If Any Game Can Recapture The Feeling Of Discovering Breath Of The Wild’s Secrets, It Will Be GTA 6

Grand Theft Auto 6 is now just under a year away, and there are plenty of reasons to be excited for Rockstar’s long-awaited return to the world of carjackings and cougar maulings. Its take on Vice City and the surrounding state of Leonida looks huge and detailed. The central story of Lucia Caminos and Jason Duval looks compelling and romantic. The graphics look incredible, down to flourishy details like bubbles fizzing up in a beer. But, the details I'm more excited to find are the Easter eggs, the little secrets we don't even know to look forward to finding yet.

By 'secrets,' I don’t just mean things that are buried so deep that no one but the most dedicated players will find them. No, I mean the cool little details that we won’t know about until we get our hands on it and start messing around. Less ‘this door won’t open unless you stand in a random corner for an absurdly long time’, and more, 'Oh, wow, I can’t believe the game lets me do that.' The kind of secrets that would get mentioned in articles with headlines like ‘99 Things You Didn’t Know You Could Do In Lego City Undercover’ (its a weirdly dense game).

I Can't Do Another 15 Years Of Easter Eggs

I understood, and continue to understand, that reference.

The Statue Of Happiness And The Elevator To Siofra

Like, in Grand Theft Auto 4, if you jumped out of a helicopter onto the Statue of Happiness, you could go inside and find a real, live, beating heart, held aloft between the teal walls with heavy duty chains. It even squirted blood if you shot it. This isn't buried deep in the code. It's right there for any dedicated player to find. But it also isn't something you could have anticipated before you actually do. It was a little message from the developers to curious players, the kind of hidden detail that drives us to keep playing open-world games long after rolling credits.

Big open-world games often have moments like this — surprises that many players are expected to find. In Elden Ring, the elevator that took you to the underground was a secret when you started to play, but it was a secret that everyone who played long enough would uncover.

Riding The Bear

For my money, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild has the most secrets like this to discover. Its world was full of questions from the moment you emerged from the Shrine of Resurrection. Some were essentially mouse traps that every player would fall into, like the Stone Taluses that appear to be a simple boulder until you land on them, but then suddenly emerge from the ground to attack. Others required more experimentation on the player's part, like discovering that dragon parts are valuable and can be collected by shooting the serpentine beasts with arrows.

A key part of the appeal of BOTW was playing along at the same time as the rest of the online community, discovering some things for yourself and getting put onto other things by other players online or IRL. I remember finding out that I could kill Octoroks, collect their parts, then attach Octo Balloons to objects to make them float. Or, like, when I found out that Link could ride a bear if he was stealthy enough in approaching it. Or, when I found a boulder shaped like a sword atop a mountain. When a game is as big, detailed, and systemically driven as Breath of the Wild, you’re bound to run into lots of secrets — some authored, some emerging from those systems colliding — that make the game worth digging into.

GTA 4 and Breath of the Wild both give pointless rewards for finding all of a certain collectible. In BOTW, finding all Korok Seeds earns you a golden poop from Hetsu. In GTA 4, killing all 200 pigeons earns you a trophy and a helicopter parked on top of a building that you… need another chopper to reach.

Grand Theft Auto More

I fully expect Grand Theft Auto 6 to feel the same. Previous Grand Theft Auto games have had their share of secrets you could find by searching the world. Grand Theft Auto 5 has dozens of bespoke phone conversations which you could only hear by calling certain NPCs at specific moments in the game. You could find a hidden UFO crashed along the coast. In Grand Theft Auto 4, the Statue of Happiness was designed to look like Hillary Clinton holding a cup of 'Hot Coffee' — a nod to the hidden sex minigame in San Andreas that Clinton went after Rockstar for while serving as New York senator. There was a mini golf course where all the decorations were culled from previous Rockstar games.

As Rockstar ups the detail for GTA 6, ups the number of buildings players will be able to enter, ups the amount of explorable land, and ups the number of quests and NPCs and side activities, there will inevitably be more cool secrets to find in the world. I can't wait to be there on day one to discover them with everyone else.

I Normally Hate Big Games, But I Want GTA 6 To Be The Biggest Game Ever Made

GTA 6 is testing my desire for smaller games with shorter dev times.