GTA Will Feature Its First Female Protagonist Because Girlbosses Commit Felonies Too

The popular free-roam video game series Grand Theft Auto will feature a playable female protagonist for the first time, in what developers say will be a “Bonny and Clyde” narrative chapter in the new game.

Grand Theft Auto developers Rockstar Games announced the new, female, Latino protagonist along with the game’s setting, with the upcoming game taking place in a fictional Miami — which millennials might remember traversing in GTA Vice City.

You can always rely on the GTA series for generating a constant source of moral panics with each new iteration– from the “hot coffee” saga of GTA San Andreas which gave players control of a virtual sex scene, to a controversial level in the latest game that allows the player to waterboard an asylum seeker. Despite the video game’s satirical intentions, the game usually punches down on marginalised groups, rather than up.

“I don’t want a female protagonist in GTA VI because it’s too unrealistic for GTA” pic.twitter.com/Kp1w51ByAx

— 𝔑𝔞𝔱𝔥𝔞𝔫 (@TheNathanNS) July 27, 2022

Developers Rockstar Games are signalling that GTA 6 will change all that. After damning reports of the development studio being a “boy’s club” where employees were routinely taken to strip clubs, combined with a corporate culture that included 100-hour work weeks in the lead-up to releases (known colloquially as “the death marches”), Rockstar says that the studio has aimed for creating a smaller world to reduce crunch times on employees while cleaning up its frat-boy culture.

The studio will now release “new missions and cities on a regular basis” after release, treating the game as a service just like its multiplayer product GTA Online. Anonymous employees at the studio told Bloomberg that the company is attempting to transform “a boys’ club… into a real company”, with another summarising the change as the studio making games that are “better for everyone working on them”.

Naturally, the series known for having one of the most toxic fanbases in gaming isn’t taking the news of a female POC protagonist very well — a petition has already been launched to stop the developers from “ruining the legacy of the series”.

Despite the developer’s best intentions of creating a better world for both their developers and virtual characters, considering all of the dead hookers and vagina jokes the series is constructed from can it really pull off a vibe shift of this magnitude?

GTA 6 cutscene where the PoC lady protagonist talks to the other player character about how she uses violence to escape the trauma inflicted on her by an unfair world while they’re eating at a restaurant called Dairy Queef

— lauren (@NotABigJerk) July 27, 2022

Gamers when Rockstar releases GTA 6 and it’s the best, most advanced open world game ever but you play as a brown woman and there’s no slurs pic.twitter.com/mqpfdXwM5f

— Big Boss (@LordBalvin) July 27, 2022

GTA 6’s release will be at least two years away, according to industry analysts.