GTA 6 Side Activities: What Rockstar’s Showcase Confirmed

Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto VI: An Extended Look confirmed a real list of things to do between story missions: rally racing, scuba diving, working out, riding e-scooters, visiting a strip club, and pulling off small heists on top of the game’s larger story robberies. This guide sticks to what that showcase and its accompanying Rockstar interviews actually put on screen, keeps GTA Online content out of it, and is honest about the long list of things nobody has confirmed yet.

The developer is Rockstar Games, publishing through Take-Two Interactive, and the setting is the state of Leonida, built around a returning Vice City. Grand Theft Auto VI: An Extended Look gave players the most substantial official look yet at Rockstar Games’ return to Vice City, premiering on Netflix on August 27, 2026, using in-game footage captured on PlayStation 5. It later went up on Rockstar’s own YouTube channel. The activities named below are the direct answer to the question everyone keeps asking under every clip: is there anything to do when you’re not chasing the story.

The showcase drew a clear line between two tiers of crime. On one side sit small, opportunistic jobs – a convenience store, a jewelry store – that Jason and Lucia can apparently pull off without a crew. On the other sit organized bank jobs, introduced through a character named Raul Bautista, who functions as a recruiter and planner rather than a random NPC. Rockstar describes him on the game’s own page as a “seasoned” bank robber, “always on the hunt for talent ready to take the risks that bring the biggest rewards.” That framing puts him in the same story role Lester Crest played in GTA V, but as a hands-on operator rather than an armchair planner.

The showcase itself demonstrated what that relationship looks like in motion: a scene where Raul, introduced as a former cellmate of a character named Brian Heder, arranges a meeting with Jason and Lucia, who are recruited to help him evade the police – with Lucia driving while Jason fends off pursuing vehicles until the group escapes. That’s the getaway-driver dynamic the pre-release chatter described: the protagonists aren’t just planning heists, they’re sometimes just the wheelman for someone else’s job.

Some early recaps of the footage also describe a robbery targeting a security or cash-transport vehicle, but that detail hasn’t shown up consistently across every outlet that covered the presentation, so it’s worth treating as less solid than the store robberies until more footage surfaces.

All of this sits inside a state, not just a city. The showcase itself was built entirely from footage running on a PS5 dev environment, and Rockstar’s official materials around the presentation named several locations beyond Vice City proper: Leonida Keys, Grassrivers, Port Gellhorn, Mount Kalaga National Park, and Ambrosia. That list matters because it confirms Vice City is one region inside a larger playable state, with swampland, coastline, and at least one national park called out by name specifically for exploration and side content rather than story missions.

The showcase backed that up visually – a sizzle reel of boating through a swamp, working out in a gym, shooting hoops, jet skis, kayaking, race car driving, and showering strip club dancers with dollar bills, spread across settings that clearly aren’t all downtown Vice City. That spread of biomes is also why outlets kept describing the world as built around things that have nothing to do with the plot – the variety suggests that a significant amount of GTA 6’s open world is designed around activities that have nothing to do with progressing the main story.

Here’s the part worth saying plainly instead of skating past: Rockstar did not show whether any of these activities pay out money, hand out experience, or feed into a stat system the way workouts did in San Andreas. No HUD element in the released footage confirmed a currency reward for winning a rally race, no interface showed a fitness stat climbing after a gym session, and no on-screen prompt tied diving to any kind of collectible or unlock chain. Important details are still being held back – Rockstar has not explained every activity, mission structure or technical option.

That’s not a knock on the presentation; a 26-minute reel was never going to cover UI and progression systems in depth. But it does mean nobody, including outlets that reviewed the full presentation, can tell you right now how long it takes to unlock anything through these activities, whether they’re a real economy or set dressing, or whether repeating them even does anything mechanically. Any article claiming otherwise this week is guessing. The honest position is: wait for hands-on time closer to the November 19 launch, or for a deeper preview that specifically walks through menus and rewards.

“These Are Just GTA Online Activities Ported Over”

Nothing in the showcase confirmed a link between these single-player activities and GTA Online’s existing systems. The footage is exclusively Jason and Lucia’s story world, and Rockstar has not said whether GTA 6 will even ship with an online mode at launch, let alone whether it would share this content.

“Rally Racing and Diving Must Work Like Their GTA Online Counterparts”

It’s tempting to assume a rally race in GTA 6 plays like an existing GTA Online race mode, but the showcase gave a name and a few seconds of footage, not a rules breakdown. Treat the mechanics as unconfirmed until a preview actually explains scoring, lobbies, or whether it’s solo-only.

“Working Out Means Character Stats Like San Andreas”

CJ’s stat-building gym system in San Andreas is the obvious reference point, but nothing in the Extended Look showed a stat bar, an attribute screen, or any visual confirmation that lifting weights changes Jason or Lucia’s capabilities. It’s shown as an activity, not confirmed as a system.

Sources and Confidence

This table separates what the studio has confirmed from what comes out of press previews, and what is still just circulating. Every link below was fetched before publishing.