How Long Is GTA 6? Game Length Confirmed By Rockstar

For the most part, a "Grand Theft Auto" game lasts as long as you want it to last. The checklist of missions to complete, things to find, goals to accomplish, etc. can take hundreds of hours to complete. And even then, there is still plenty to do just messing around and exploring without pursuing the forward progression of the game in any way. Even so, people are always curious about how long it actually takes to finish a "GTA" game, just so they have a sense of the time commitment they are in for and how much of their life is going to be monopolized for the foreseeable future.

Rob Nelson, the current studio head of "GTA 6" developer Rockstar North, recently gave us the first indication of just how long a basic playthrough of the game will take following the extended first look. He revealed that, in a recent playthrough, it took him 80 hours to get through the main story as well as at least some of the optional content. He didn't specify exactly how much of that time was devoted to said optional content, but a 100% completion run of "Grand Theft Auto 5" — that's doing everything but without necessarily spending much time just screwing about — is said to take around 90 hours.

So 80 hours finishing the main story plus what seems to be a fairly small amount of side stuff means that "GTA 6" is poised to be a great deal longer than "GTA 5" was for completionists that go all-in on seeing all there is to see and doing all there is to do in Vice City. 

As it stands, we know very little about what types of side missions, bonus activities, and so on will be included in "GTA 6." The extended look did show two different types of races — car and dirt bike — that included pole position and lap times for users to track. So, as per usual, there will apparently be a lot of options for racing in "GTA 6." Beyond that, we mostly have to rely on activities we only briefly caught glimpses of characters taking part in to get a sense of what to expect.

Over the course of the two teaser trailers and the big gameplay trailer, we've seen characters hunting, fishing, exercising, wrestling, skydiving, shooting targets at a gun range, playing various sports, spelunking, and more. With the exception of the racing and the shooting range, most of it has consisted of quick glimpses that offered no indication of what the actual playing of the activities would entail.

We have no doubt that every side activity in the game is going to be fully fleshed out, likely more so than they were in any other "GTA" game, given that nothing in the game seems to be perfunctory or half-baked. Expect a lot of really fun, complex, and well-polished activities to constantly distract you from the main missions when "GTA 6" hits in three months.