Grand Theft Auto 6‘s new non-playable character system is supposed to be the most complex simulation the series has ever seen, but even with a reported billion-dollar budget, there are only so many things a developer like Rockstar can program into the game. And with such a long development process, you’d assume the people working on GTA 6 have seen everything in the open-world game. A recent two-hour preview suggested that GTA 6 is so dense with new content, even Rockstar can be surprised by what’s in it.
Italian influencer MikeShowSha recently shared a 26-minute video distilling a lengthy off-hands preview of GTA 6 that’s full of new details. For example, there’s the news that stolen bills can be marked and must be laundered, and car crashes are completely dynamic. MikeShowSha also noted that evading a six-star Wanted level was extremely difficult thanks to the aggressive police AI.
The best nugget from the preview is about GTA 6′s random events that were described around the 21-minute mark in the video. “I witnessed an event that the whole team told me they had never encountered during all their months of testing,” MikeShowSha says. He went on to describe a scenario where, while free roaming, they encountered two women in ski masks, smack-dab in the middle of a jewelry robbery gone wrong. The alarm was blaring, and the pair was panicking about what to do next — they couldn’t open the safe. The player can intervene and help, finish the robbery and steal the money, or just walk away altogether.
In a leak months before the Netflix Extended Look, one alleged employee who worked on GTA 6‘s audio claimed that Rockstar had recorded an extraordinary amount of lines for all the NPCs. Supposedly, many of these lines were recorded multiple times, for different scenarios and emotional registers. The apparent mandate was to give the world so much complexity that the player could stand in place somewhere for at least 20 minutes without seeing a piece of dialogue or an event repeat itself.
While the claim seemed extraordinary, MikeShowSha’s preview lends it further credence — the game is evidently so full of content, the developers themselves can play for extended periods of time without seeing everything it has to offer. The preview also made it sound like Rockstar is polishing the game all the way up to the finish line as well. At one point, the player gets a car delivered by an NPC who then rides away on an electric scooter. The Rockstar rep noticed that GTA 6 co-protagonist Jason didn’t thank the character for delivering the car and ordered the team to fix it. The YouTuber also claimed that they didn’t encounter any bugs during their playtime, but that Rockstar corrected details as they went along.
Now it makes perfect sense why it would take even a Rockstar dev 80 hours to clear the main story without doing much of the optional content. The GTA 6 map is many times bigger than Red Dead Redemption 2. Every single NPC was hand-crafted with countless dialogue, potential events, and hundreds of thousands of animations.
Grand Theft Auto 6 is coming to PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X on Nov. 19.