GTA 6's World Is 'a Very Big Map' and Rockstar's Most Complex Yet

In the realm of open-world games, especially those from Rockstar, the perennial question is always about the size of the map. With GTA 6, we finally have an answer—sort of. The main storylines and bombastic missions have always been a major draw for these once-in-a-generation releases, but there's always plenty to do after the credits roll. As with 2018's Red Dead Redemption 2, GTA 6 will be no exception.

"There is a whole other world in Red Dead Redemption 2, yes. GTA 6 is very much like that," Rob Nelson, co-studio head of Rockstar North, told IGN in an exclusive interview. "There's a whole lot of stuff that you discover emergently that we're not necessarily directing you to through objectives or blips or icons on a map as well. If you take a bit of time and explore you will be rewarded – a lot. It's a big map, a very big map."

Creating such a vast playground requires an immense amount of time, effort, and the right tools. This is where the power of current-generation consoles comes into play, allowing Rockstar to push boundaries even further than Red Dead Redemption 2 did on PS4 and Xbox One.

"I think with Red Dead Redemption 2, we finally had the team and the tech and then took the time we needed to push the idea of making a fully realized consistent-feeling world further than we ever had," Nelson explains. "With that game we took the time necessary to take advantage of that generation of hardware to maximize the quality of our open world population, design, and gameplay so that when you were riding from here to there in-game, you were constantly getting distracted and pulled in different directions. And then you could really get lost as that character in that place. That's when to me, these games can feel magical and create a sense of wonder that the world is alive – and you get these little shivers of 'What's happening?'

GTA 6 is a continuation of our team pushing in this direction – doing everything we possibly can to create the largest, deepest, most densely populated and complex world we have ever built for people to get lost in."

One of the most noticeable improvements to the world of Leonida compared to previous Grand Theft Auto locations will be the people who populate it. Thanks to the power of modern consoles, players will see a far greater level of diversity in body shapes, heights, and movements as they traverse Vice City and its surroundings.

"One of the coolest things about this game being developed from the ground up on this generation of hardware is taking advantage of all the memory that we have on the latest consoles combined with our teams' experience doing this for so long together," says Nelson.

"NPCs have more height differentiation and body shape differentiation than ever before, we could never have had this variety before because different body types had to share animation sets. So, if you had the same animation on the 5'6" person and the 6'2" person, they wouldn't line up if they're fighting or sitting in cars—basically any interactions with each other or the environment. But on this game, the team worked out a system where they now retarget those animations on the fly. Now we have a huge variety of heights and shapes and it all works together because of what this team was able to pull off."