Trophies and Achievements

Rockstar's public material for GTA 6 - two trailers, the official site's bios and area descriptions, two screenshot batches, the pre-order pages and the twenty-six-minute Extended Look - contains no trophy list, no achievement names and no completion criteria. Neither PlayStation nor Xbox has published a list on their storefronts.

This is worth stating plainly because trophy lists have a particular kind of pull: they are the closest thing to a table of contents a game has before release, and a fabricated one is unusually easy to write. A list of forty plausible-sounding names, each with a plausible-sounding requirement, reads exactly like a real one and can be produced by anyone. There is currently nothing to check such a list against.

When a real list appears it will be attributable - to Rockstar, or to a platform storefront that publishes trophy data. Until then, no name, no count and no requirement for GTA 6 is knowable.

Per the community GTA Wiki, Grand Theft Auto V carries 43 achievements on Xbox and 44 trophies on PlayStation, the extra one being the platinum, Los Santos Legend, awarded for earning everything else. The Steam list matches the Xbox one at 43.

The list splits into three kinds of demand, and the split is the useful part:

• Story trophies. Ten of them, hidden until unlocked, each tied to a main mission. They are hidden for a reason: the name of a late-story achievement is a plot spoiler, which is why a trophy list read before playing is a mixed blessing.
• The completion trophy. One entry, Career Criminal, for reaching 100 percent game completion. It is a single line on the list and by a wide margin the longest item on it, because it stands in for an entire checklist of missions, side content, collectibles and activities.
• Everything else. Skill and activity entries that come out of ordinary play, some of them tied to the game's online component rather than the story.

Red Dead Redemption 2, Rockstar's next game after GTA 5, kept the same skeleton: a platinum on PlayStation, story entries, and a completion entry that carries the checklist.

In practice, one line on the list determines how long a full run takes. In GTA 5 it is Career Criminal; in Rockstar's other games it goes by another name and does the same job.

What that trophy actually demands is not written on the trophy. It is written in the game's own completion tracker, which enumerates story missions, side strands, hobbies, collectibles and miscellaneous tasks and computes a percentage from them. The trophy is a pointer to that tracker, which is why every serious completion guide for a Rockstar game is a guide to the tracker rather than to the trophy.

For GTA 6 the tracker's contents are unknown. Nothing in the official material describes a completion system, and no outlet reported one from the Extended Look. What has been reported is a set of life-sim systems - eating and training changing the protagonists' bodies, fatigue from a lack of sleep, an apparent honour meter - and it is not established whether any of them feed a completion percentage. Until the game is out, the honest statement is that GTA 6's completion criteria do not exist in public.

One interaction is worth knowing in advance because it catches people out. In GTA 5, activating any cheat disabled achievements, trophies and accomplishments for the rest of that game session, and using one during a story mission capped that attempt at a bronze medal. Reloading cleared the state, but a session in which a code had been entered was a session in which nothing could be earned.

That rule is the reason cheats and trophy runs were treated as separate activities in that game - typically a first playthrough for the story and the list, and a second save for messing about.

Whether GTA 6 grades missions, and whether it has cheats at all, is unknown. If both turn out to be true, the same trade-off returns and this page will say so.

When GTA 6's list appears, three habits make it useful rather than a spoiler:

• Read the visible entries, skip the hidden ones. On PlayStation, hidden trophies are hidden because their names give away plot. The visible list still tells you what the game expects of you.
• Find the completion entry first. It is the one that dictates the length of a full run and the one every other guide hangs off.
• Note which entries are tied to an online component. In GTA 5 some of them were, which means a single-player-only player cannot reach the platinum. Rockstar has confirmed nothing about GTA 6's online mode; the reporting on it comes from Bloomberg and is covered on the gameplay page.

A list that is missing the hidden entries entirely, or that carries requirements phrased in marketing language rather than in the flat imperative Rockstar uses, is not a real list.

This page becomes a trophy guide once the list is published by Rockstar or by a platform storefront. Each entry will carry its own requirement as written, with the hidden entries marked as spoilers rather than reproduced next to the rest, and the completion criteria broken out separately as the game's tracker defines them.

Until then it stays what it is: the published record, and the structure the last two Rockstar lists used. If a list surfaces before launch, it will appear in the news feed with its source named.

Related: cheats for the interaction above, missions for what is known about the story's structure, and editions for what each version of the game actually includes.