Rob Nelson has confirmed that you can rob essentially any store you can enter. That is a meaningful change from GTA V, where robbable locations were a short fixed list.
The three tiers
- Low risk, low take. Won't fund much.
- Tier 1 — local store
- Middle ground on both.
- Tier 2 — jewellery store
- The full score, and the full response.
- Tier 3 — bank
These can be run solo or with both protagonists. Which you pick is a risk decision, not just a payout one — a bank brings a police response the corner shop does not.
The story makes you earn
This is the part most people have skimmed past, and it changes how the campaign is paced. According to Nelson, there are points in the story where you must go out into the open world and accumulate a certain amount of capital before the story will advance.
So free-roam robbery is not purely optional side content. At specific gates it is the critical path. If you dislike being told to go and earn, that is worth knowing before launch rather than after.
Cash versus bank
The HUD carries two money readouts in the top right — a purple icon for your bank balance and a green one for the cash physically on you.
Rockstar has not spelled out the consequences of the split. The obvious inference is that carried cash is at risk in a way banked money is not, but that is inference, and we will not state it as a rule until it is shown.
Stealing cars is a skill now
Car theft has tiers of its own, and early in the game you simply cannot take everything:
- Smash the window — fastest, loudest, and a witnessed crime is a reported crime.
- Slim Jim — quieter entry.
- Key cloner — required for higher-end vehicles.
- Not everything can be hotwired, particularly early on.
Because a crime has to be witnessed or set off an alarm to be reported, how you take a car matters as much as which car you take.
Car fences
Fences are where stolen vehicles are sold. Two further functions have been reported:
- They may hand out lists of specific cars to go and collect.
- They can remove trackers.
Both are described from the Extended Look footage rather than from a Rockstar statement, so treat the detail as likely but not final.