Thanks to a dedicated team 'art-directing' every single NPC, GTA 6 has over 10 times as many unique animations as GTA 5

There are big-budget blockbusters, and then there's GTA 6. If you want any sense of just how big this thing is, look no further than a recent interview Rockstar North co-head Aaron Garbut gave The New York Times (via Techradar). In it, he said the studio dedicated an entire new team solely to making NPCs.

"We art-directed each individual one of them," Garbut said in the interview. "Every room in the game, somebody thought about this … Who's sitting where, what they're drinking, the marks that are left on the table. The pictures on the wall will have the people that are in that room, with their tattoos on their arms and their family behind them.

"That whole thing has been made, and built, and photographed, and placed in this random room in a random building in a huge city, in a world." He revealed that GTA 6 has over 600,000 animations—double the amount Red Dead Redemption 2 had, both of which dwarf GTA 5's 55,000. Considering the game's map is also three times as big as Red Dead 2's, it seems like the game operates on an unprecedented level of scale and fidelity.

This all lines up with what PC Gamer's US editor-in-chief Tyler Wilde said of the game in the wake of recent leaks earlier this month: even if GTA 6 doesn't reinvent the open world crime-'em-up, it "will be impressive for the same reason Rockstar games typically are: The absurd amount of effort and money the studio puts into making them as big and detailed as the mainstream hardware of the day can manage."