GTA 6 Driving Physics Hint at Return to the Realism of GTA 4 - The Drive
Before writing this, I hadn’t touched GTA IV in something like 14 years, while I played GTA V as recently as 2024. I think that’s part of what’s happening here—at least between GTA IV and V. So, this brings us back to the GTA VI leak.
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All week, an anonymous leaker has been posting snippets of Grand Theft Auto VI gameplay. The footage covers various scenarios, from flying planes to shooting hoops to getting tased, but one video that briefly showed the player tooling around an intersection in a Ford Ranchero-lookalike got plenty of attention from GTA fans who enjoy these games for their driving. Many hope that it teases a return to the weightier, more challenging dynamics of GTA IV.
See, there’s a popular assertion among serious fans that GTA V made driving too easy by giving vehicles additional grip and downplaying aspects like weight transfer and suspension travel. Punch the throttle from a stop in a rear-wheel-drive muscle car in GTA V, and it won’t take very long for the rubber to stick; if you yank the wheel left and right, the car won’t fishtail quite as waywardly, and suspension travel will be dramatically muted compared to GTA IV.
Now, I’m not going to lie: This difference never stuck out to me as egregiously as it has to the rest of the GTA-playing world. Before writing this, I hadn’t touched GTA IV in something like 14 years, while I played GTA V as recently as 2024. In the newer game, you can still very easily spin and lose control if you’re careless with your inputs, or get tagged on a fender in a way that sends you spiraling. GTA physics have always been tuned for comedy, playing up behavior that leads to spins, crashes, and general chaos. It’s the series’ calling card.
I needed to dust off my impressions of GTA IV’s dynamics, so I walked across the street (support your local retro game shops) and grabbed an Xbox 360 copy, which fortunately is still compatible with the latest Xbox consoles. What I found was, yes—cars generally feel more lumbering and slippery in that title, with the kind of rolling and heaving befitting of American barges from four or five decades ago. I don’t think it’s a tremendous difference, though handbrake turns are notably tougher to execute properly.
By contrast, most vehicles in GTA V feel a touch more immediate, and they definitely don’t buckle like jelly when changing direction. That last point, though, is worth unpacking, because I’d argue it speaks to a common misconception about how cars behave in video games.
When we talk about the way digital cars handle, there’s a tendency to ascribe what we see on screen to the physics calculations that we can’t—because, well, that’s how the real world works. Of course, games aren’t bound by such laws. Rockstar can jack up the suspension travel for a particular car while affording it more or less the same level of grip; it can play up the visual drama, without necessarily having that tie back into the math that determines traction and slip angle and so on.
I think that’s part of what’s happening here—at least between GTA IV and V. I don’t think cars are really a whole lot harder to drive in IV, but they certainly look like they are, and it’s hard to extricate the visual evidence from the “physical.”
There’s another wrinkle here too, which is that GTA IV’s car roster is drowning in malaise-era vehicles, and it makes sense that these should handle more sketchily than the more modern roster of GTA V. As Andy Kelly wrote a few years back for The Gamer, “Liberty City is an unpleasant place, smeared in a tangible layer of grime and danger,” and its traffic is a product of that environment.
So, this brings us back to the GTA VI leak. The Vapid Ganado that Jason’s driving is certainly a vehicle drenched in malaise, at least in the rusted-out state of that particular example. I don’t think it’s unwarranted to watch that footage—observing the way the body rolls aft to fore as the player slams on the brakes, the smoke pouring from the tires after a quarter-donut, and how the pickup pirouettes into the side of an ambulance while attempting to flee the scene—and think that Rockstar may have aimed to model GTA VI’s driving physics more in line with its predecessor from 18 years ago. That’s entirely possible.
I also know from experience that you can only judge so much about the way cars handle in a game solely by watching. Camera behavior defines so much of what we perceive as physics in games, more than people realize. To cite a rather extreme example, that’s the reason I can’t stomach Screamer at all from its chase cam, but I feel extremely comfortable with its weird, twin-stick driving system when playing from the hood or bumper. I’d also be curious to know how GTA VI’s faux-Ranchero behaves at real pace, which we never get to see in this short clip.
At the rate these leaks are coming through, maybe we’ll get that glimpse soon, or maybe we’ll see high-speed gameplay in Rockstar’s “extended look” trailer next week.
Which GTA’s handling do you prefer, and what’s your hope for GTA VI? Let us know in the comments.
Backed by a decade of covering cars and consumer tech, Adam Ismail is a Senior Editor at The Drive, focused on curating and producing the site’s slate of daily stories.
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