In the latest issue of Love magazine, Rockstar North’s head of development and co–studio head Rob Nelson explained that the senior team at the studio have been together for a “loooooooong time” and everyone involved has a “good sense of what they need to do.” He also provided the development schedule and strategy the team uses to craft a place as large and detailed as Vice City.
“We start building and creating assets and systems, and we begin roughing in content across all areas of development,” said Nelson.
“We build the game up through a series of eight-week milestones where we pull agreed-upon sections of the game together. We evaluate those milestones and make loads of notes that will determine what we focus on for the next milestone. We work our way there, year after year, one obsessive day at a time, course-correcting as we go; always with the feeling we want the finished game to have firmly in mind, knowing that often we have to find that feeling, and trusting that, even if we haven’t found it yet, we will eventually!”
And how do you fill this giant game world with content, including over 150 animal species and hundreds of vehicles? One option is to just throw lots of people and money at it, and that’s what it sounds like Rockstar did. The studio built an entire writers’ room dedicated to writing pedestrian dialogue. As GTA 6‘s open-world writing director James Horton explained, Rockstar created a team in Los Angeles focused solely on writing pedestrian dialogue, and they worked closely with a production team in L.A. to create the game’s thousands of unique NPCs.
“There are no shortcuts when it comes to building a world like this,” said Horton.
“It’s a question of giving the right people the resources they need to build something that’s not only vast and varied as a whole, but where every part rings true no matter how small it is, or how closely you look at it. It needs to wash over you when you’re sprinting down the busiest street in the city, hearing snatches of a hundred different conversations as you go; and it needs to be totally convincing if you decide to stop and pay close attention to any one of those conversations.”
Next month, after years of waiting, fans will finally get to play Grand Theft Auto 6 and discover if all this work paid off or not.