A former developer at Rockstar explained in an interview why the world of GTA 6 is not so easily freed from bugs and why we should consider this for the release.
Who is this developer? It is Mike Yorke. He worked as an animator on GTA 5 and Red Dead Redemption 2 before leaving the company.
In an interview with the podcast Kiwi Talkz, which has since been taken offline, Yorke spoke about the open world of GTA 6 – and why it is not so easy to get it bug-free.
Unpredictability causes problems
Why should we expect bugs at the release of GTA 6? Yorke states that GTA 6 is supposed to be “like no other” due to its unpredictability and the unpredictability of what the player can do in this title.
Yorke compares the open world of GTA 6 to that of The Witcher 3, which is also massive, but functions very differently. Witcher 3 mostly consists of nature, and occasionally you ride into a small village. Proper cities, although large, are still rare and manageable.
The densely populated urban environment of Vice City is said to make the game significantly harder to optimize. “There are many things that can happen that you don’t really think about until a random kid tries it in his basement,” Yorke says.
This does not mean that they do not search for bugs themselves and test performance. When Yorke worked on GTA 5, he recounts, the developers “played the game all day, every day, for about 8 to 10 hours a day” looking for problems.
In an earlier episode of the podcast, Mike Yorke also commented on the performance of the game. Although Rockstar has not yet stated how many frames the game is supposed to run on consoles, according to his estimation, GTA 6 could only run at 30 FPS at release.
