The upcoming GTA 6 won’t just be absolutely enormous in both scale and scope, it’ll also offer an incredibly dense and sumptuous narrative experience as according to Rockstar North’s Rob Nelson, the main story of the open world behemoth could take you around 80 hours to complete. And of course, if you want to explore the fully realized world of Lenoida (even a little bit) and take part in some of it’s ever-emergent side activities, GTA 6 could take you way longer.
It’s no surprise that open world titles like the caliber of GTA 6, Red Dead Redemption 2, Skyrim and several other games actually fall into the category of “forever” games cause they basically offer a never-ending, ever-engaging experience where you cannot run out of things to do or places to discover. And of course, GTA 6 is going to set a new precedent even in that category of titles so yes, it’s actually less of a videogame in the traditional sense and more of a life-simulator, offering a nigh-infinite level of playability.
In a new interview with The New York Times, Rob Nelson, co-studio head of Rockstar North has provided a brief rundown on the amount of time that’s possibly going to take for completing the central narrative experience in GTA 6: “Of course we want to do everything; we want to have every mechanic that you can imagine,” Nelson said. “But we do have to carefully pick and choose what we think is best for our characters and our story and what we can handle creatively and technically… I hope that there will be people that want to get up, have a cup of coffee, shower, get dressed, go out for a little exercise,” Nelson said.
Previous GTA titles have also offered a lengthy narrative experience and it’s great to see Rockstar sticking true to their design philosophy even in the current era of gaming.
It’s also revealed that the full map of Vice city in GTA 6 is twice the size of the enormous Lost Santos from GTA 5, which is absolutely staggering and could easily take years to explore to it’s fullest.
GTA 6 is currently slated to launch for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S on November 19, 2026.
