GTA VI gets its second trailer

Well, I’ll be damned. After it was announced last Friday that GTA VI is delayed into 2026, I’ve seen two things constantly. People in the industry who work on games sighing in relief, because maybe something other than the overly hyped big-budget title with baked-in mass appeal will be Game of the Year.

Or comments by the general public such as, “Well, we’d have seen another trailer by now if it was coming out this year.” I love laughing at the people who pretend with absolute confidence they know the industry better than everyone else. So after the delay, Rockstar published the second trailer for GTA VI yesterday.

I won’t say that it is as “iconic” as the first trailer featuring Tom Petty, completely setting the mood. This one is focused more so on what seems to be our two leads and telling a bit of the story as we head to Vice City once again in 2026. I won’t do a blow-by-blow on it, but we finally got a name for our leads, Jason Duval and Lucia Caminos, the latter of which has been in prison for a while, as we already knew. It goes almost without saying, the trailer looks stunning and so do the images published on the Rockstar website.

The website (at the time of writing) gives a lot more detail, not just of the trailer but also of the big players of the story. Protagonists, friends, gangs, drug runners, antagonists, and even highlights of locations with little blurbs and images. It’s all beautifully packaged. Do I think it will look as perfect on launch? Maybe downgraded a little for consoles, which is the other major news. Just over a year out, and there is still no word on a PC launch or any word of the Switch 2, which some supposedly want.

The only problem with all of the hype we’re seeing around Grand Theft Auto VI, in my eyes, is the problem we always have with games: the hair. For guys with shorter hair, it all looks fine, but in that trailer, if you watch Lucia’s hair, it looks… flat. Maybe I’m speaking from experience a bit too much, but you either need enough hairspray to put a hole in the ozone layer, or magic to get hair to stay that rigid and like hair always does in games/animation. Everything else looks stunning, but that’s the only thing that looks “dated” and like it’s actual in-engine footage.

Announced last Friday, May 2nd, 2025, Grand Theft Auto VI will now be releasing May 26th, 2026. So, September 2026? We also got confirmation that Grand Theft Auto VI will launch on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S, with the trailer supposedly “captured on PS5.”

What’s worth noting there is that the trailer runs at 30 frames per second, and that’s normal, but historically, Rockstar is known to push the graphical fidelity to the limits and sacrifice a bit of performance. GTA V on launch ran sub 30FPS at 720P on the PS3, and hit 30FPS at 1080P on PS4. I’ll honestly be surprised if we get 4K 120FPS for Grand Theft Auto VI on launch, as some will probably demand.