GTA 6: An Extended Look debuts in a few hours still, but a developer who worked on 007: First Light's incredible crowds says Rockstar Games' NPC tech is already miles ahead of the competition based on the huge leaks we've been privy to so far.
The hacker known online as Cyberleek has been sharing early looks at the open-world game for a couple of weeks now, and some of those videos have given fans a peek at GTA 6's bustling crowds enjoying themselves at the beach or at the strip club, say. But the early clips have also left cheeky onlookers a bit divided - whether Rockstar's achieved the crowd density it showed off in GTA 6's first trailer is up for debate.
In the eyes of Berkay Dursun, an IO Interactive AI programmer who worked on the under-the-hood tech powering the new James Bond game, GTA 6's bustling flocks of people aren't even in the same league as other games.
In response to a tweet that was disparaging GTA 6's crowd density by comparing it to Hitman's also really impressive rabble of people, Dursun explains that "every character is simulated individually" in Rockstar's upcoming game - or, at least, that's how it seems based on what's been shown. That's different to the way games like Hitman and Assassin's Creed handle crowds, where most NPCs don't actually have any AI programming, schedules, or behaviors running underneath. They're essentially repeating movements to make crowds look as busy as possible.
"And achieving simulations on this scale puts them at least 10 years ahead of the industry," Dursun continues, per a machine-translated tweet that's been fact-checked by GamesRadar+. "The closest game that does simulation on this level might Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord" - a game Dursun also had a hand in creating.
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