Anyone who has played Grand Theft Auto has pulled this trick. You abandon the car, climb over a fence and sprint until the police lose interest. In GTA 6, that escape could finish with a dog landing on you.
Rockstar Games confirmed in a recent preview that the police in Grand Theft Auto VI will include K-9 Units, which the series has never had before. They’re more than background detail. According to Rockstar, the dogs will help officers and will sometimes be set on players during on-foot pursuits, where they can run you down, tackle you and pin you to the ground.
Fans have welcomed the change, and the reasons are obvious. Escaping police on foot in earlier GTA games never felt realistic, and GTA 6 has pushed hard on realism from day one. Police dogs suit that direction. They also make running away on foot, a long-time series habit, far less dependable.
What Rockstar hasn’t said yet
Plenty is still unknown after the preview. There’s no word on how often K-9 Units will show up next to the rest of the police. They might be uncommon. They might be linked to certain areas of the game, or held back for missions and left out of free roam altogether.
The depth of the system is another open question. What’s confirmed so far: the dogs are in the game, they work alongside officers and they can bring you down.
The dog question
Things get uncomfortable here. Most video games avoid letting players harm dogs, and Rockstar hasn’t explained what GTA 6 will do.
A reasonable guess (and it is only a guess) is that police dogs can be shot, hit with a car and treated like any other NPC. Melee is harder to call. At close range, the game may trigger a takedown or bite hold animation and not give you the chance to fight back. Whichever way it goes, chases will play out differently.
The police won’t have the only dogs in the game. GTA 6 includes other dogs, with NPCs keeping pets, and players can presumably do the same. If police dogs can be attacked, you can probably assume the same goes for every dog.
Rockstar’s past games haven’t been consistent on this. Red Dead Redemption 2 allows you to kill dogs, though it discourages you from doing so. GTA 5 doesn’t let you. GTA Online does.
Part of a longer list of police changes
The K-9 Units add to changes to police and the wanted system that had already been reported as big breaks from GTA 5. They’re arriving in a game that mixes older ideas, among them a returning feature from GTA 4, with a large batch of new ones. It seems Rockstar had kept the K-9 detail quiet until now.
If players can mow down police dogs on day one, a lot of groups will want to get in on the attention. PETA is the most likely one to object.
Grand Theft Auto VI launches worldwide on November 19 for PS5 and Xbox Series X.