I'm calling it: GTA 6 is officially an immersive sim, based on what you can do with NPCs

I don't mean to be contrarian (which is rare for me), but I've been generally unfazed by the hype for Grand Theft Auto 6. It's not that I don't think it'll be good—I'm actually damn near certain it will—it's just that none of what Rockstar has focused on so far in its marketing speaks to me all that much.

Anyway, throw those equanimous sentiments out the window, because an anecdote from Edge magazine's new mondo-feature on GTA 6 has convinced me this game is actually an immersive sim, and now I'm bouncing off the walls in anticipation. Chatting about his experience actually playing the game, Rockstar head of development Phil Hooker told a story about the time he deployed a bit of unorthodox crowd control to prepare a store for a heist.

"Recently I was robbing a store that was full of people," said Hooker. "I wanted to get rid of them, because they'd be witnesses who would cause me trouble." What did he do? Well, in GTAs of yore, your options would have been pretty limited, but GTA 6's dovetailing systems gave our man an opportunity. "I basically started picking fights with them, provoking them and then immediately defusing it.

"I didn't actually get them into a fight—I'd just go: 'Ah, sorry, leave it'. Then they would leave the store, so that would clear them out and I could rob it more cleanly." It's one of the things Hooker says he, and Rockstar generally, focuses on in testing: "meeting new NPCs, for example, trying different ways in which to interact with them, trying to find ways to combine the features in ways we maybe haven't thought about."

Forgive me, but is that not the most immersive sim stuff you've ever heard? A sandbox crammed with systems that can collide—or be manipulated—in ways the developers themselves never even expected, to the delight and satisfaction of a creative player? I say it is, and it's quite honestly made me more excited for Rockstar's quadrillion-dollar baby than any glossy trailer. Put it in my hands, please, and then let me use those hands to pick up a crate that turns translucent when I do it.

Rumor has it that GTA 6 will come to PC relatively quickly after the console launch, though Rockstar typically puts at least seven months between console and PC launches.