GTA 6 Has 600,000 NPC Animations Because Nobody Was Generated

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28 August 2026 11:34

This is kind of insane.

Rockstar announced GTA 6 has over 600,000 NPC animations. Red Dead Redemption 2 had 300,000 and GTA 5 had 55,000.

So how did they do it?

Rockstar assembled a dedicated team of writers, directors and producers in Los Angeles working solely on NPCs, and according to them rejected procedural generation for them entirely. "We art-directed each individual one of them," said Rockstar North co-head Aaron Garbut.

Leonida's population covers a wider spread of heights, weights and body types, and animations just blends in perfectly.

The rooms

Garbut's description of the detail work is the part worth quoting at length, because it explains where 600,000 animations comes from.

"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."

Scale

Repoertedly Vice City is twice the size of Los Santos. The full map is three times larger than Red Dead Redemption 2's. Which is substantial.

Co-head Rob Nelson stated "Once we managed to accomplish that level of interactive fidelity in a more sparsely populated version of America 100 years ago, we were already imagining what it would be like if we could do that at the scale and density of a modern environment."

You can greet, taunt, provoke or defuse people through an expanded version of RDR2's interaction system, and NPCs notice when Jason or Lucia eavesdrops on their conversations. Some will attack unprovoked.