Why My GTA VI Hype Is Getting Out of Control

I've been excited about Grand Theft Auto VI for a long time, but at this point we're getting close enough that the hype is starting to become a problem.

Part of that is just being a gamer. GTA has been around for a huge portion of my life, and Rockstar releases don't exactly happen every other year anymore. We're approaching GTA VI more than a decade after Grand Theft Auto V, and in between Rockstar gave us Red Dead Redemption 2, which is still one of the games I point to when talking about just how ridiculously detailed a virtual world can become.

But becoming a software developer changed the way I look at games like these.

I still want to steal cars, explore Vice City, cause completely unnecessary chaos and see what kind of trouble Jason and Lucia get into. At the same time, there's another part of me looking at the trailers wondering what kind of engineering nightmare is happening behind everything I'm seeing.

And Rockstar seems determined to give that part of my brain plenty to think about.

The Beer Bottles Got Me

Of all the things Rockstar has shown, one of the details that caught my attention most might also be one of the dumbest.

There is a scene in Trailer 2 where Jason walks out of a convenience store carrying a six-pack of bottled beer. If you watch the bottles closely, the liquid appears to move around inside them as he walks.

I'm not the only person who noticed it. Other trailer analysis has pointed out the apparent liquid movement as well.

Now, I'm not going to claim that this confirms GTA VI has some groundbreaking dynamic beer simulation system. It could be a shader. It could be an animation. It could be something specifically created for that sequence. Until we're actually playing the game and throwing six-packs down staircases in the name of science, we don't really know.

But if those bottles really are reacting dynamically to movement, that may be the most Rockstar thing imaginable.

Nobody needs individually simulated beer in a six-pack.

That's exactly why I want Rockstar to have done it.

Most developers could reasonably make those bottles opaque, give the liquid a static texture, or treat the entire six-pack as one object. Ninety-nine percent of players would never care.

Somebody at Rockstar apparently looked at it and may have thought, "The beer should move."

And then somebody had to actually build that.

That is the kind of unnecessary nonsense I love about Rockstar games.

The Details That Don't Matter End Up Mattering

Red Dead Redemption 2 is probably the best example of this philosophy.

That game contains an incredible number of little interactions, animations and environmental details that don't really need to exist for the game to function. You could remove a huge percentage of them and still have a perfectly playable western.

The problem is that once you combine thousands of those details, they stop being meaningless.

They show a level of engineering that we only really expect from Rockstar.

The beer itself isn't important. What interests me is what the beer might represent.

If they're putting that much effort into something I'm going to carry out of a convenience store and probably forget about thirty seconds later, what are they doing with vehicle physics? NPC behavior? Weather? Damage? Police interactions? Crowds? Animals? Water? Interiors?

That's where my imagination starts running away with me.

Being a Developer Somehow Makes Rockstar More Impressive

Before I worked in software, I could look at a game and think, "Wow, that looks incredible."

Now I'll sometimes look at one and think, "How in the hell did they get that working?"

Those are two very different reactions.

Once you've spent enough time developing software, you begin to appreciate how quickly complexity grows. Something that sounds trivial can become surprisingly difficult once it needs to interact with ten other systems.

Now scale that problem up to an open-world game.

There are vehicles moving around a city while pedestrians are navigating sidewalks. Traffic lights are changing. Police are responding to crimes. Weather is changing. The player can interrupt everything. Physics has to react. Audio has to react. Animations need to transition correctly.

Then some lunatic player drives a motorcycle through a storefront while carrying a shotgun and somehow launches an NPC onto the hood of a police cruiser.

The game has to figure out what happens next.

Rockstar developers are damn near gods as far as I'm concerned.

I know enough about software development to understand that I don't understand a fraction of what is happening underneath something like GTA VI.

And that makes me want to see it even more. Full transparency, I do mostly app dev and web dev. I have toyed around with game dev a bit, but what these people do is incredible. 

The Leaks Made the Wait Even Stranger

GTA VI has also had one of the strangest development periods to follow as a fan.

The massive 2022 leak put unfinished development footage online years before Rockstar was ready to show the game properly. Rockstar subsequently acknowledged the intrusion and said early development footage had been illegally accessed. More recently, additional unauthorized material has appeared as the game has gotten closer to launch.

I have mixed feelings about that stuff.

Of course I'm curious. I'm waiting for GTA VI like everybody else.

But as a developer, I also understand why leaked development footage can give people the completely wrong impression of a project.

Software under development can look terrible.

That's normal.

Features are unfinished. Assets are placeholders. Debug information is everywhere. Performance hasn't necessarily been optimized. Entire systems may exist temporarily and eventually be replaced.

