It seems the upcoming GTA 6 will feature the most realistic and lifelike NPC behavior we’ve ever seen in a videogame, going a step further to bridge the gap between real life and the game world. In a recent interview with The New York Times, Rockstar North’s co-head, Aaron Garbut has revealed that there was an entire team of writers, directors and producers, only for designing the NPCs of the open world behemoth.
Garbut said, “We art-directed each individual one of them”, which is staggering for a videogame and indicates that GTA 6 will have NPCs that are painstakingly designed to both look and feel like real people.
“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,” he said.
The latest entry in the legendary Grand Theft Auto franchise will feature over 600,000 animations which is exponentially more than the number in GTA 5 (55,000), highlighting the unprecedented realism and details in the population of Leonida.
It’s also revealed that the full map of Vice city in GTA 6 is twice the size of the enormous Lost Santos from GTA 5, which is absolutely colossal and could easily take years to explore to it’s fullest. Plus, the main narrative can take around 80 hours to complete which means we’re in for a sumptuous experience with the upcoming open world title, just like it’s predecessors.
Overall, in terms of the sheer size and density of it’s fully realized open world, it’s obvious that GTA 6 is easily going to set a new benchmark for all other titles to follow, for years if not decades.
GTA 6 is currently slated to launch for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S on November 19, 2026.
