GTA 6: Pre-Load Moves Up, PS5 Firmware Closes Jailbreak Gap

Somewhere a server administrator at Rockstar is drawing up a release calendar that treats time zones as a weapon, and the effect is almost poetic: because Grand Theft Auto VI launches at local midnight everywhere, New Zealand gets to meet Jason and Lucia roughly twenty one hours before anyone on the American west coast has finished their coffee. That detail, confirmed by Rockstar itself according to DreamcastGuy, has already produced the predictable cottage industry of players nudging their console region settings to chase the earliest possible midnight, a trick DreamcastGuy notes works on both Xbox and PlayStation, though the PlayStation version apparently demands considerably more patience to pull off.

Sony, for its part, appears less amused by the other kind of early access. The PS5 system software requirement for the game was quietly raised from version 14.10 to 14.22.00.00 within hours of a new platform update, a bump DreamcastGuy reports was aimed squarely at jailbroken consoles running older firmware, the sort of workaround that lets a modified machine play a game it has no business running yet. One can admire the timing even while noting the obvious: Sony patched its own hardware to protect its own launch, which is rather the point of owning the platform in the first place.

The practical calendar, per that same report, now has pre-loading beginning November 10 ahead of a November 19 release, with the install landing at roughly 212GB, a figure that tracks closely with the 210GB this site covered as a leak back in October and now reads less like a rumor and more like a number that simply held up. Rockstar will also sell a digital map poster for $0.99 on its store, with a two-sided physical version at the same price or free with any other purchase, which is either a charming bit of merchandise or the cheapest marketing campaign in the company's history.

The details worth lingering on, though, are the ones DreamcastGuy frames as newly surfaced and that carry no official confirmation from Rockstar at all: Leonida reportedly opens up early enough to let players explore north of the map before the story demands it, the full map is said to run roughly twice the footprint of Grand Theft Auto V and nearly matches the combined landmass of Grand Theft Auto IV, V, and Red Dead Redemption 2, and the game is said to carry close to ten times the interiors of its predecessors alongside some 600,000 individual NPC animations, with pedestrians apparently reacting to being stared at with the kind of personality modeling that, in one case, ends with a dog being set loose on Jason. None of that has been confirmed by Rockstar, and I would treat it as a promising rumor rather than a fact until the company says otherwise.

DreamcastGuy also floats the idea, his own speculation rather than anything Rockstar has stated, that the PS5 Pro might coax an extra ten frames out of the game's 30fps target, perhaps even a 40fps VRR mode. I have learned not to bet against a Pro revision quietly doing more than its marketing admits, but until Rockstar confirms a number, that is a hope wearing the clothes of a specification.