Focus

Focus slows time and paints hit zones onto whoever you're pointing at, red for the shots that kill and yellow for limbs. If you've played Red Dead Redemption, you'll recognise the shape of it straight away.

The yellow zones are the new bit

Slow-motion aim assist has been around for ages. Marking limbs separately is new, at least for this series, because it turns disarming into something you choose to do. Before, it only happened when your aim was off. Grand Theft Auto has never given you a reliable way to end an encounter without killing everyone in it. Red Dead Redemption 2 did, through a mix of disarming shots, intimidation and defusing, and it changed how a lot of its encounters felt.

Put that next to a police system that builds a case against you out of evidence and a profile that records how you operate, and a non-lethal option starts to matter a lot. For the police, a robbery where nobody got shot is a different problem from one where somebody did.

Not the only way to avoid a body count

Focus isn't the only non-lethal tool Rockstar has talked about. Rob Nelson has described suppressive fire: shooting near someone on purpose to scare them, which in some encounters is enough to get through without killing anyone. That's from an interview, and there's no footage of it yet.

And now there's a reason the game itself cares. Edge's cover feature (29 October), from a demo Rockstar ran for the magazine, reports that knocking people out, intimidating them or talking them down all count toward the Professional end of the Criminal Profile, while shooting first pushes you toward Irredeemable. A disarming shot through a yellow zone looks like exactly the kind of thing that scale is watching for, although Edge doesn't mention Focus by name.

Where it sits in the series

Rockstar has carried mechanics between its two big series in both directions for years. The special abilities in GTA V, one for each of its three protagonists, were closer to a stat buff than to Dead Eye. Focus looks like the Red Dead system arriving properly, adapted for modern weapons and for a game where the person you're shooting at may well be shooting back with something automatic.

What isn't known

Rockstar hasn't shown how Focus is charged, whether each character has their own, whether it can be upgraded, or how long it lasts once it's switched on. It also hasn't said whether disarming someone has any knock-on effect beyond the obvious one, which is that they're still alive afterwards. Edge's report on the Criminal Profile suggests non-lethal play is tracked, but nobody's said whether a Focus disarm counts the same as a knockout or a talk-down.