It sounds like Grand Theft Auto 6 will take open world weather effects to another level, with simulated tropical storms and hurricanes.
We already knew that GTA 6 would have an advanced weather system of some kind. But in Game Informer’s GTA 6 cover story, senior associate editor Marcus Stewart described the need for Leonida to have diverse weather, due to Florida’s tendency to have wild shifts in its climate. And, it seems like Rockstar has that covered.
Rockstar vice president of art for lighting and rendering, Owen Shepherd, told Stewart, “We have re-engineered our weather system to make everything much more localized and persistent,” and that “the world features new fully dynamic cloudscapes that roll across the map.”
We already know that GTA 6 is going to have a map that’s three times larger than the ones found in Grand Theft Auto 5 and in Red Dead Redemption 2, so it’s even more impressive that the game will be able to simulate moving storm systems. In practice, this will absolutely mean you can get localized rain showers in one area, while the next area is sunny. But while that alone wouldn’t necessarily be groundbreaking, it seems like weather systems will have lasting effects on the environment.
According to Stewart, he was told that “GTA 6’s rain creates realistic rainbows under the right lighting conditions, and that recently showered areas will remain wet on the ground and create persistent puddles once the storm passes.” That’d be cool enough if the weather in Leonida only got as extreme as a thunderstorm but in real life, Florida is known to have more unpredictable weather.
Luckily, GTA 6 will also have simulated tropical storms and hurricanes, which will wreak havoc on the environment. Shepherd says that these storms will have “heavy clouds, strong winds, dense atmospherics and a lot of rain combine so that everything is dripping wet, water is gushing off roof edges and lampposts, thunder rumbles and flashes of lighting light up the clouds dramatically.”
Unfortunately, Game Informer’s cover story doesn’t come with video that shows these weather systems in action, but combined with the persistent effects weather can have on the environment, my imagination is running wild. Will there be flooding in the streets? Will buildings and trees get knocked down? There are a ton of possibilities, and I already want to jump in and go storm chasing.
GTA 6 launches on November 19, so we won’t have to wait too long to see what the weather can do.
Jackie Thomas is the Senior Tech Editor at IGN and the PC components queen. She’s been covering gaming hardware for more than a decade for IGN, TechRadar, Gizmodo, PC Gamer and more. You can follow her @Jackiecobra