GTA 6 trailer is how the game is “really going to look”, not cinematics, says ex-Rockstar dev

rockpapershotgun.com:

If you were impressed by how good the first GTA 6 trailer looked, you were far from alone: even developers who previously worked at Rockstar were blown away by the level of detail shown.

Ex-Rockstar dev Mike York, who worked at Rockstar New England for nearly six years across both Grand Theft Auto V and Red Dead Redemption 2, offered his own take on the GTA 6 trailer from the perspective of someone who has inside knowledge of being at the studio. Even despite that, York seemed mighty impressed with what Rockstar’s current staff are able to pull off on modern hardware.

Reacting to the GTA 6 reveal trailer on his YouTube channel (thanks for the spot, VG247), York started by clarifying that the Grand Theft Auto devs always opt to render things in-engine rather than bumping up the visuals of cutscenes, meaning that “everything that you see in a GTA game is all done in-game. Every single cutscene.”

In other words, what we see in the GTA 6 trailer is how things will look when we’re actually playing the game in terms of detail, lighting, animation and other visual fidelity.

“A lot of times you see a cinematic. This is not that,” York reiterated. “When you play this game, it’s really gonna look like this. It’s gonna look just like this. It’s gonna be incredible. I cannot wait.”

York expressed his own admiration for the “hundreds of thousands” of unique animations the team has to create to account for the level of freedom offered to the player - using the example of stealing a flamingo as how wild things can get - and pointing out the number of distinct NPC appearances, poses and actions glimpsed in the trailer’s beach scene as a good demonstration of how the world is brought to life. York was also particularly