Someone on X tried to dunk on Grand Theft Auto VI's crowds by comparing them to Hitman's and it didn't go how they hoped. Berkay Dursun, an AI programmer at IO Interactive who spent three years building the crowd tech behind 007: First Light, stepped in and didn't agree with the comparison, saying, in his words (originally posted in Turkish), Rockstar Games' technology in its upcoming game is "at least 10 years ahead of the industry."
According to him, most games fake their crowds, Hitman and Assassin's Creed included. He describes the crowds used in these games as having no AI, no schedules, no brains, just canned animations looping to make a place look alive and busy, whereas a real NPC has an actual AI running it, reacting to you, and living its own life. He says that this is what Rockstar does, individually, at a scale nobody else is even close to, and he says the closest comparison is Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord, but even then, GTA 6 is just on a whole other level.
Of course, Dursun made it clear that he doesn't work at Rockstar. However, his words hold weight because he builds crowd systems for a living, and he's making it as if Rockstar's work is witchcraft or magic.
Rockstar's own words at least confirm his comments about the sheer scale of GTA 6. Speaking to the New York Times around the premiere of Grand Theft Auto VI: An Extended Look, Rockstar confirmed that GTA 6 will have more than 600,000 unique NPC animations, which over ten times what Grand Theft Auto V had and double Red Dead Redemption 2.
Numbers only tell you so much, though. What sells it is the intent behind them. Rockstar North co-studio head Aaron Garbut described NPCs that materially exist in the world, down to who is sitting where in a random room, what they are drinking, and the marks left on the table. There is a whole team in Los Angeles whose entire job is art-directing individual pedestrians, a genuinely unhinged use of unlimited resources. The results are exactly what you were staring at for most of the 26-minute Netflix footage_,_ the packed clubs and dense beaches, the pedestrians who actually react when you draw a weapon or start a scene.
This is also, not by accident, why the game runs at 30 FPS on consoles, and why we argued that cap is the compromise Rockstar may have to pay.
All those individually simulated brains cost something. The crowd you cannot stop staring at is the same crowd eating the frame rate.
So what does it mean for Leonida? If Dursun is even half right, the city is not a backdrop with extras shuffling through it. It is a place where the person you just carjacked has somewhere to go, an opinion about you doing it, and a deep enough animation set that you might not see the same reaction twice your entire playthrough.
Whether that holds up is the one thing nobody can promise until launch, but if the goal was a world that feels alive rather than merely populated, the tech, on paper and on screen, is pointing the right way.
