If you can actually believe it, we’re just days away from our first official look at Grand Theft Auto 6 – thanks to that previously announced GTA 6 trailer finally having a release time. While the overly secretive developer is staying true to form and giving us very little to go on going into it, we now know when our first look at GTA 6 will arrive and it’s – strangely – just before The Game Awards.
Now, we know a game like Grand Theft Auto 6 is going to have a very tough time not being one of the best open world games available at launch – maybe even one of the best games of all time, when you look at the more recent GTA V and Red Dead Redemption 2 – but the fact that this trailer is dropping just hours before a major industry event like The Game Awards is both shocking and entirely expected. If you were to take a look at all the new PS5 games and new Xbox games due trailers, Grand Theft Auto 6 would be the last one that needs the boost an appearance at The Game Awards would offer. Every morsel of information from Rockstar Games is pounced upon by hundreds of thousands of fans and any sort of social media post on a game like GTA 6 racks up hundreds of thousands of interactions in a matter of minutes.
However, as this social media post from Rockstar Games shows, the Grand Theft Auto 6 trailer is set to debut at 06:00 PST / 09:00 EST / 14:00 GMT on December 5; this is just before The Game Awards, which is set to take place on December 7. We can only speculate that the reason for Rockstar Games’ decision to publish the upcoming trailer beforehand is to avoid being caught in any announcements scheduled for The Game Awards itself – and, the fact that it really doesn’t need The Game Awards to actually promote its trailer.
What do we know about this trailer right now? Well, not a lot – officially, anyway. The image, as you can see, shows a color palette not too dissimilar to what we associate with Grand Theft Auto Vice City – which reinforces rumors that the game will see players return to the iconic location – and the palm trees double down on the fact that we’re going to see Rockstar Games’ fictional depiction of Miami at some point.
Beyond that, though, we just have to look to older Grand Theft Auto titles to glean information about what to expect. As you can see below, the first GTA 5 trailer is a rather basic – but also effective – way of presenting players with a sense of what the game is about, while also not giving too much away. It shows off key areas of the city (which is Los Santos in this case), offers us a glimse of the technological improvements on the way (like the graphics and vehicle physics), and an insight into the characters we’ll be playing as and meeting (thanks to Michael’s dry voice over).
So, while there’s nothing to say Rockstar Games won’t change things up for Grand Theft Auto 6, we can imagine we’ll get something – around a minute long – very similar to this trailer. We’ll see a mix of playable characters and NPCs going about their normal lives, a little bit of crime, and a lot of the location we’ll be spending the next whoever-knows-how-many years in.
With GTA 6 leaks teasing two playable protagonists, one of which is the series’ first playable female character, and a story that spans several locations, we’re all in for a treat. However, with so much misinformation out there regarding this highly anticipated game, it’s difficult to say with any certainly just how much is true when it comes to the finer details. This game has been in development a long time and so much can change in such a short period of time, too. We’re confident that this game will be largely set in Vice City, and we do think the evidence of multiple playable protagonists is plausible, but beyond that we’ll all just have to wait and see.
If you want to know what else to expect, you can check out our predictions for the GTA 6 trailer song right here; every major Grand Theft Auto trailer has one and we can’t imagine Grand Theft Auto 6’s first trailer is going to be any different. You can also read up on the latest GTA 4 remaster rumors here and prepare your hard drive for the inevitably-huge download size of GTA 6 with the best Xbox expansion cards and best PS5 SSDs right here.