The wanted system

GTA 6's wanted level does something no earlier game in the series did: under the stars sit icons for what the police actually know about you — your crew, your clothes, your face and your car.

At 14:13 in the Extended Look the top-right corner carries four stars and, below them, four small red icons: two figures side by side, a clothes hanger, a single face, and a car. To the right of those sits the ammunition counter. The icons are the same size as the stars and sit in the same block, which is how you can tell they belong to the wanted system and not to something else on screen.

Ninety seconds later the same corner is different. At 15:57, with the weapon wheel open, the block shows three icons instead of four: the two figures, the hanger, the face. The car is gone. Between those two moments Lucia throws a Molotov at the getaway car and it burns.

That is the whole argument, and it rests on two frames rather than on anything Rockstar said. The reading it supports is that each icon is a piece of description the police are holding, and that getting rid of the thing removes the icon. The other half of the system is on its own page: the ITEMS tab of the weapon wheel, where a bandana, sunglasses, a cap and an outfit each carry a state of ON or OFF.

One more thing the wheel shows that ordinary play does not. Outside the wheel only the lit stars are drawn, so a four-star level looks like four stars. Inside the wheel the whole scale is visible, and it runs to six.

How to recognise it

• Four red icons under the stars at 14:13: two figures, a clothes hanger, a face, a car
• Three icons at 15:57, after the getaway car burns — the car icon is gone
• Six stars on the full scale, of which four are lit at that moment
• The icons sit in the same block as the stars, at the same size
• The other half of the system is the disguise wheel, where each item has an ON or OFF state

The frame it comes from

The frame is Extended Look at ~14:13.32. It is 1920 by 1080, and the vehicle occupies 278 by 178 of it.

What we still do not know

• Whether the icons clear individually or whether losing one lowers the whole level
• What the two-figure icon means — your accomplice, or witnesses
• Whether six stars is the real maximum or whether the wheel draws a fixed six regardless
• How the police get a description in the first place, and whether being masked prevents it

A note on this record

Both frames come from our own pass through the Extended Look rather than from a measured timestamp, so the timecodes carry a tilde: they are accurate to about a third of a second.