The wanted system and evidence

The wanted display in the Extended Look doesn't just show stars. It carries a row of icons too. Reporting on that footage identified them as your face, your clothing, your vehicle, your weapon, your partner and CCTV coverage. Each one's a separate piece of evidence, and you can deal with each one separately.

Breaking line of sight is only step one

In every previous Grand Theft Auto, escaping meant breaking line of sight and waiting. The stars were a timer with a search cone attached. With evidence in the picture, breaking line of sight is just the first thing you do, because the description the police are working from survives it. Losing one piece doesn't clear the rest.

So the back half of a chase turns into a cleanup job. Change clothes and your description's out of date. Swap or destroy the car and the vehicle they're looking for stops matching. Dump the weapon and it can't tie you to the scene any more. None of that is hiding, and all of it takes time you might not have.

What Edge saw the police do

Edge's cover feature from 29 October has the most detail yet, from a demo Rockstar North played for the magazine. The icons work like a running file the police keep on Jason and Lucia: what you look like, whether there were one or two of you, what you were wearing, CCTV and your weapons. Split up and witnesses describe two separate people. Change clothes or dump the gun and that detail drops off.

The police bring more kit than before, too. Helicopters sweep the streets with searchlights. Officers put stinger strips down during chases, and Edge says they're hard to see at night (one burst a motorbike tyre in the demo). And the K9 units aren't just along for the ride. The dogs catch suspects and pin them.

The bit we like most is the bus. Buses and trains run as working networks, and Phil Hooker, a head of development at Rockstar North, told Edge that if you get on a bus without the police seeing you, they won't come looking for you on it. They act on what they actually saw, and Edge says whether anyone witnessed a crime matters all the way through.

Six stars?

VideoCardz reported in August that leaked footage from an unfinished build showed a six-star wanted level. Then Rockstar's own Extended Look came out, and GamesRadar reports the wanted meter in one of its story missions climbs past five stars. So six looks real, though Rockstar hasn't said it in words, and nobody's described what the sixth star does.

Other systems that lean on it

Several other confirmed systems only make sense next to this one. Masks matter because your face is a tracked item, and witness descriptions matter for the same reason. Weapon condition matters because a distinctive gun is easier to match than a generic one, and because dumping a weapon you've invested in costs you something. And since larger weapons are stored in the car and not on your body, the car ends up carrying evidence for you.

The store robbery system reported alongside it works the same way. Masks, witnesses and a getaway plan all feed into how a robbery turns out, where the old games just had a single alert level.

What isn't known

Nobody's published anything from actually playing it yet, so nobody knows how forgiving any of it is. Edge's demo makes the evidence side sound like the spine of every police encounter, but a guided demo isn't the same as fifty hours of play. Rockstar hasn't published the full icon list either, so treat the six above as what's been read off the footage, with Edge's dossier description alongside. They aren't a confirmed set.

We also don't know how long evidence stays live once you've lost the police, what the top star level does, or how much the K9 units and stinger strips show up outside the toughest chases.

Related: Criminal Profile, weapon condition.