unique pickup icons disappearing when thrown might be a bigger deal than i thought

Caught a small thing in the extended look that I haven't seen anyone else mention. When you throw certain pickup items, their icon just vanishes from the world. The basketball is the obvious example. It's a minigame object and a unique pickup with its own icon.

That got me thinking. If the basketball works that way, maybe a bunch of other minigame items do too. You could grab one and mess around with it outside whatever activity it belongs to. The second screenshot shows what looks like a basketball sitting in a trunk, so maybe you can stash these things in your car.

You could take a ball from a court in Vice City, drive it anywhere in Leonida, set up your own game wherever there's a hoop. Or just chuck it at an NPC for no reason. That's the kind of dumb freedom that makes these games fun.

There's a spoiler-ish detail from TGG floating around too.

Apparently dog poop is a pickup and you can throw it at pedestrians.

If that's real, Rockstar is leaning hard into this. Unique icons for all kinds of junk, weapons, collectibles, whatever.

GTA IV had bricks and bottles you could grab and toss, but it never felt like a system. This looks more fleshed out. I wouldn't be surprised if Leonida is full of random objects with their own icons and weird little uses.

Rockstar seems to be treating pickups as part of the roleplay sandbox, period. That's the kind of thing that'll keep me messing around for hours before I even touch a mission.

Source: r/GTA6 · Curated content.

Stashing a ball in the trunk and hauling it to some hoop out past Mount Kalaga (if one even exists there) is the sandbox freedom Los Santos never gave me.