Condition and appearance

Tracked stats

Health, Cardio, Fitness, Stamina, Strength, Calories, Body FatSource confidence: Reported

Weight gain

Fast food and heavy drinkingSource confidence: Confirmed

Muscle gain

Regular trainingSource confidence: Confirmed

Sleep

All-nighters show on their facesSource confidence: Confirmed

Hair growth

Does not grow automaticallySource confidence: ReportedChanged at salons, or at home.

Injuries

PersistSource confidence: Reported

Tracked separately

Jason and Lucia, independentlySource confidence: Confirmed

Fighting styles

Fixed per character, not trainedSource confidence: Reported

What actually moves the numbers

Three inputs, all of them things you do anyway rather than a menu you visit. What the characters eat, what they do with their time, and whether they sleep.

• Fast food and heavy drinking put on visible weight.
• Regular training builds visible muscle.
• Gym work, swimming, running and the game's many physical activities all count as exercise.
• All-nighters and long police chases show on their faces.
• Injuries and wounds persist rather than vanishing at the next cutscene.

The phone has a fitness app that tells you when to train, which is the game's way of admitting that a system like this needs a prompt or it becomes something you notice three chapters late. It is also a nice piece of characterisation in its own right. Two fugitives with a step counter.

It applies to both of them, separately

Jason and Lucia are tracked independently, which means neglecting one while playing the other has visible consequences. Training together is also one of the activities that builds their relationship, so the two systems feed each other.

Almost every route to a fitter character is also a route to a stronger relationship, because the game counts shared activity rather than solo effort. A player who trains both of them together is quietly progressing three systems at once, and a player who runs everything as Jason will end up with a Lucia who looks like she has been sitting in a car for a month.

Hair does not grow

Hair and facial hair do not lengthen over time on their own. They change when you change them, at a salon or at home. Rockstar previously built the opposite in Red Dead Redemption 2, where hair grew in real time and had to be maintained, and has evidently decided that the maintenance was not worth what it added.

What that means in practice is that appearance is entirely under your control rather than drifting while you are not looking. A haircut is a decision you made, not a chore you forgot, and since hair is one of the things the police put into a description of you, it is also a tool.

Fighting styles are fixed, not trained

Lucia fights with kickboxing and mixed martial arts, Jason street-fights. These are characterisation rather than a skill tree, and there is no indication you can train one into the other.

This is the point where GTA 6 stops resembling a role-playing game. There is no build here. You are not spending points to turn Lucia into a different fighter. You are looking after two specific people who fight the way those two people fight, and the system is reporting on their condition rather than letting you configure them.

Appearance is an input, not a costume

In most games, how your character looks is decoration. In GTA 6 it is wired into two other systems, and both of them are ones you will be using constantly.

• The police build descriptions from your clothing, hair and build, so what you look like determines how identifiable you are.
• Changing clothes, a hat or your hair degrades a description the police are working from, the single most direct way to break a pursuit.
• NPCs comment on what you are wearing, notice being stared at or followed, and react accordingly.
• A mask worn before a crime means there is no face to describe afterwards.