Underground fighting

Underground fighting shows up in the lists of confirmed side activities that went round after the Extended Look. It's the thinnest item on those lists, and this page is mostly about why.

What's actually known

Very little. It comes from reporting on preview footage, not from anything Rockstar has published, and nobody has pointed to any fight club footage you could clearly identify.

How a list like that forms

We'll walk through this one, because it's how most of what gets called confirmed about this game ends up being called that.

A small number of outlets attend a preview or watch a presentation. One of them publishes a list of activities. A second outlet writes up the first one's list. A third aggregates the second, and by the fourth the qualifier has dropped off and it reads like a feature Rockstar announced. Nobody in that chain is being dishonest, and you still end up with a claim that has exactly one source behind it.

Several of the confident write-ups on this particular item trace back to the same secondhand list. That doesn't make it false. It makes it unverified, which is a different thing, and a much more common one.

Why it's plausible anyway

The series has form. San Andreas had three gyms teaching three different fighting styles, each with its own instructor you had to beat, and what you learned changed how CJ fought for the rest of the game. Red Dead Redemption 2 put brawls in saloons as a matter of routine. Grand Theft Auto Online eventually built an arena and a whole update around it.

The setting backs it up too. Grand Theft Auto 6 already has a gym and diet system that tracks muscle over time, and a gym system with no combat use attached to it would be unusual for this studio. Red Dead Redemption 2 had no gym, and San Andreas, which did, wired it straight into fighting.

There's also the Criminal Profile, which Rockstar has said tracks how you operate. Edge's issue 430 cover feature, out on 29 October and written from a Rockstar demo, reports that it runs from Professional to Irredeemable, with angel and devil icons, and that it changes how the story plays out. Knocking people out, intimidating them and playing carefully count towards Professional, and shooting first counts the other way. A game that keeps a record of your methods has an obvious use for a place where the method is your fists.

Why we list it but don't describe it

We're listing it because it's being widely reported and you'll probably have seen it. We aren't describing how it works, because nobody outside Rockstar knows, and the write-ups that do describe it are making the detail up.

That's the reason this wiki uses confidence tiers at all. Reported and confirmed aren't the same word, and a page that blurs them is worth less than a page that admits what it doesn't have.

What isn't known

Pretty much everything. We don't know whether it exists as a system, where it happens, whether it pays, whether it connects to the gym, whether a fist fight counts towards a Professional or an Irredeemable profile, or whether either character does it. If Rockstar shows it, this page will say so and stop hedging.