Showing that to millions of people and having them judge it as though they're looking at the finished product isn't particularly fair.

The interesting part of those early leaks for me wasn't whether a particular texture looked good. It was seeing hints of how ambitious some of the underlying systems might be.

Even then, I don't want to take anything from a development build and say, "This will definitely be in GTA VI."

Games change.

Features get cut.

Systems get redesigned.

That's development.

So, What Do I Think GTA VI Is Actually Going to Push?

This is where I'm firmly in speculation territory.

I don't think the big leap is simply going to be graphics.

Obviously GTA VI looks incredible. Rockstar describes it as its biggest and most immersive evolution of the series yet, and the footage they've released certainly looks the part.

But we're reaching a point where making something prettier isn't enough by itself.

What I want to see is density.

I want buildings that aren't merely decoration. I want more places that can actually be entered. I want stores to feel like places instead of menus disguised as buildings. I want NPCs that seem like they're doing something rather than spawning simply because I walked down a street.

I want crimes to produce situations instead of simply flipping a wanted-level switch.

I'd love to see police responding differently based on what actually happened. Witnesses reacting more intelligently. Crowds behaving differently depending on what's going on. NPCs interacting with each other in ways that have absolutely nothing to do with me.

I'm especially interested in how far Rockstar can take the systems they experimented with in Red Dead Redemption 2 and apply them to a modern city.

Vice City gives them a completely different playground.

I Want the World to Fight Back a Little

One of my biggest hopes is that the world becomes less passive.

Open-world games have always had an interesting problem. They want you to believe you're inside a living place, but you're also basically the center of the universe.

I would love GTA VI to blur that line more.

If I walk into a convenience store and decide to rob it, maybe the employee recognizes me later. Maybe someone outside gets my license plate. Maybe police don't instantly know exactly where I am. Maybe changing vehicles or clothing actually matters.

If I cause a wreck, perhaps traffic doesn't simply drive around the wreckage indefinitely.

If two NPCs get into an argument, I want to be able to stand there like an idiot and watch it escalate without being involved.

None of this is confirmed.

I'm just describing the kind of systemic depth I'd love to see.

And Rockstar is one of the few studios where I can make a ridiculous wish list like that and still wonder whether they might actually have built some of it.

Please Let Me Pick Things Up

Here's another weird one.

I want more physical interaction with the world.

Red Dead Redemption 2 made me realize how much I like objects actually existing in the game world. You pick things up. Characters physically interact with drawers, cupboards, weapons and bodies. Animations have weight.

GTA has historically been much faster and more arcade-like, and I don't want Rockstar to destroy that by making every interaction painfully slow.

But there's a balance somewhere.

The six-pack scene is one of the reasons I'm curious about this.

If Rockstar is putting that level of detail into physical objects, I want those objects to matter.

Let me grab things.

Let things break.

Let objects behave according to their materials.

Let me create situations the developers absolutely did not intend.

Some of the best moments in open-world games happen when several systems accidentally collide and create something nobody scripted.

That's when the world starts feeling alive.

I Also Want GTA to Still Be GTA

There is a danger with everything I'm describing.

You can simulate so much that a game stops being fun.

I don't want to fill out paperwork after stealing a car.

I don't want Jason to need eight hours of sleep followed by a balanced breakfast and a reasonable dental-care routine.

There is still supposed to be a game underneath all of this.

GTA works because there is a certain amount of absurdity built into it. You can follow a serious story for an hour and then immediately launch a sports car off an overpass because you saw something that looked vaguely like a ramp.

I want GTA VI to be deeper without forgetting that.

Rockstar has to somehow create a world that feels more believable while still letting the player be an absolute menace to society.

That's probably a much harder design problem than any liquid-filled beer bottle.

November Can't Get Here Fast Enough

Rockstar currently has GTA VI scheduled to launch November 19, 2026 on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S.

I'm trying not to build an imaginary version of the game in my head that no developer could possibly deliver.

Trying.

It's not going particularly well.

Between what Rockstar has officially shown, what we've seen of Jason and Lucia, the return to Vice City, the sheer density of Leonida, and all of those ridiculously small details hidden throughout the footage, I'm probably more interested in GTA VI than I have been in a game for a long time.

Some of that is because I want to play it.

Some of it is because I'm fascinated by what Rockstar's developers have managed to build.

And yes, apparently part of it is because somebody may have simulated the beer inside a six-pack.

If that's the level of unnecessary detail Rockstar is starting with, I can't wait to find out what else they've been wasting perfectly good development hours on.