New details about Rockstar's GTA 6 continue to come to light ahead of the highly anticipated crime game's release in November. Reporter Jason Schreier published a video recently in which he discussed some of the new things about GTA 6 that he learned when interviewing Rockstar, including how the game will feature the next evolution of fine details like the horse testicle system in Rockstar's last game, Red Dead Redemption II, along with information about the game's roads and "dark" years of development on the project.
One of the details is that GTA 6's roads are narrower, generally, than what GTA 5 had--and that was on purpose. The roads are "significantly" narrower, Schreier said that Rockstar's Aaron Garbut told him, and players will have denser traffic scenarios to deal with. Anyone who's played GTA 5 knows that some of the roads are wide open, allowing players to zip around like an action movie.
Players can do that in GTA 6 as well, but Schreier said Rockstar told him that the team planned on narrower roads from the onset of development, and this caused "ripple effects" for the game overall. "All these things come back to bite you later," Garbut said, referring to how narrower roads meant that the team had to create more buildings and generally more elements to accomodate this.
Also in the video, Schreier said Rockstar faced "dark" times between 2019-2022 due to not only COVID, but also because that was when Rockstar was determing how realistic they wanted to make GTA 6. Finding the balance between realism and the arcade-style fun that GTA is known for was a key point of discussion at Rockstar around this time, and it caused some tension internally, Schreier said.
Around this time, Rockstar's Rob Nelson told Schreier that the studio was thinking about making GTA 6's weapon system more realistic and only allowing players to hold a set number of weapons in their arsenal. Rockstar spent "months if not years" experimenting with different designs for a new system to evolve the traditional weapon wheel, or get rid of it entirely. However, after all that time, Rockstar decided to stick with the familiar weapon-wheel setup.
Another interesting fact from the video is that, according to Garbut, there is "no one person that has this whole thing in their head," referring to GTA 6 itself. Schreier said individual developers working on GTA 6 are given a level of autonomy that allows them to add small details that other colleagues might be totally unaware of.
Schreier pointed out how one of the granular details in Red Dead Redemption II was how your horse's testicles would shrink or expand based on the weather. That was never something that was on a "features list" for the game or an idea that a director asked for. Instead, someone, or a team of people, came up with this on their own and put it in the game. Schreier said GTA 6 will have its own version of this, with individual developers or teams inserting granular details that might otherwise go unnoticed.
GTA 6 launches on November 19 for PS5 and Xbox Series X|S. It's expected to be a huge hit commercially, and it's already tracking ahead of all the other big AAA games of recent times.