The gym and diet system

The Extended Look shows Lucia lifting weights, with button prompts to help with the lift. Reporting on the same footage describes a weight and muscle system: eat too much and the character puts on weight, skip the gym and they lose muscle over time.

It's San Andreas coming back after twenty-two years.

Why people wanted it back

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas in 2004 let you make CJ fat, thin or muscular by eating and training. It's still one of the most fondly remembered systems in the series, and it's one of the things people have asked to see again most often.

Rockstar dropped it for a reason. Body-shape systems are hard and expensive: every piece of clothing has to fit every body state, every animation has to look right on a heavier or lighter frame, and cutscenes have to cope with a protagonist who might look wildly different from one player to the next.

Doing all that for two protagonists, where San Andreas had one, roughly doubles the cost. So the studio must have really wanted it.

Body shape, clothes and the wanted system

It ties into appearance customisation, since body shape is the layer under clothing and tattoos. It plausibly ties into the evidence system too, because a physical description is still a description, though Rockstar hasn't said so.

The reported button prompts on the lift matter as well. They suggest training is something you do with your hands on the controller, and you don't just pick it from a menu. That's what made the San Andreas version feel like something you did, where a lot of games just give you a stat to set.

Gyms are on Rockstar's list, and so is sweat

Rockstar named gyms among Leonida's activities in Game Informer's issue 382 cover story. That settles it: the gym is a place you go, and it's more than a location for a cutscene.

Bloomberg's Jason Schreier reported on 14 October that the game has a sweat system scaled to effort. A character dancing hard in a club, or pushing through a heavy workout, sweats more than one who's taking it easy. That's reporting, Rockstar hasn't said it, and nothing suggests it's anything more than visual.

The bench press, in play

The Extended Look shows Lucia on a bench press at a gym, seen from above, with button prompts on the bar at each hand. It's the clearest sign yet that working out is something the player actually does, and not something that happens in a cutscene. The plates are branded GAINZ.

A membership, and a reason to go together

Edge's issue 430 cover feature, out on 29 October and written from a Rockstar demo, adds two things. You have to buy a gym membership first, and going to the gym is one of the activities that raises Jason and Lucia's relationship, which Edge says runs on a four-point scale. So the gym is doing two jobs: your build, and the couple.

Edge also reports a couple of consumables. Coffee gives you a stamina boost and a protein shake gives a health buff. That's the closest anyone's come to describing what food actually does in play, and what it describes is a short-term buff.

How sure is the weight part

Some coverage, our own Burger Shot piece included, has put it as fact that the Extended Look shows food changing Jason and Lucia's weight. What the footage shows clearly is the lifting. The eat-too-much, lose-muscle detail came from reporting on that footage, and Edge's write-up of Rockstar's demo talks about the gym and buffs and doesn't describe a diet system. So this page keeps the weight and muscle part at reported.

What isn't known

We don't know how far the range goes, whether sweat is purely cosmetic, or whether any of this affects stamina or combat beyond the coffee and shake buffs. It's also not clear whether food is bought at specific places, whether the two characters are tracked separately, or what a gym membership costs. Rockstar has named gyms and shown the bench press. The weight, muscle and membership detail comes from reporting, Edge's included, and Rockstar hasn't published any of it itself.