‘A Love Letter’

Over the past decade, CD Projekt Red has been the only developer to come close to matching Rockstar’s level of open-world immersion. Among its games, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt set a standard for open-world fantasy, and Cyberpunk 2077 proved that games could leverage the talent of Hollywood stars like Keanu Reeves and Idris Elba. Their writing set a high bar for blockbuster games that Grand Theft Auto VI will be measured against.

Rupert Humphries, Rockstar North’s senior vice president for narrative, acknowledged that conspiracy theories became more mainstream during the game’s decade-long development. But some of the seismic events during that period — President Trump’s rise to political power and the coronavirus pandemic — will not be directly addressed.

“We run the risk of dating ourselves in a sort of awkward way,” Nelson explained. “So we have to look at things and go, What is going to have a timeless sort of quality that will speak very easily to relatable sort of human folly and foibles and will be remembered as part of this time?”

Social media certainly fits the criteria. Players will be able to learn about the world of Grand Theft Auto VI through an in-game feed known as Snapmatic, on which influencers, celebrities and friends of Jason and Lucia will share photos and videos.

One of the game’s writers, Michael Wiafe, said, “I think if we can make a story about humanity where you are poking fun at greed and hubris and all these sorts of things that we can all agree are problematic, then I think that is a unifying thing.”

Depicting a wide cross-section of society meant on-the-ground research for Rockstar — visiting racetracks and night clubs, riding along with police officers, meeting with owners of gun ranges. To make the game feel as authentic as possible, Nelson said, the studio interviewed people who were respected in all types of neighborhoods; Rockstar hired some of them as well.

Humphries said he was proud the game showed all parts of life in Miami and South Florida. “Everything is there, and you can take this ride through it, and that is something to escape into,” he said. “It’s a sort of critique, but it’s also like a love letter.”

The plenitude in the game’s extended trailer put me in mind of capacious 19th-century novels and films like “Nashville” that presented a maximalist vision of human activity. Toward the end of my visit, Garbut, the series’s art director since Grand Theft Auto III, stopped by and emphasized the lack of visual shortcuts. “You can see these vehicles from the top of a skyscraper and then parachute down and see that it’s the actual vehicle you saw there,” he said. “All these things cascade all the way down.”

Similar rigor was applied to building the game’s nonplayer characters, known as NPCs. Their behavior in Grand Theft Auto V, Nelson said, was quite simple: If you bumped into someone and he dropped an object, he would forget about it and walk away.

To make this world feel more believable, Rockstar built a new team of writers, directors and producers in Los Angeles that focused solely on creating more realized NPCs. Rather than use procedural generation to algorithmically mix and match body parts and clothes, the developers went for a bespoke approach.

“We art-directed each individual one of them,” said Garbut, who with Nelson also leads development for Rockstar Games.

Grand Theft Auto VI, Rockstar said, has well over 600,000 animations, compared with 55,000 animations in Grand Theft Auto V and 300,000 animations in Red Dead Redemption 2. Garbut emphasized the new game’s human-made craft.

“Every room in the game, somebody thought about this,” Garbut said. “Who’s sitting where, what they’re drinking, the marks that are left on the table. The pictures on the wall will have the people that are in that room, with their tattoos on their arms and their family behind them. That whole thing has been made, and built, and photographed, and placed in this random room in a random building in a huge city, in a world.”

Transformative Play

The inside of Rockstar North’s building in Edinburgh, which once housed a newspaper, is an architectural stunner. Its vaulted glass ceiling, ribbed by thin steel supports, floods the interior with natural light. Backlit panels around the ground floor depict characters from Grand Theft Auto VI.

During my visit, Phil Hooker, a head of development for Rockstar Games, reiterated that the goal was immersion. “We wanted, whether you’re on mission or off mission, for it to feel the same so you wouldn’t really see the structure of the game underneath,” he said.

His comment brought to mind James Joyce’s famous dictum from “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”: “The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.”

It is a lofty comparison. But the ambitions of Grand Theft Auto VI are great.

“All of it is a bit of a moonshot,” said Nelson, noting that Jason and Lucia may go from shopping to getting food to robbing a store to escaping on a motorcycle.

“Having that all work dynamically has been incredibly challenging,” he said, adding: “For this story to really work, though, we needed to do it. It wouldn’t have been enough for the player to just have them as a couple in a few sort of scripted date missions. Not for the way we want players to connect with these characters.”

From time to time during Nelson’s demonstration, he would call out imperceptible details he felt should be addressed, such as an NPC reacting too slowly. There are plenty of action set pieces in the game, he said, but some missions will allow for a greater number of approaches, which adds a level of unpredictability that is difficult to test.

With Grand Theft Auto VI, Rockstar hopes to retain cultural influence for another decade.

“We’re trying to reflect a sort of crazy, warped version of this American state and city — we always try to do that,” Nelson said. I asked what he would say to my literary friends who were not into gaming but were interested in this particular game. He replied, “I think this story has — if you want it — themes of hopefulness, elements of sacrifice versus selfishness, and it plays out asking questions about whether love can survive through this storm.”

Humphries said the series’s games were powerful because they gave people moments of serendipity.

“They’ll be driving down the street, the sun will hit a building in a way, and there’s a song playing on the radio,” he said. “There’s a sort of transcendental moment there. It’s transformative. And I think that with the tools we’ve got now making this new game, you could have that moment on a rooftop bar, or in a nightclub, or on an airboat in the swamps.”