GTA 6: New pre-load trailer appears to take a swipe at critical fans

Fans have been able to pre-load GTA 6 since November 10. Rockstar also released a new trailer to mark the occasion (embedded below), and one particular moment has sparked a lively discussion. To understand why, it's worth looking back at the Extended Look released in late August. At the 17:22 mark, Jason performs a backflip into the water. However, he only begins rotating once he's already in the air. That doesn't make much sense from a physics standpoint, and many viewers felt the animation looked unnatural. Rockstar faced some criticism as a result.

The 30-second pre-load trailer opens with a brief nightclub scene before showing a racing driver pulling off a perfectly executed backflip – and that's the moment fans have been focusing on. Many on Reddit suspect Rockstar deliberately included the stunt as a cheeky response to those who criticized Jason's earlier animation, almost as if to say the studio knows perfectly well how to animate acrobatic moves. "They know EXACTLY what they were doing with that backflip," reads the most upvoted comment in a recent community discussion. Whether the backflip was actually intended as a jab at critics is impossible to say. Still, that's how many fans have interpreted it.

There's also an important distinction: Jason's backflip in the Extended Look appears to be gameplay footage, while the stunt in the pre-load trailer looks more like a scripted sequence. If Rockstar really wanted to prove a point, an equally convincing backflip during actual gameplay in GTA 6 (available for pre-order on Amazon) would make a stronger case.