By The retellings coming out of the previews add a detail the showcase never spelled out: GTA 6 has places where the sandbox is switched off. A number of locations tied to the story work as safe zones — inside them you can’t steal a car, start a fight or even draw a weapon.
The example that keeps coming up is the club owned by a friend of Jason’s. The reasoning attributed to the developers is blunt: there is no point letting the player wreck a friend’s business just to permit something that can happen anywhere else on the map.
Why this is a design choice, not a limitation
Older GTAs handled the same problem by cheating. Story-critical characters were simply immortal, their venues respawned untouched, and the game pretended nothing had happened. That kept the plot intact but broke the fiction: you could shoot up a bar on Tuesday and be welcomed back on Wednesday.
A safe zone is the more honest version. If residents keep score and clerks decide for themselves whether to fight back, then a world that remembers what you did can’t also let you torch the people the story depends on. Fencing off a handful of story venues is the price of everything else being reactive.
It also changes how those places feel. A bar where nothing can go wrong stops being another surface to bounce off and becomes a place you might actually spend time in — the way safehouses are meant to work.
What we don’t know
How many such zones exist, whether the rule is absolute or just suppresses the wanted system, and what happens if you arrive already in a chase. None of that has been shown, and the club example itself comes from preview retellings rather than anything Rockstar has published — treat it as a well-sourced rumour, not a feature list.