GTA 6 realism: GTA 5 already felt dated, says Rockstar

Rob Nelson, co-studio head of Rockstar North, says parts of GTA 5's realism were already starting to feel dated, and that GTA 6's big jump in visual fidelity meant the team could no longer get away with shortcuts it used to rely on. Nelson made the comments in an interview with Edge magazine, which GamesRadar+ picked up and HobbyConsolas reported on November 1.

Why GTA 5's timing looked wrong in GTA 6

According to the coverage, Nelson put much of the problem down to how much better the new game looks. When the team ran GTA 6 using GTA 5's timings, he said, everything appeared too fast for a world rendered at this level of detail. His wider point, as HobbyConsolas relays it, is that once a world's resolution goes up, some things simply can't be glossed over the way they once were.

It's an interesting admission. Higher fidelity is usually sold as pure upside, but Nelson describes it as something that exposes old habits, forcing changes to how things move and behave and not just to how they look.

The shotgun test for GTA 6 NPCs

Nelson's clearest example involves civilians. If you want pedestrians to behave believably, he argued, you can't stand in front of them, pull an automatic shotgun out of nowhere and get no reaction at all.

He said that barely held up even in GTA 5. Anyone who has played it will recognise the behaviour he described: bystanders would ignore a drawn weapon and only run once you actually aimed it at them. In Nelson's view, that was already beginning to feel dated at GTA 5's level of resolution, so it was never going to survive the step up to GTA 6.

The reported comments don't spell out exactly how GTA 6's civilians will react instead. HobbyConsolas expects the behaviour to be fixed and suggests Red Dead Redemption 2, where Arthur Morgan's interactions with NPCs were far more detailed, as a likely influence. That link is the outlet's own speculation, not something Nelson is quoted as saying. If you want to follow that thread, we've covered how the NPC system from RDR2 was nearly kept from Nelson.

More from Rockstar's Edge interview

Nelson's remarks come from the same Edge feature in which several senior Rockstar staff discussed how GTA 6 was built. Elsewhere in that coverage, Rockstar explained why the main story can't be rushed. Taken together, the interviews paint a studio that sees GTA 6 as a rethink of how its worlds behave, not just a graphical upgrade on GTA 5.

Players will be able to test the shotgun theory themselves when GTA 6 launches on November 19 on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S. For the rest of what Rockstar has officially shared, see our GTA 6 everything we know guide.