Former Rockstar game designer Ben Hinchliffe has suggested that the studio will currently be working to “tighten” Grand Theft Auto VI as much as possible ahead of its hotly anticipated release in 2025.
Speaking with YouTube channel GTAVloclock, Hinchliffe, who now works at Just Add Water but had been involved with GTA V, Red Dead Redemption 2, and GTA VI during his time at Rockstar Games, was asked what the focus would be right now for the development team.
“Talking generalities, on a title that big, you’re wanting to really tighten it in every corner” when the title is roughly a year away from launch. This boils own to “a lot of bug fixes” and ensuring everything is ready for players to jump into, especially when it comes to playing in unintended ways.
90% of your work is actually doing stuff that you don’t want [players] to do. You might just want someone to drive in a straight line – ‘drive from A to B, please, just follow that car’ – and then they don’t. They get out of the car, or they drive over there, or they shoot this person, or they turn around and go the other way. And it’s just like, can you just do what the objective is telling you to do, please?
He added that players don’t always follow the rules “because people like to mess around, and they like to do things differently,” which ultimately means a lot of extra work for the team to accommodate these deviations or stop them outright, even if as little as “10% of the people might try” going down this path.
Grand Theft Auto VI is scheduled for release in 2025 for PS5 and Xbox Series X/S.
