairly small role.

GTA’s not just telling this story, then. It’s revelling, self-consciously, in its ability to create cinema, to depict interesting places and people and the things about the world it has noticed. It’s put fake handheld wobble on many of the shots. It’s pitched that lazy tracking shot out the window of the car while Jason drives past a crime scene as if there’s a cameraman in the passenger seat. This stuff, like the different kinds of birds, is a flex – and a reminder that the whole extravagant thing is a flex when you get down to it.