GTA 6 has more than 10 times the animations of GTA 5 and double those in Red Dead Redemption 2, Rockstar Games confirms

Rockstar Games

Rockstar has revealed that GTA 6 contains more than 600,000 NPC animations, dwarfing both GTA 5's 55,000 and Red Dead Redemption 2's 300,000. The scale reflects a fundamental change in how the studio built its crowd characters, with Rockstar dedicating an entire Los Angeles office to hand-crafting NPCs rather than generating them procedurally.

The details:

The animation figures were confirmed through an interview with The New York Times, coinciding with the official GTA 6 extended look on Netflix. The numbers represent more than a tenfold increase over GTA 5 and roughly double what shipped in Red Dead Redemption 2.
Every NPC in GTA 6 was individually art-directed with its own body type, personality, and behaviours. NPCs will remember interactions, such as dropping an object and going back to retrieve it, a level of retention that was absent in previous Rockstar titles.
Co-studio head at Rockstar North Aaron Garbut described the depth applied to even incidental spaces: "Every room in the game, somebody thought about this. Who's sitting where, what they're drinking, the marks that are left on the table. The pictures on the wall will have people that are in that room, with their tattoos on their arms and their family behind them."
NPCs will also react to threats and fire back if provoked, giving Leonida's population a more grounded and unpredictable quality than GTA 5's crowds. GTA 6 launches November 19 on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S.

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