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

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 impressed by the clip of a crocodile being wrestled from a backyard pool, having worked on the crocodile animations in Red Dead Redemption 2.

In general, the level of detail on GTA 6’s character models came in for a wealth of praise, with York pointing out the fidelity of gold chains, pockmarked skin and dreadlocks in one scene and a bikini-clad character in another as a good example of the detail given to NPCs who aren’t even main characters (as far as we know, anyway).

“Everything looks very good for in-game,” he said. “I’m really impressed by how far they’re bringing the graphics for an in-game version of this.”

Unsurprisingly, that groundbreaking level of detail requires some fairly clever use of current-day tech, with York saying that Rockstar is at the bleeding edge of utilising hardware - and having that account for GTA 6 having to run on consoles now a few years into their lifecycle, as well as top-end PC rigs. (Although a PC release for GTA 6 is still yet to be confirmed.)

“The artists over there really know how to push the consoles and the hardware to the limits with their level of detail, their LoDs, and all their different stuff,” he said.

A Rockstar game being at the high end of graphical quality and pushing hardware to its max may strike many as obvious, but it’s nevertheless fascinating to hear someone with inside knowledge of the studio still sound so impressed with the development polish being applied in GTA 6.