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Former GTA 6 dev says Rockstar will currently be trying to 'really tighten' the game 'in every corner' right now, because '90% of your work' is accounting for players who don't do as they're told
A former Rockstar designer discusses the development process for GTA 6, highlighting the importance of creating a game that allows players to engage in unexpected ways and highlighting the immense challenge of accommodating players' unpredictable actions.
It might not have an exact release date yet, but GTA 6 is getting closer and closer, and one former designer on the game has suggested that Rockstar's focus right now will likely be on making sure everything is prepared for the players who'll just want to mess around in the action-adventure.
In an interview on the GTAVIoclock YouTube channel, Ben Hinchliffe – who was a game designer at Rockstar for over 12 years on the likes of GTA 5, Red Dead Redemption 2, and GTA 6 before becoming a lead designer at Just Add Water two years ago – was asked what the focus of the dev team would normally be at this point. "Talking generalities," he begins, "on a title that big, you're wanting to really tighten it in every corner" when it's about a year away from release. Namely, this comes down to "a lot of bug fixing" and making sure that everything is prepared for players to dive in and play in unintended ways.
Hinchliffe estimates that for developers, "90% of your work is actually doing stuff that you don't want [players] to do," as opposed to what was actually intended or asked of them. "You might just want someone to drive in a straight line – 'drive from A to B, please, just follow that car' – and then they don't. They get out of the car, or they drive over there, or they shoot this person, or they turn around and go the other way. And it's just like, can you just do what the objective is telling you to do, please?" he laughs.
Obviously, players aren't always going to listen to the rules, simply "because people like to mess around, and they like to do things differently," but that means a lot of extra work for the devs to either stop them from doing those things or accommodate them, even if only "10% of the people might try" in the first place.
Hinchliffe believes that "good games are games that don't block the player or stop them, but actually allow them to do what they want to do and it still works," like if a player is tasked with killing an enemy, but they do it by dropping a crate on them rather than shooting them. "That in my opinion is what makes GTA games what they are, is that freedom that it allows the player, and the game will still handle it and still allow the player to do these weird things," he adds.
GTA 6 has a lot to live up to given the immense hype and buildup, but we can finally expect it to launch on PS5 and Xbox Series X sometime in Fall 2025.