GTA 6’s Jason and Lucia Are Already Losing to Red Dead Redemption 2’s Arthur Morgan

Main characters are extremely important to a game series’ success—just ask Grand Theft Auto. While gameplay is important, how a main protagonist is developed deeply affects how they are received by audiences. In the case of Grand Theft Auto 6, players will be introduced to two main characters: Jason and Lucia, boyfriend and girlfriend and partners in crime. Both parties can be played separately, switched between at will.

Spending time on both characters at once could pose a challenge, leaving one main protagonist fully developed, while the other might lack substance. Since protagonists hold so much weight in how a game is received, this character development challenge could already signal a weakness in the foundation of the upcoming game. Rockstar Games are masters at their craft, having developed some impeccable characters in games in the past, a la Arthur Morgan or Niko Bellic. That being said, even the company’s expertise might not be able to save them when it comes to building two compelling characters at once.

Developing One Protagonist Is Already Hard Enough

GTA 6 is going to spend time trying to develop Lucia and Jason as protagonists at the same time. While it is too early to say, pulling something like that off is not a small feat in the least. Players need to sit with characters, mull around in them as they play to get to know them. Learning their quirks, growing and changing with them as the story progresses and missions are completed. I figure that the game will see both characters develop through each other’s eyes, offering a skewed perspective.

We see Lucia through her lover’s point of view, a perspective that is not our own. Same goes for Jason. Off the bat, players are given a crooked lens into the pair’s relationship and life, narrated by the very people they are trying to understand. Can we really understand a character if our perception of them is based on the viewpoint of a lover? This might be an unreliable narrator situation. In general, developing two characters at the same time can be tricky. Details can be missed, and characters can come off as flat due to bandwidth reasons. One protagonist might get fully fleshed-out, while the other might lag behind in characterization.

Creating just one fully fleshed-out, lovable character is hard; writing two is almost a Herculean feat. Writers have to manage two stories, completing arcs in full. Thankfully, these characters seem to run in the same circles because of their couple dynamic, and their stories seem to be connected, which will make creating situations and managing point of view a smidge easier. Will these characters face their own trials apart? How will Rockstar manage to balance screen time for both so that either character doesn’t feel like a sidekick? Knowing a character is being able to step into their shoes, learning their fears, likes, and dislikes. Making two main characters compelling to audiences is not impossible, but it is hard.

While it is too early to say, I am betting we won’t ever get to truly know these characters, especially not when there’s so much going on already. This might be a “too many cooks in the kitchen spoil the broth” situation. There’s a lot to play with in GTA 6 as far as game mechanics go. Adding two playable characters in an already jam-packed game is almost too much for players to work with. This, juxtaposed with Red Dead Redemption 2‘s masterful characterization of Arthur Morgan, is like night and day. Working with one main protagonist, Rockstar managed to craft a character from start to finish that players were willing to root for.

Morgan is resilient, reliable to a fault, and a romantic, even if he won’t let himself believe it. I grew to love the gunslinging cowboy because I was able to sit with him for hours upon hours. Just him and nobody else. I got to know his longtime love interest, Mary Linton, and his complicated family history and upbringing as an orphan, which made me realize that Morgan saw Dutch Van Der Linde as a father figure he could not disappoint. His lore revealed deep-seated abandonment issues and a willingness to win at all costs, even if it cost Morgan his life.

I learned of his fear of dying, his affinity for wildlife through his intricate sketches, his justifiable hatred for Micah Bell, and begrudging trust in Van Der Linde’s grand plans. Morgan is a multifaceted character who felt 3D because of all of his rich characterization. Time was spent cultivating this extremely intricate cowboy. That’s what makes Morgan someone worth rooting for. By the end of his story, you feel deeply for him, something that can’t be accomplished with two main characters. One is bound to get left behind. I remember finishing RDR2 late at night, staring at my screen and sobbing for a long time just thinking about how cruel it all was.

Morgan’s eventual death was impactful because it felt like, after all these hours I’d poured into the game, I knew him personally. I knew my horse equally well, but that was ripped from me too. I’d spent 65 hours with Morgan traversing the wild American West, and now, he was gone. If Rockstar is aiming to recreate the same magic they did with Morgan in RDR2, they need to focus on a specific character, rather than two. The company has seen single characters in the GTA universe prosper for them in the past, with stellar protagonists like Niko Bellic, who is arguably the best in the franchise. It is often too hard to develop two characters at the same rate and with the same attention to detail. Something will fall through the cracks, leaving a specific protagonist feeling hollow like a bunch of pixels on a screen.

Here’s How Red Dead Redemption 2 Still Managed to Include (in Some Capacity) a Secondary Protagonist

Well, you might be saying to yourself, “RDR2 technically did have a secondary protagonist,” and you’d be right. John Marston serves as a secondary protagonist in the game, following Arthur’s unfortunate passing. Before then, the cowboy served as a secondary character that players should already know if they’ve played RDR. RDR2 serves as a prologue to the events of RDR, showing how Marston received his iconic scars while setting up the events that shaped his life in the first game. This works because players know and love Marston already.

To put this into perspective, when RDR2 was announced, many OG fans were pretty miffed at the idea of having a new protagonist on the scene. Morgan wasn’t folks’ first choice, especially not since they’d spent the entirety of the first game getting to know Marston. After the game was released, though, fans of the series were treated to a fantastic character that silenced any criticism outright. Funnily enough, many people, including myself, wish they could still play as Morgan. While I love Marston, I was disappointed I could no longer play him, forced to play Marston on my save file for eternity.

Players have already spent time with John, learning of his familial struggles and dealings with his young son Jack Marston and wife Abigail Marston, his dark childhood, and final denial of promised peace towards the end of RDR. No matter how hard John tried, settling down and living a normal life was impossible, and we see that notion beginning to crop up in John’s section of RDR2. His standing as a secondary character works because John’s character was already brilliantly established in the first game. RDR2 just served to offer his character even more context.

Systems

Released

November 19, 2026

ESRB

Rating Pending – Likely Mature 17+