Rockstar Games established a new team focused on developing more realistic NPCs for Grand Theft Auto 6.
The Los Angeles-based team of writers, directors, and producers designed these characters by “art-directing each individual one of them,” as Rockstar North co-head Aaron Garbut told The New York Times.
“Every room in the game, somebody thought about this,” Garbut explained. “Who’s sitting where, what they’re drinking, the marks that are left on the table. The pictures on the wall will have the people that are in that room, with their tattoos on their arms and their family behind them. That whole thing has been made, and built, and photographed, and placed in this random room in a random building in a huge city, in a world.”
Rockstar North co-head Rob Nelson described GTA 6 as “an evolution” of what the studio accomplished with Red Dead Redemption 2 in terms of detail and scale.
“Once we managed to accomplish that level of interactive fidelity in a more sparsely populated version of America 100 years ago, we were already imagining what it would be like if we could do that at the scale and density of a modern environment.”
Rockstar stated that GTA 6 features over 600,000 NPC animations, compared to 300,000 in RDR2 and 55,000 in GTA 5. Vice City is twice the size of Los Santos, and its map is three times larger than that of RDR2.
Nelson also confirmed on the Kinda Funny Gamescast that GTA 6 will not have generative AI or microtransactions.
The game’s extended preview on Netflix yesterday showcased these features, highlighting the depth of interactivity Nelson and Garbut described, along with the game’s story, combat, and gameplay.
Sensor Tower data shows that Netflix US mobile viewership went up by 35% during the preview, which caused both Netflix and Twitch to crash.