GTA 6 has been in development since 2015, Rob Nelson, head of development and co-studio head of Rockstar North, told TroisCouleurs. Most of the team moved onto it after Red Dead Redemption 2 came out in 2018. The French magazine was the only French-language outlet invited to Edinburgh in July, and the interview came out on August 27.
A trailer ahead of the game
Often the first thing the team rallies around is a song. For GTA 6 it was Tom Petty’s Love Is a Long Road, used in the first trailer, which Nelson calls a mission statement. The game wasn’t fully formed when the trailer was made: it showed the best of what the team had at the time and became a guiding light for what GTA 6 needed to feel like.
Why a couple
After three protagonists in GTA 5 and Arthur alone in Red Dead Redemption 2, Rockstar wanted to bring Arthur’s emotional pull into GTA and still keep more than one lead. The answer was a duo with the potential to be in a relationship, Bonnie and Clyde. Nelson says the team doesn’t want to push the relationship on players who aren’t interested, but your actions can influence the couple’s journey, as they could with Arthur.
The quiet moments matter as much: waiting while your partner gets ready to go out and wondering whether to hurry them. When Lucia is thrown down the stairs and you switch to Jason and can’t hear her, Nelson wants you to worry.
Chapters and partial control
The story is split into chapters, and big tentpole missions move the couple from one part of the map to the next. Scenes are full performance capture on built sets. Rockstar keeps blurring play and cutscene: walking into an elevator, petting a dog in a hallway and knocking on a door all happen in play before a cutscene and then a gunfight. In some scenes you have partial control and can move back and forth while the camera stays close.
What an hour of play showed
Then Nelson played for the magazine. After a fight at a beach villa the police knew what Jason was wearing but hadn’t seen him get into his car, so he could slip past. Nelson describes it as choosing what sort of criminal you want to be, a careful professional or a loose cannon, which the game tracks in your criminal profile.
Cash from a gas station robbery has to reach an ATM, because if you’re wasted before you deposit it, it’s gone (money and the bank). You can enter a huge number of buildings. On a drive, people diving off a bridge dared the couple to jump; they jumped hand in hand, and their car was stolen while they were in the water. Two store robberies on that drive went differently.
The satire is still there, in a TV commercial for a bloody burger with 38 beef patties and in streamers taking live challenges from the trunk of a stolen car. For the look, Nelson sets the same goal as for gameplay: not to be realistic but to feel realistic.
What Nelson told Japan’s Famitsu is in our article on the Famitsu interview.
