ruz.eth ♢ he/they

Interesting GTA 6 details shared by Jason Schreier: - Rockstar top staff had to visit stripclubs and other areas in Miami for research in 2015 to create the world of the game - Rockstar now has 4,711 employees compared to 2,441 when RDR2 released - Jennifer Kolbe, Rockstar’s head of publishing didn’t disclose the budget of the game, but she debunked rumors that the game surpassed the $1.5 billion it cost to build Burj Khalifa - Rob Nelson described the two previous delays as a dark period - The studio has more than one head of development to make decisions faster: Phil Hooker, Aaron Garbut and Rob Nelson - Schreier saw the office full of developers working to squash bugs before release - By the end of 2019, the team finally figured out the skeleton of the story - At one point, the studio heads wanted to make the game so realistic that you had to go to the store’s refrigerator, grab the beer, bring it to the counter and manually pay. Or go to the grocery store and buy the ingredients to make a sandwich - The studio had a hard time during the pandemic trying to keep the team together: “We’re going to get through it.” Nelson said, just like Jason and Lucia - Schreier saw Jason and Lucia walking in a park, holding hands and reminiscing about the time Lucia’s mother got mad at him - Jason and Lucia will be flirting and bantering during activities, which adds a whole new layer to the immersive systems carried over from Rockstar’s previous titles - Aaron Garbut talked about the 2022 leaks: “It feels like somebody’s wading through your dirty washing. It’s like they’re inside your head. You see your early work out there. Nobody’s ever supposed to see that. It’s really weirdly invasive. And so it’s quite hard to deal with on an emotional level.” - Rockstar says they did their best to avoid crunch with this title: “Anytime I say we haven’t crunched, someone is going to say, ‘I did.’ And I don’t want to get into arguments with individual teams or individual people. But I think we did things differently, and I’m proud of that.” Said Kolbe - Trailer 1 worked as a huge guiding light for the team: “You’d think it would be done through documentation or communication, but nothing aligns us like a trailer.” Said VP of tech Jonathon Ashcroft - Strauss Zelnick was flabbergasted when Kolbe called him to ask for a second delay to November: “I think he said, ‘You’re kidding. Please tell me you’re kidding,’” she recalls - She says they’re lucky that Strauss is as reasonable as he is, because a lot of people would rush it and say “You’d just better figure out how to ship it” - Zelnick says the delays were a “wise investment in time and financial resources to reach the level of perfection it has the ability to reach” - Rockstar says they didn’t face development hell that caused the delays and the game just never completed settled: “We never have an exact blueprint. Even within the last few months, we’ve changed things” - They also said that some areas in the game weren’t going to make it if they haven’t delayed the game: “We could hit that schedule, but it won’t be the game we want to make.” Hooker said - Phil Hooker recalls that he was supposed to go to a story mission, but then he got lost for two hours in the game’s world: “I remember the sheer fun of it. And everyone coming out of the review buoyed by the experience and despite all the concerns and doubts that plague you at that time thinking, if we stick to our guns on this, we have something really special.” He said - Garbut says this game is the culmination of lessons they’ve been learning for a lifetime and that the last 30 years have been practice for where they got to here - Lastly, Rockstar vows that the next game won’t take another 8 years: “The engine, the tools and the team we’ve built during this project will allow us to do things more quickly, I feel confident that we can build on top of this and go more sideways than upwards to build more compelling content.” Said co-studio head Phil Hooker (Source: bloomberg.com/features/2026-…)