Technology has always been the greatest friend and fiercest foe to video game developers. Yes, that might sound “dramatic,” but it’s true. The growth of technology has allowed developers and publishers to make all manner of incredible titles, even when it’s “pushing the bounds” of what the drivers, graphics cards, and memory banks can do. The problem, though, is that there are “always constraints” that they have to adhere to, and thus, they don’t always get to do what they want to do. For GTA 6, this will be the first time Rockstar Games has put something out on the “latest batch” of consoles and upgraded PCs; as such, expectations are high.
Yet, the thing that many keep going back to when rewatching the initial trailers is the beach scene that helped welcome people back to Vice City and Leonida. The beach was filled with highly rendered models, and many on Reddit still wonder if this is what we can expect from the title:
“Will the beaches in the final game really be this crowded? I have my doubts about whether it would be possible to always have a high density of NPCs without significantly compromising performance.”
That is a fair question, and many noted that plenty of high-profile games today still struggle with large NPC numbers, let alone all of those NPCs doing unique actions.
“I am not sure about this. As far as I am aware, current mid-range CPUs absolutely decimate consoles in terms of processing power.
But maybe Rockstar really performed black magic.”
However, others were far more positive with their analysis of things:
“If Rockstar does one thing well, it’s not over promising with the trailers. What you see is what you get (and usually better).”
“With LOD and impostors, pooling and swapping, I think it’s possible. Plus maybe smart throttling depending on your FOV. It’s more of the TYPES and BEHAVIOURS of NPCs than the number of them – which makes a 1-1 swap harder I reckon.”
In truth, this is only one element to GTA 6 that many will keep an eye on, but the reason that many focus on it is that they wonder what it’ll mean for the rest of the game, both visually and gameplay-wise. If there is potential for so many unique NPCs in one place, that opens up how “busy” Vice City and other locations may be, and the kind of things you can get up to when you’re allowed to have fun outside of cutscenes.
