GTA 6 Forced Rockstar to Level Up as GTA 5's Realism Was Already Aging

Rockstar North boss Rob Nelson says the jump in technology between GTA 5 and GTA 6 left the studio unable to "get away with" shortcuts that used to pass unnoticed. In an interview with several senior Rockstar figures about how the new Grand Theft Auto was made, Nelson explained that the higher fidelity of the world exposed design habits that no longer held up, from game pacing to how pedestrians behave.

Timings and crowds had to change

Much of the problem comes down to what players see on screen. Nelson said that running GTA 6 on GTA 5's timings made everything feel "too fast" for a world rendered at this level of detail. NPCs were tricky for a similar reason: the sharper the picture, the more obvious it is when the people in it act strangely.

"As the resolution of the worlds goes up, I think there are things you can't get away with in the same way," he said. "If you want a pedestrian population to behave believably, and you can stand in front of them and produce an automatic shotgun out of nowhere and they don't react, then that doesn't work."

GTA 5's reaction problem

Nelson pointed to GTA 5 as the example. In that game, a player could pull out a weapon in front of a pedestrian and nothing would happen until the gun was aimed at them, at which point they ran.

"That barely held in GTA 5, where you could literally produce one of those weapons in front of somebody and they would not react unless you aimed it at them," he said. "Only then would they run. To me, that was already showing its age in GTA 5 at that level of resolution."

Building on Red Dead Redemption 2

GTA 6 is not only a matter of making the visuals and behavior line up. Rockstar's new game also carries over ideas from Red Dead Redemption 2, including an NPC interaction system that lets you greet or antagonize characters. GTA 6 builds on that system rather than reusing it as is.

GTA 6 launches on November 19.