Everyone was expecting GTA 6 to be massive, sure, but comparing the amount of unique animations in the game to what was included in Rockstar Games‘ previous work really puts things into perspective.
Fresh off the back of Netflix’s GTA 6: An Extended Look premiere, a preview from New York Times revealed that the open-world maestros at Rockstar Games built a whopping 600,000 different animations to bring Leonidas to life – its people, its critters above and below sea level, its cars, and practically everything else that moves.
But that massive stat doesn’t tell us much without some context, so let’s zoom out. To compare Grand Theft Auto 6 to the already mammoth games that came before it, Rockstar developers told the publication that GTA 5 included a still impressive 55,000 animations and Red Dead Redemption 2 had an also almost unbelievable 300,000 animations.
Just in terms of animation work, GTA 6 is 10 times bigger than GTA 5 and double the size of Red Dead Redemption 2. Kind of astounding when you remember how wide GTA 5 felt back in 2013, with its seemingly endless moving parts clunking away.
Rockstar North art director and studio co-head Aaron Garbut, who’s been with the series for decades, also stressed the effort that went into the smaller details. “Every room in the game, somebody thought about this,” he said. “Who’s sitting where, what they’re drinking, the marks that are left on the table. The pictures on the wall will have the people that are in that room, with their tattoos on their arms and their family behind them. That whole thing has been made, and built, and photographed, and placed in this random room in a random building in a huge city, in a world.”
The rest of the GTA 6 showcase lifted the lid on so much more. For instance, GTA 6 is finally revamping the series’ Wanted system and it sounds like you can make or break the couple at the heart of GTA 6.
