Ever since GTA 6 locked in its November 2026 release date after the latest delay, players have kept asking the same thing. Why is GTA 6 taking so long to make? By the time it arrives, more than eight years will have passed since Red Dead Redemption 2 launched, and now there may be a technical explanation instead of the usual “Rockstar is chasing perfection with GTA 6” line that Take-Two executives tend to repeat.

Rob Carr, an audio engineer who worked on GTA 5 and L.A. Noire, recently spoke with ReeceKiwiz about what he believes is behind GTA 6‘s extended development. “I don’t have inside knowledge of what’s happening right now, but considering how long it has taken to get to this point, they’ve probably rebuilt the RAGE Engine from the ground up. That’s the only thing I can say with complete confidence,” he said.

Rockstar Is Reportedly Rebuilding the RAGE Engine

Carr stressed that he was not claiming this was definitely happening at Rockstar, but he said he would be surprised if it had not happened, because “the technological landscape has changed dramatically since GTA 5, which, let’s remember, came out three console generations ago. It was the last game to release on Xbox 360 and PS3.” What the former L.A. Noire audio engineer says does make sense, because the RAGE Engine is Rockstar’s in-house technology and it has been present in all of the studio’s games since 2006: GTA 4/5, Max Payne 3, Red Dead Redemption 2.

Every new release has demanded major changes to the engine, but rebuilding it entirely to suit the current consoles (PS5, Xbox Series X|S) would involve a much heavier engineering effort, naturally explaining why GTA 6 has had the longest development cycle in the studio’s history, with more than a thousand developers spread across the globe. Carr also mentioned that GTA 5 included some elements that had been discarded from GTA 4, such as the introduction of three protagonists.

One of Rockstar’s traditions is to carry some ideas cut from the previous game into each new release. That may also be happening with GTA 6, which follows Red Dead Redemption 2, a game set to become the third best-selling title of all time. The fact that Rockstar has taken this long is not necessarily a sign of internal problems – even with the layoffs from a few months ago and the political pressure – but rather a sign that the studio may have chosen to rebuild the RAGE Engine from scratch.

Source: 3DJuegos