According to one Rockstar Games developer, there are effectively no boundaries on that front, which can send the team’s imagination into overdrive.
One of the things that separates Rockstar Games’ open-world titles from almost everything else is their sheer scale and the density of environmental detail. That is no accident, because it stems from what is essentially a limitless budget and a design philosophy with no creative restrictions, which in turn is why Grand Theft Auto VI is shaping up to be something few games can really compare to. That much came up in a recent interview with Kiwi Talkz featuring Rob Carr, former Rockstar sound designer on Red Dead Redemption and Grand Theft Auto V.
Carr was asked whether Rockstar’s effectively bottomless budgets are one of the main reasons its games reach such a high level of quality. In response, he explained that this “limitless” development model pushes every element of a game to an enormous scale at first. Not all of that scope ends up in the final product, though, because the project gets trimmed back later in development when necessary.
“You can kind of go nuts… As a creative person, I never had a problem with creative constraints. One of the things Rockstar does exceptionally well is open worlds… On any job, the first question is: what are the limits? You ask what the constraints are, and they’ll give you the technical limitations. You know, every sound bank has to be X, Y, and Z; those are the restrictions for every mission. Those are technical limits. So what are the creative limits? There aren’t any. Go nuts.
That means if you want to create footsteps, and you want 10,000 different unique sounds for that, then go nuts. Because pretty soon we’ll have loads of stuff, and then we’ll pull out what we don’t need. For example, sure, you made 10,000 footsteps. Do we need that many? Probably not. So then we cut it down to 100. But that can be quite overwhelming, right? Obviously, in games like Red Dead Redemption 1 and Grand Theft Auto V – the scope is enormous, right? So the sheer amount of sounds you’d need to build is insane. It’s easier to dial things back, overshoot, and trim some of it off than it is to not do enough and then push for that extra five or ten percent at the very end of the project, right?” – Carr said.
Given that this development model has apparently been in place for a long time, and that Rockstar is also said to have built in ultra-detailed systems such as procedurally breakable glass, there is a very good chance that Grand Theft Auto VI is currently in exactly that “polishing” phase ahead of its November release. With a process like that and a total budget reportedly hovering around $3 billion, Grand Theft Auto VI is shaping up to be the biggest open-world game ever made.
Unfortunately, we still have not seen very much of it in action, but if the game does not get delayed again, we should not have to wait too long to find out just how far the developers let themselves go in this new take on Vice City.
Source: WCCFTech
