Weapon condition

Weapons in Grand Theft Auto have always turned up immaculate. Whatever you picked up looked like it came out of the box that morning, however long it'd been rattling around the back of a stolen sedan.

What the screenshot shows

The check cashing screenshot breaks the pattern. The pistol in Lucia's hand has tape wrapped around the grip, a sticker stuck to the body and visible scuffing across the slide.

None of that is damage in the sense of something being broken. It's wear from use. People tape a grip when the grip panel's worn smooth or cracked and replacing it isn't an option, and nobody puts a sticker on a gun they've been issued. It looks like the gun of somebody early in a criminal career. Nobody's supplying her.

If wear is tracked

If condition is a value the game keeps track of, and not a one-off bit of art, a gun becomes something you maintain, replace or get rid of.

That sits right next to the evidence system, where your weapon is one of the things the police match against you. Dumping a weapon after a job stops being flavour and becomes a decision with a price on it, because the thing you're throwing in the water is the thing you've carried since the start.

Half of that is now more than our reading. Edge's cover feature (29 October), from a demo Rockstar ran for the magazine, reports that getting rid of a weapon takes one identifying detail off what the police have on you. The wear part is still only what the screenshot shows.

A distinctive weapon is also easier to match than a generic one. Tape and a sticker are exactly the details a witness describes, and they're the difference between a pistol and that pistol.

It'd also tie in with vehicle weapon storage. If the larger guns live in the car and the car is evidence too, then a worn weapon in a known vehicle is two pieces of the same case, and the cleanest run is the one where neither of them is yours.

Rockstar already tried this in Red Dead 2

Red Dead Redemption 2 tracked weapon wear and made you clean your guns, with oil you bought and a maintenance action you performed, and it was one of the more divisive systems in that game. A big chunk of the audience found it tedious and said so at length.

Rockstar clearly doesn't see that as a settled argument, since the studio built it in the first place and has never publicly disowned it. Whether a version of it survives into a game with a wanted system built on physical evidence is a real open question, and the case for it here is much stronger than it was in 1899.

All of this comes from one screenshot

Rockstar hasn't said anything about weapon wear. Not a word. Everything above is inferred from a single screenshot, and it's entirely possible the tape is character work for Lucia specifically and means nothing beyond what it says about her.

We're writing it up anyway, because Rockstar's art department doesn't put tape on a grip by accident.

What isn't known

We don't know whether condition is tracked at all, whether it affects accuracy or reliability, whether weapons can be maintained, whether they can be destroyed, or whether the tape is a system or just a portrait of Lucia.

Related: the weapon wheel, the wanted system.