Fans of the Grand Theft Auto franchise worried about potential feature bloat in the upcoming Grand Theft Auto 6 seemingly have nothing to worry about. In an interview with Kiwi Talkz, producer of Grand Theft Auto 5, John Ricchio, discussed how the studio isn’t scared to cut out content like minigames and activities that don’t work with the game, even if they were almost “completely done”.
Grand Theft Auto 5, in particular, according to Ricchio, was going to have “so much stuff that was done” that would never make it to the full release. “Like, minigames that were completely done and ready to go, except for animation, right?” The studio apparently decided to cut out these minigames because the animation team was “getting destroyed” from its work on other aspects of the game. After all, there was “so much animation work to do to bring everything to the same level..”
Ultimately, Ricchio said that “we had to cut stuff out that was otherwise completely done” due to the lack of time and approaching deadlines. He went on to discuss that these things tend to happen for larger projects. “They’ll throw out entire levels, and they’ll throw out entire things because they don’t have enough resources to get everything to the same level.”
Since Grand Theft Auto 5 never received single-player DLC, Ricchio noted that the cut content never made it to the public eye. Rather, “they just disappeared.”
Rockstar Games is hard at work on wrapping up the development of Grand Theft Auto 6 to ensure it launches on November 19th. Pre-orders having been kicked off last month would indicate that the studio is on schedule.
Grand Theft Auto 6 will take players to the state of Leonida, marking the franchise’s return to the Miami-inspired Vice City. Its story will focus on two protagonists – an ex-con named Lucia Caminos and a drug runner and racketeer named Jason Duval. The duo finds itself in a lot of trouble after a score goes horribly wrong. Thus, they end up in Vice City and are embroiled in its shadier side.
While no real details about the story have been revealed so far, Rockstar Games has confirmed that it will involve a grand criminal conspiracy spanning the entire state and that players will explore several locations outside of Vice City throughout the game.
Grand Theft Auto 6 is currently slated for release only on PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, and while the franchise has traditionally also come to PC some time after coming out on consoles, neither Rockstar nor parent company Take-Two Interactive has committed to a firm release date on the platform.
When asked about this, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick said that the studio wanted to focus on its console player base because “historically, Rockstar’s gone to console first.” This statement isn’t untrue, since even its most recent game – Red Dead Redemption 2 – came to PS4 and Xbox One in 2018 before eventually getting a PC release in 2019.
