Rockstar Games is no stranger to some of its projects getting leaked before the studio was ready to show them off, and Grand Theft Auto 6 has been no exception in this regard. Discussing some of the upcoming title’s early leaks, artist Aaron Garbut told Bloomberg about how “it feels like somebody’s wading through your dirty washing. It’s like they’re inside your head.”
Garbut’s sentiment comes down to the fact that the early leaks showed many assets and design decisions that weren’t completed yet. “You see your early work out there. Nobody’s ever supposed to see that. It’s really weirdly invasive. And so, it’s quite hard to deal with on an emotional level.”
The interview covered a wide variety of topics, and even included head of publishing Jennifer Kolbe, who spoke about how the studio wanted to move away from its reliance on crunch following the release of Red Dead Redemption 2. Describing it as “a real moment for Rockstar to look at itself”, she said that the common sentiment around the time was that “we’re not doing it like this again”.
“Anytime I say we haven’t crunched, someone is going to say, ‘I did.’ And I don’t want to get into arguments with individual teams or individual people. But I think we did things differently, and I’m proud of that.”’
Head of development Phil Hooker has spoken about the massive scale of Grand Theft Auto 6, and revealed that Rockstar has been continuing to fine-tune the project and make changes as recently as a few months ago. “The game’s never completely settled,” he said. “We never have an exact blueprint. Even within the last few months, we’ve changed things.”
Co-studio head Rob Nelson discussed how some of these decisions included things like the density of NPCs roaming around in the open-world game. “The projections they were giving us were horrifying,” said Nelson about the resource limitations that Rockstar had to deal with. Hooker added that this even led to some planned areas getting cut from the game altogether.
“I think when it became apparent that some areas weren’t going to make it, that’s when we decided to make the shift of date. We could hit that schedule, but it won’t be the game we want to make.”
In a separate report, Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier revealed that the team behind Grand Theft Auto 6 has even created technology that would make the in-game characters sweat realistically depending on the intensity of the activity they were partaking in.
“They told me that they have a specific system in the game that will make it so Lucia, Jason, or whoever will exert different amounts of sweat depending on how much effort they’re putting in,” said Schreier. “If they’re dancing extra hard in the nightclub, they will sweat more than if they are not, which I think shows you the level of detail they’re putting into this game.”
Grand Theft Auto 6 is making its way to PS5 and Xbox Series X/S on November 19th. In the meantime, the studio is also gearing up for a tribunal hearing about its alleged union-busting activities.
