GTA 6 is so detailed that Rockstar Games has created around 600,000 animations solely for the game's NPCs, ensuring that they feel more individual.
In a new interview with Edge magazine for issue 430, it's revealed that Rockstar assembled a full team in Los Angeles tasked with bringing GTA 6's NPCs to life in a way that'd make them feel more like real people with more unique characteristics, instead of solely relying on procedural systems to make crowds that simply serve to fill an empty space.
After art directing each one, around 600,000 animations were created, which is wild to think about – it sounds like the average player could be playing for years and not see all of them. Leonida's pedestrians all have personality traits, too, with factors such as their temperament, the player's behavior towards them, and their own levels of aggression influencing how they respond to different situations.
Rob Nelson, co-studio head at Rockstar North, says the process of creating all these NPCs involved asking: "Who’s going to be aggressive? How many people are going to go for a weapon? How many are going to test me?"
Over half a million NPC animations is an almost unfathomable level of detail, though – it's stuff like that that makes it understandable why there's been a 13-year gap between GTA 6 and GTA 5. It also helps explain its apparently enormous file size – according to PlayStation Store sleuth PlayStation Game Size on Twitter, Rockstar's behemoth clocks in at a whopping 210GB. You might want to start clearing some space now before we get to launch day.
