GTA 6 is too big for any one dev to know, Rockstar says

Rob Nelson, co-studio head at Rockstar North, doubts that a single person on the GTA 6 team knows everything in the game. "The game is so big, I don't know that there's anybody on the team that knows all of it," Nelson told IGN, in comments reported by Dexerto on October 7. He said new dialogue was still "regularly hitting the build", so even he keeps hearing lines for the first time.

Aaron Garbut, another Rockstar North veteran, said much the same to Bloomberg's Jason Schreier. Schreier shared it in a YouTube video covered by GamesRadar+ and Eurogamer. "There's no one person that has this whole thing in their head," Garbut said.

The impound lot Nelson had never heard of

Nelson backed up his point with a story from his own play session. He was driving to a shop he planned to rob when Jason pointed at a car park they were passing and suggested a different job. Nelson hadn't heard that line before, and he said he was "pleasantly surprised" enough to change his plans and go for the impound lot.

Rockstar has already said the GTA 6 story won't take players to every corner of Leonida. Nelson's comments suggest a lot of the rest is meant to be stumbled upon. He compared it directly to Red Dead Redemption 2, saying much of the content is discovered emergently instead of being flagged with objectives, blips or map icons. "It's a big map, a very big map," he added.

He also described getaways that grow out of ordinary robberies. Your partner can take the wheel while you shoot at pursuing police, blown tires can cause crashes that block the cars behind, and a partner can beat a train across the tracks at the last moment to cut off the chase. Nelson said these moments "can feel like you're playing a scripted mission, which is totally new for us." He has spoken before about how Red Dead's systems shaped GTA 6's world, including the NPC system he nearly didn't get to pitch.

Red Dead's horses and developer autonomy

According to Schreier, Garbut used one of Red Dead Redemption 2's most famous details as an example: horse testicles that shrink in the cold. Schreier said the feature "was not something that was on some big list of features to make". Instead, one person or a small group decided to add it because they thought it was a cool detail and had time to build it. Eurogamer said it was checking the anecdote with Rockstar.

Schreier gave his own view too, not a quote from Garbut. He said he imagines not even Rockstar's top developers know every single thing in GTA 6, and that staff have the freedom to add things they find cool, so similar surprises could turn up in the new game. Eurogamer reported that Red Dead 2's contextual "hold left trigger" interaction system started the same way: Phil Hooker, now director of technology, built it on his own initiative rather than at the request of a creative lead. Hooker has also said GTA 6 was still changing close to launch.

Narrower roads and a much bigger art team

Eurogamer listed several other details from Schreier's video:

• Roads in GTA 6 are "significantly narrower" than in GTA 5, so players feel the traffic more.
• Some artists have worked on GTA 6 for 11 years.
• The art production team has 65 people. Schreier said GTA 6's art production team has 65 people, compared with "five or six" on GTA 5.
• Rockstar tried several replacements for GTA's radial menu and ended up keeping it.

Eurogamer also noted that Rockstar grew from 2,441 to 4,711 employees across 12 offices in the years after Red Dead Redemption 2 launched in 2018. With that many people working on the game, it makes sense that nobody can keep all of it in their head. Garbut has also spoken about the pressure to beat fan expectations. GTA 6 releases on November 19.