With Rockstar Games finally pulling back the curtain on Grand Theft Auto 6 via interviews and hands-off previews, small chunks of new information are trickling out that paint a clearer picture of this latest entry in the series.
We already know how big the world is going to be and the Bonnie and Clyde-esque dynamics between its leading characters, but Rockstar also claims that attention to detail required the company to implement a radical shift to the pace of life in its world in order to maintain the illusion of realism. With the game’s visuals now more true-to-life, the company says it felt compelled to slow things down in order to maintain the immersion of Vice City.
In a new interview with EDGE magazine, co-head of Rockstar North and head of development Rob Nelson discusses how the company visited Miami on numerous occasions, cataloging specific aspects of the city and the culture for Rockstar to further research. After rebuilding Vice City based on these excursions and the subsequent research, the company tested the world with the same time-and-day systems and gameplay speed as GTA5, but something felt off.
“Everything felt too fast,” Nelson explained. “As the resolution of the worlds goes up, I think there are things you can’t get away with in the same way. 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 GTA5, 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 GTA5 at that level of resolution.”
So, the company chose to replace the quick loop of the previous games’ day-night cycle with something that takes far longer to pass through, making for longer nights and sunsets as time physically moves slower. NPCs are more reactive. You can still summon cars, but it won’t be as instantaneous as it was in GTA5 or even as summoning your horse was in Read Dead Redemption 2. If you want to summon a car in GTA 6, you can pay a modest fee to use the Scooter Bros app. After a few seconds, someone will drive up in your car before riding off on the scooter they brought with them. And while you can keep an arsenal of weapons in the trunk of your car, you can’t carry them all on your person.
Additionally, the company added narrative friction that prevents an immediate rush through the game’s story at a pace far too fast to feel realistic for the story being told. Rather than letting players race through the main story, immediately jumping from one mission to the next, the game introduces enforced downtime via requirements such as the need to raise cash for a new job to slow progression.
Rockstar Games is trying to emphasize realism over the at-times arcade-y design ideal present in aspects of prior games. This is being done to allow the game’s pacing to match the visual fidelity the company has spent years upon years honing. It won’t be long to see if it all pays off.
