Six stars are back in GTA 6, and the police finally have to find you

**GTA 6 restores the sixth wanted star that GTA 5 dropped — but the sixth star is the least interesting thing about it.** The Extended Look and the Rockstar North previews describe a police system rebuilt from the ground up, in which officers do not know you did anything unless somebody saw it, and only know what you looked like if you let them.

It is the single most substantive mechanical change Rockstar has disclosed, and it changes what a chase is.

## Somebody has to see you

In every previous Grand Theft Auto, the wanted meter was omniscient. Commit a crime in an empty field and the stars appeared anyway, because the game knew.

In GTA 6 a crime has to be witnessed by a person or detected by a security system before it is reported. Responding officers are then briefed on what happened and who might have been involved — meaning the police act on information, and information can be incomplete.

That single change turns the wanted system into something you can play against rather than simply outrun.

## The police only know what you show them

Beneath the star rating, GTA 6 displays symbols indicating exactly which pieces of evidence law enforcement currently holds. Each has a corresponding countermeasure.

| What they have | How you clear it |
| --- | --- |
| Your face | Wear a mask during the crime, discard it during the getaway — this also defeats surveillance cameras |
| Your physical description | Visit a barber and change your hair |
| Your outfit | Change into a completely different one. A hat or glasses is not enough |
| Your vehicle | Ditch the car and take another |
| Nothing confirmed | Outlined stars mean they are searching without a description |

The last row is the elegant part. Outlined rather than filled stars mean police are actively looking for an offender they cannot yet identify — a state that has never existed in this series before.

Previews add a practical wrinkle: car boots can hold a change of clothes, which makes stashing a second outfit a genuine tactical decision rather than flavour.

## Escaping is no longer the end of it

Losing your pursuers does not close the case. The location of the incident stays an active police zone, with officers sweeping the surrounding area before eventually calling the search off. One star should be easy to shake. Six triggers an all-out manhunt.

Rockstar has also rebuilt movement — sprinting, vaulting and climbing — specifically to make escaping on foot viable. That matters more than it sounds, because Vice City is a bad place to be in a car with three stars. Previews describe crowded streets, tight roads and constant traffic making vehicle escapes genuinely harder than they were in Los Santos, which Rob Nelson says is half the size of GTA 6's Vice City.

## Two protagonists, two problems for the police

The most novel wrinkle comes from the dual-protagonist structure.

When police work out that both Jason and Lucia are involved, the pair can split up and force officers to divide their resources. You can deliberately send your partner clear of the scene and stay behind to absorb the pursuit yourself; once they are safe, they message you to confirm it. One of them can be busted — triggering the familiar "Busted" screen — while the other is still at large and running.

None of that exists in GTA 5, where a chase involved exactly one person the police cared about.

## The Criminal Profile sits alongside it

The wanted system tracks what the police know right now. The Criminal Profile tracks who you are over time.

Rockstar's replacement for Red Dead Redemption 2's Honor meter deliberately avoids a good/evil axis. It records patterns: gratuitous violence and destruction feed it, but so do mundane behaviours — Rockstar cited disposing of rubbish correctly. Completing robberies cleanly and efficiently builds a reputation as a capable criminal. Violence a mission requires of you does not count against you.

Its effects, per previews, are on how Leonida's residents react to Jason and Lucia, and potentially on how parts of the story develop.

## What is still unclear

Rockstar has demonstrated the system, not documented it. Nobody outside the studio has played it, and the specifics that matter for actually using it are unpublished: how long a police zone stays active, how quickly heat decays, whether wanted levels persist across a save, what triggers the jump from five stars to six, and whether the military appears at the top end as it has historically.

There is also no confirmation of how any of this interacts with a future online mode, because there is no announced online mode.

GTA 6 releases for PS5 and Xbox Series X|S on 19 November 2026. Our [gameplay guide](/guides/gta-6-gameplay) covers the rest of the systems the Extended Look revealed.