Store robberies

Holding up a shop is old ground for this series. What's reported here is a system with tiers, where the old games had a single interaction: three levels of robbery, available at stores across Leonida, with the outcome shaped by whether you wore a mask, who saw you, and whether you had a way out.

Filling the gap between heists and hold-ups

Grand Theft Auto V had heists, which were set pieces, and it had convenience store hold-ups, which were a novelty you did once. There was a huge gap between the two. A tiered robbery system fills it, and it's the obvious place for the game's other confirmed systems to meet.

A mask beats the face icon in the evidence system. Witnesses give the police the description they work from. The car you arrive in becomes the car they're looking for, and if your larger weapons live in that car, leaving without it isn't really an option. How you handle the people in the room feeds the Criminal Profile, and Focus gives you a way to end things without killing anyone.

Once you're standing in a check cashing store with a bag, none of those feel like separate features any more. That's the case for building the game this way.

Why you'd rob a store at all

Edge's cover feature (29 October), from a demo Rockstar North ran for the magazine, gives robberies a job in the story. Some story missions need Jason and Lucia to raise money first, and Edge lists robbing gas stations and holding up jewellery stores as ways to do it, next to stealing cars for fences through the WAINK app (see stealing cars).

Edge also says robberies are less predictable than they used to be. Another customer can step in and turn a store job into something bigger. A pedestrian you rob might go along with it, then go for you once your back's turned. Phil Hooker, a head of development at Rockstar North, told Edge how he got round the witness problem in testing: he wound up the customers in a store, then backed down and apologised. They left, and he robbed the place with nobody watching.

Nelson's suppressive fire, shooting near people to scare them without hitting anyone, is the other tool Rockstar's described for keeping a job clean.

Why a check cashing store

The check cashing storefront in the official screenshot set isn't random set dressing. Cheque cashing, pawn, payday lending and cash-heavy retail are exactly the businesses that cluster in the parts of Florida the game is drawing from, and they're exactly the businesses that keep cash on the premises.

The one in the Extended Look is a phone shop

The robbery in the Extended Look itself isn't at the check cashing store. About eighteen minutes in, Lucia walks into Zeke's Gadgets, a phone shop in a strip mall with a "We Do Repairs" banner and its opening hours posted up, holding a pistol behind her back. On one side is a pawn shop and jewellers, Casa de Empeño and Joyería Empeños, advertising instant cash for gold, silver and diamonds. A couple of doors the other way is Video Forever, a video rental shop that's closing down. We read the whole strip mall at 4K.

A pawn shop next to the target fits the same cash-business pattern as the check cashing store, and a jewellers is one of the store types Edge says you can hold up.

What isn't known

Rockstar hasn't officially described the three tiers, and nobody outside the studio has seen a full robbery from start to finish. Take the structure as reported and the individual pieces as shown.

We don't know which story missions need money up front, how much they need, or whether robberies are the quickest way to get it. Edge's account also doesn't say if a messy robbery costs you on the Criminal Profile, though that's what the scale's description suggests.