As tends to be the case with any sequel, the recent Grand Theft Auto 6 Extended Look showcase has drawn quite a bit of comparison with the previous entry – Grand Theft Auto 5. While some have claimed that the upcoming title doesn’t really look much different from its predecessor, the voice actor behind GTA 5’s Michael De Santa, Ned Luke, said in an interview, which you can check out below, that they are “out of their minds.”
“[Grand Theft Auto 6] looks nothing like Grand Theft Auto 5. I think they’re out of their minds. I’ll tell you one thing, I never looked that good,” said Luke in a recent interview. Further in the discussion, he also brought up how much more detailed the animations look in GTA 6, and how technology has evolved quite a bit since GTA 5’s development, culminating in its 2013 release on PS3 and Xbox 360.
“Watch the way the people move,” he said. “The walks are actual human walks. We still had a little bit of that mechanical thing going with our walks and the way we’d stand. For me, I felt like my legs were never fully straight. They always had this little bend in them.”
“The technology has grown by leaps and bounds, you know? What would make you think it’s going to be better than those games? It’s no diss to those games. It’s like between [GTA 5] and GTA 4. Our graphics blew GTA 4 away. They weren’t even close.”
Grand Theft Auto 6 is shaping up to be one of the most complex games out there, and even IO Interactive’s AI programmer thinks that Rockstar might be “at least 10 years ahead of the industry” when it comes to the game’s NPCs. In a social media post, Berkay Dursun spoke about how, while the Hitman franchise has traditionally featured large groups of NPCs, few of these NPCs actually have any AI powering them.
“As someone who worked for 3 years directly at IO on this crowd technology, I can say that this crowd technology has no relation to the technology in GTA 6. In GTA, every character is simulated individually, and achieving simulations on this scale puts them at least 10 years ahead of the industry. The closest game that does simulation at this level might be Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord, and yes, I worked on that game too lol.”
He went into more detail in another post, where he discussed the difference between “crowds” and “NPCs”, which largely comes down to how much processing horsepower is dedicated to these characters. “The characters you see here or in the environment in Assassin’s Creed, etc., aren’t NPCs; they’re Crowd. There’s no AI behind them; they just do “extra” roles in a certain pattern. An NPC has AI behind it and reacts to the player, has its own behavior patterns, etc., and those are costly operations for a large number of NPCs.”
Interestingly, Rockstar North co-studio head Rob Nelson even spoke about how the developers had to leave some ideas on the cutting room floor to make sure that GTA 6 didn’t get too complicated.
Grand Theft Auto 6 is coming to PS5 and Xbox Series X/S on November 19th.
