Gaming audiences have been burned plenty of times by games that look stunning in their pre-launch trailers, but end up delivering noticeably (and, at times, severely) downgraded visuals when they actually release, which means there’s always an air of skepticism around graphically impressive trailers for upcoming games. Grand Theft Auto 6 received one such stunning trailer upon its announcement last week, and though there are some who have wondered whether the game will actually look this good, a former Rockstar developer is certain that it will.
Mike York – an animator who was at Rockstar from 2012 to 2017 and worked on Grand Theft Auto 5 and Red Dead Redemption 2 – has said in a video he recently uploaded to his personal YouTube channel that GTA 6 is going to look just as good as its trailer suggests, and that what we saw in the trailer wasn’t footage of cinematics, but rather, representative of the in-game experience. According to York, Rockstar is “[pushing] the [current] consoles and the hardware to the limits with their level of detail.”
“I’m really impressed with how far they’re bringing the graphics for an in-game kind of version of this,” he said (via VG247). “A lot of times you see [cinematics used], this is not that, when you play this game, it’s really gonna look like this.”
The Grand Theft Auto 6 reveal trailer has certainly proved massively popular, as many had expected it would, after the last decade of anticipation. In fact, the trailer managed to attract more views on YouTube in day than the GTA 5 reveal did in 12 years.
Grand Theft Auto 6 is due out in 2025 for PS5 and Xbox Series X/S.