While many players might find the idle chit-chat between NPCs not worth their attention, Rockstar Games believes that this type of chatter is an important part of worldbuilding for Grand Theft Auto 6. In an interview with Love magazine, vice president of narrative, Rupert Humphries, revealed that there’s an entire “team of writers and creatives” focused purely on writing the “’background noise’ that makes the city and the world come to life.”
This team consists of pedestrian dialogue writers based in LA who work with “a team of advertising and comedy writers across New York, LA, and London.”
“It’s a team from all sorts of backgrounds and walks of life, but we all share a sense of humor and a desire to have a bit of fun with the ridiculousness of humans and the media and advertising. And none of us see it as background! It’s all part of the tapestry of the game and creates the experience of living in this wild world.”
According to open-world writing director James Horton, this is part of Rockstar’s conscious efforts to build teams that would work on specific small details that might not be priorities for other developers building their games.
“There are no shortcuts when it comes to building a world like this: it’s a question of giving the right people the resources they need to build something that’s not only vast and varied as a whole, but where every part rings true no matter how small it is, or how closely you look at it. It needs to wash over you when you’re sprinting down the busiest street in the city, hearing snatches of a hundred different conversations as you go; and it needs to be totally convincing if you decide to stop and pay close attention to any one of those conversations,” explained Horton.
The quantity of this writing has led Horton to exclaim that Grand Theft Auto 6 doesn’t really have a difference between “background” and “foreground” noise, since it all comes down to what the player wants to pay attention to in any given moment. “No one you meet is an extra; they’re not only full characters, everyone you meet is the main character in their own story.”
Grand Theft Auto 6 is shaping up to be one of the biggest game launches in the history of the industry. Reports have indicated that, ahead of the title’s November 19th launch, many markets have been running out of stock of consoles. While analysts believe that pre-order figures have largely skewed in favor of the PS5 version, Xbox’s chief strategy officer, Matthew Ball, has said that the company is happy with the pre-order numbers it has been seeing.
“We are very happy with GTA VI pre-orders. The title is breaking records for Xbox; we expect even more records will be broken throughout the fall, and our internal analysis shows our share of pre-orders to be matching our share of the console market.”
Grand Theft Auto 6 currently only has a release date for PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. No PC release has been announced yet, and Nintendo has even commented about a potential Switch 2 version being “a conversation for Take-Two and Rockstar”.
