Jason Duval

Jason's one of the two playable leads. Rockstar's version of him is a guy who grew up around grifters and crooks, did a stint in the Army, and came back into the same world he'd left, working for drug runners in the Leonida Keys.

On paper he's the steadier half of the pair. That doesn't make him the more careful one. The screenshots give him scarring, knuckle tattoos and clothes that look like he's actually lived in them, nothing picked out for the photo.

He owes somebody before you press a button

He doesn't rent anywhere. Brian Heder, an old smuggler who runs a boat yard, lets him stay on the property. It looks generous, but it comes with a debt attached, so Jason already owes somebody when the game starts.

Grand Theft Auto leads usually turn up with nothing and build out from there. Jason turns up already living on somebody else's land and inside their operation, and that boxes him in more than being broke would. So when Brian shows up as the man who knows somebody who needs a job doing tonight, Jason hasn't got much room to say no.

Trouble in the Army

For three years Rockstar mentioned his military service and left it there. The launch trailer on 15 October finally fills some of it in. In voiceover Jason says he got into trouble in the Army and didn't leave on good terms, and that the people who'd normally lend money won't lend it to someone like him.

It's only a couple of lines, but they set up a lot. In America a bad discharge shuts doors that tend to stay shut, and credit's one of them, so crime stops being a taste and becomes the option he's got left. It also doesn't sit well with the popular theory that Jason's an undercover cop, since a guy pushed out of the military isn't an obvious hire for a police department. That last bit is our reading. Rockstar hasn't said anything about it.

Coverage of the trailer also points to a shot of a younger Jason in Army gear and a training school T-shirt, which looks like a flashback. That's somebody reading a single frame, though. There's no caption saying so, and we're treating it as a reading.

What the footage does show is a man who stays calm under pressure in a way Lucia isn't asked to. In the rain-soaked hood shot and the fence sequence he's reacting to what's happening around him. He isn't the one starting it.

A separate Criminal Profile, and the partner problem

Like Lucia, Jason has his own Criminal Profile. It tracks how he operates, and it isn't a straight good-or-evil score. The two profiles are kept separate, so the pair can drift apart depending on how you play each of them.

Edge's cover feature in issue 430, out on 29 October and built on a demo Rockstar ran for the magazine, puts names on the two ends. Edge reports the scale runs from Professional to Irredeemable, with an angel icon at one end and a devil at the other. Non-lethal choices, like intimidating somebody or putting them down without killing them, count towards it, and Edge says it changes how the story unfolds without saying how. So there's a bit more right and wrong in it than the early footage suggested, even if it still reads as a record of how he works.

The same demo had Jason open the boot of an unattended police car and take the shotgun out of it. For a guy with no money and no credit, that's how you get a gun: you take the one somebody left lying around.

The relationship has a number on it

Edge also reports that how close Jason and Lucia are is tracked on a four-point scale. Time together outside missions raises it: walks on the beach, cycling, drives, going to the gym (which needs a membership first). Rockstar's Rob Nelson wouldn't confirm or deny whether they can get married, according to the magazine. It's all from Edge's account of the demo, and Rockstar hasn't put any of it in its own material yet.

He's also something the evidence system keeps track of when he's the partner and you're controlling Lucia. So the other half of the pair is a second gun, and he's also a liability the police can trace back to you.

What isn't known

Rockstar hasn't confirmed his voice actor, and it's never published a cast list for this game. We don't know how things with Lucia develop, what happens at the bottom of that four-point scale, whether the relationship can break, or what he wants beyond getting out from under the Keys. Rockstar's also kept back what actually happened in the Army. The trailer says he left on bad terms but doesn't say why, and nobody's confirmed whether his service ever shows up as a playable flashback. Edge didn't spell out what landing at the Irredeemable end of his profile actually does to the story either.

Related: Lucia Caminos, character switching.