600,000 animations, and the team Rockstar built just to make strangers behave
Eleven times what GTA V shipped with, twice Red Dead Redemption 2, and a Los Angeles studio of writers and directors whose whole job was people you'll never speak to.
By Wes Calloway
Rockstar's told The New York Times that Grand Theft Auto 6 has well over 600,000 animations. For scale, Grand Theft Auto V shipped with roughly 55,000 and Red Dead Redemption 2 with around 300,000.
So this game has eleven times the animation content of Grand Theft Auto V and double Red Dead Redemption 2's, and plenty of people thought Red Dead's animation work was excessive at the time.
A studio built for background characters
The number isn't even the most interesting part. Rockstar set up a new Los Angeles team of writers, directors and producers whose whole job was bringing non-player characters to life. Not the main cast. The strangers.
Art director Aaron Garbut told the Times they "art-directed each individual one of them", and described how much thought went into rooms the player may never even enter:
- Who's sitting where
- What they're drinking
- The marks left on the table
- Pictures on the wall showing the people in that room, with their tattoos and their family behind them
The cheap way to fill a city
There's a much cheaper path to a busy city, and most open-world games take it. You build a library of generic behaviours, randomise appearance across a set of body types, and let a crowd system spread them around. It works. It's also why background characters in most open worlds feel more like weather than people.
Hand-directing individuals doesn't scale, and that's the point. Rockstar chose to spend money on something you can't spend money on efficiently. It's one of a very small number of studios that can make that call, and the reason it can is that Grand Theft Auto V has been earning for over a decade.
Witnesses need real people
There's a practical side to this beyond atmosphere. The game's wanted system builds a case against you out of evidence, including witness descriptions. Witnesses only matter if the people around you are actually simulated as individuals who saw a particular thing from a particular place.
A developer at IO Interactive has also publicly described the NPC systems in the released footage as at least a decade ahead of the industry, which is quite something for a rival studio to say about work it's only seen in a trailer.
Counting animations isn't judging them
An animation count is a production statistic, and it doesn't guarantee quality. It tells you how much was made. It doesn't tell you how well it's blended, how the transitions hold up under player input, or whether the density survives on a base PS5. Digital Foundry's early analysis already noted compromises in reflections on the base console.
Everything here is Rockstar describing its own game to a newspaper two months before launch. Take the intent as real and the result as unverified.
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