In the process of tweaking GTA 6's open world to make it feel believable, Rockstar implemented GTA 5's timings only to find that "everything felt too fast" and that a change was needed to stick the landing.
That comes from a new interview featured in Edge magazine – on sale now, by the way – where several lead developers on the upcoming Grand Theft Auto game share how it all finally came together.
The earliest days of GTA 6 were more about place than plot. With most of Rockstar still working on Red Dead Redemption 2, the initial work on the project involved a small group traveling to Miami to get a better feel of what a return to Vice City would entail. While GTA 6's Bonnie-and-Clyde-style story would eventually come into focus, it wouldn't be before Rockstar applied lessons learned from building RDR2 to GTA 6.
Many of the lessons manifested in minor details that collectively paint a bigger picture that looks unlike GTA 5. While the roads of Los Santos are intentionally wider to make driving and turning easier, the roads of Vice City are narrower, as Rockstar North boss Rob Nelson wanted "a more believable size." The duration of day and night is also longer, giving you a greater window to get up to mischief under cover of night, if you so please.
The changes to GTA 6 compared to GTA 5 were also brought about by improvements in visual performance. For example, Rockstar tested GTA 6 using GTA 5's timings and found that "everything felt too fast" for a world that boasts the level of fidelity that Vice City can reach. The citizens who call Vice City home were equally problematic.
"As the resolution of the worlds goes up, I think there are things you can't get away with in the same way," Nelson explains. "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. 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. Only then would they run. To me, that was already showing its age in GTA 5 at that level of resolution."
Making GTA 6 was, then, equal parts evolving what worked in Red Dead Redemption 2 and being mindful of what's changed in the 13 years between GTA 5 and 6. A higher level of performance means that the ceiling has been raised, but as Rockstar has learned over the years, the floor has also been raised. GTA 6 is due to release on November 19.
Check out our Countdown to GTA 6 here as we explore the Rockstar games that got us here
