When Rockstar announced GTA 6 pre-orders would kick off on June 25, it did so with a short, looping video posted to the official website that offered a fresh look at Vice City. It’s meant to be viewed as you scroll down, a cool piece of GTA 6 media that sets the tone for your experience on the website. But this is GTA 6, and so everything is analyzed to within an inch of its life.
Look closely at the image taken from this short video, below, and you’ll see a ferris wheel in the background. It’s lit up, as you’d expect it to be given this is a night time scene, but unlike the buildings around it, the ferris wheel does not have a reflection in the water. Fans spotted this omission almost immediately, dubbing it GTA 6’s “vampire ferris wheel.” And while it sparked plenty of “literally unplayable” jokes, the tech experts at Digital Foundry did their thing, and have come up with an explanation for what’s going on here.
DF’s Tom Morgan suggests that the missing reflection is the result of a “ray tracing related quirk.” As we know from the two GTA 6 trailers Rockstar has released so far, the game uses ray traced reflections, and as you’d expect they’re used for the reflections we see in the water here. But for some reason the ferris wheel misses out. That is to say, we should be seeing a reflection for the ferris wheel. As Morgan says: “it’s clear that the ray traced reflection on the water here is not accurate to the lighting or shading of the scenery above.”
As for the why, the object (the ferris wheel) may have been excluded from ray tracing to save on GPU costs. “This alone would explain the missing Ferris wheel reflection,” Morgan suggests. “It’s an object in similar range as the surrounding buildings, and yet one that’s seemingly not flagged to reflect using the ray tracing approach.”
The camera distance may also have had an impact, Morgan said, although there’s no way to know at this stage. “It’s likely a ray tracing related quirk that, perhaps, will be tweaked in the final game,” he continued.
There’s been a lot of fun reaction not just to this vampire ferris wheel, but to Digital Foundry doing its thing with it. Some think fussing over this sort of thing is overkill, and of course it is, but this is GTA 6 we’re talking about. Expectations are perhaps higher for this game than any other in history, and the technology underpinning Rockstar’s games is a huge part of the excitement. Just look at Red Dead Recemption 2, now eight years old, and still wowing fans with its many systems, realistic visuals, and tech prowess.
And let’s be honest here, if we’ve got fans spending months charting the planetary positions for every Rockstar trailer drop since 2007 to try to work out the release date for Trailer 3, then analyzing this brief browser video for reflections shouldn’t come as a huge surprise.
We’ve even done a spot of GTA 6 analysis ourselves, taking a close look at the recently revealed official cover art. Not long now!
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
