GTA 6 may "disappoint" players hoping for a technological "jump", says former Rockstar North tech director
But "it's still going to be the best game out there"
While he's "blown away" by the beach scenes in the first GTA 6 trailer, former Rockstar North technical director Obbe Vermeij thinks the forthcoming open worlder might underwhelm players hoping for a palpable technological update on GTA 5, which has been reworked and re-released extensively since its 2013 launch. This has less to do with GTA in itself, Vermeij says, than with the fact that changes in computing capacity today simply aren't as dramatic as in the days of the very first PlayStation. It's becoming rare, he suggests, that you see a "jump" akin to GTA going 3D.
'Technological change' obviously covers a lot of bases, and what counts as a "jump" varies by the player or at least, the hardware manufacturer trying to flog you a new graphics card. One day people are frenziedly associating "the next gen" with the absence of crawlspaces, the next it's all about whether the vegetation rustles when you shoot it.
To chuck my own hat into the ring, I'm grumpy about placing video game hardware on a timeline from less to more advanced - this kind of rigid teleological, market-driven thinking cancels out and buries a wealth of specific usages of technology for particular artistic ends. I also agree with BioWare's Mark Darrah that chasing fidelity for its own sake is a "death cult". Still, I can see Vermeij's point that it's generally harder to screenshot the difference between, say, two sequels released in the past five years than two sequels released in the early noughties.
"It's harder to make the same step again because well the technology is moving much slower," Vermeij observed in an interview with SanInPlay. "Like, the difference between PlayStation 1 and PlayStation 2 was enormous, and PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 is not that not that big, right. So you don't really have that technology jump to make things different and better.
"So I think yeah, so I think GTA 6 is not going to be wildly different from GTA 5. I don't know, maybe they pulled it off, maybe it's amazing, but I think some people, their expectations might be a little too high. Because you can never have that jump, the jump from GTA 2 to GTA 3 was big, and from San Andreas to GTA 4 was very big. I don't think we can ever see a jump like that again."
Again, Vermeij is impressed by what he's glimpsed of GTA 6 nonetheless. Like fellow ex-Rockstar Mike York, who posted his own reactions to the trailer in December, he's mad keen on the NPC animations. "The scene that blows me away is the one on the beach where everybody seems to be doing something else," Vermeij enthused elsewhere in the SanInPlay interview. "Every character has got their own animation. I think that looks pretty amazing. But I don't think it is going to be wildly different from GTA 5. I think maybe people might be a little disappointed. But it's still going to be the best game out there."
Discussion of the supporting hardware aside, the interview includes some reflection on how Rockstar changed up their narrative and stylistic approach for GTA 4, introducing a more "serious" storyline about a migrant chasing the New York dream, and doing away with many of GTA: San Andreas's oddball flourishes, such as simulating the effects of over-eating.
"We had a lot of time to do that one, like three years," Vermeij recalled. "And we went crazy in all the features, like stupidly. We were like stealth and skydiving and all these bikes, articulated lorries - it was just ridiculous. And of course, the three cities. And then at the end of that, we thought 'OK that was dumb'. Because we didn't have to do it. We could do half of it and it would still be very good. So we knew for GTA 4, we had to make a big jump and work to make the animation better and the city better and all that stuff. So that's why we cut down the features on purpose. So that we could actually make it a much more polished, much more beautiful game. And then worry about the additional features later on."
All that notwithstanding, Vermeij prefers the preceding games for their more openly comedic tone. This is one reason he left Rockstar in 2009 (the others include wanting to relocate with his family, and wanting to work for a smaller team again). "The [opening] trilogy, I thought those games were just tons of fun," Vermeij said. "I really enjoyed them. And then we made 4, and to my mind, it was a little too serious, too dark, too depressing almost. So when I decided to leave after GTA 4, it was like a number of things. One of them was like, my wife's Canadian and she wanted to move back to Canada. But also, I thought GTA 4 wasn't as good and as fun as the games before. And I thought that the next one was going to be like, even darker. I'm happy to see that I was wrong. GTA 5 is a lot more lighthearted than GTA 4. So I got that wrong."
Vermeij feels that GTA needed to become more "realistic" to wow the punters, comparing Rockstar's on-going successes to other games that have tried to continue the tradition of "crazy, wild" GTA (he doesn't mention Saints Row, but it's the obvious elephant in the room). "And, you know, they didn't do that well either. So I think it was the right move to make it more serious. But at the same time, I sort of miss the old games still." He's hopeful that GTA 6 - a Bonnie & Clyde-style adventure in Vice City, GTA's version of Miami - will keep things relatively light and silly.
"I love the Miami vibe. I think that the Miami Man theme where people just do stupid stuff, and the alligators and sitting on cars and everything - I think that suits GTA very well. So yeah, it's going to be a good game for sure." Vermeij also speculates that Rockstar might have access to "pretty new technology having to do with animation and AI and all that stuff", remarking in closing that that "I think there's definitely time for a revolution where animation is maybe not hand-animated anymore, but it would be more AI-driven and physics-driven." He doesn't go into detail and I'll refrain from extrapolating, because I can never quite decide what "hand-animated" means or has meant.
This isn't the first time Vermeij has held forth on all things GTA. Last year, he aired a few cancelled Rockstar projects on his blog, though he has since deleted these posts after current Rockstar developers expressed their displeasure. He still puts out the odd development titbit on Xitter. GTA 6, meanwhile, is coming in 2025, though Rockstar have yet to pin down a PC release date.