Rockstar's 'go nuts' mentality and intense fat trimming rule is shaping Grand Theft Auto 6

In a recent interview, former Rockstar Audio Designer Rob Carr revealed two main ingredients that enable Rockstar to create such immersive worlds, including Red Dead Redemption 2 and the upcoming Grand Theft Auto 6.

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Rockstar is known for creating vast open worlds that have an impressive level of attention to detail, and during the interview, Carr explained that Rockstar has an "unlimited budget", enabling developers to essentially have no "creative restraints". Carr goes on to say that Rockstar will provide the developers, who in his case are audio, with technical constraints, but when it comes to creativity, the studio says, "There isn't any. Go nuts".

Carr goes on to give more specifics on how Rockstar approaches different parts of game development, with the former Rockstar Audio Designer saying that if you wanted to make 10,000 unique sounds for just footsteps, you would be able to, but that might not make it into the final cut of the game, as it will go through a fat trimming process. "Do we need 10,000? Probably not. Well, let's just limit it to about 100 then."

"Can it get quite overwhelming, though? Obviously, with something like, say Red Dead Redemption 1 and GTA 5, they're massive in size, right? So, the amount of sounds you'd have to make is just insane. It's easier to dial it down, go too much and then strip some fat off than it is to not do enough and then have to push for that extra 5 or 10% at the end of the project, right?" explained Carr

Moving to the topic of Grand Theft Auto 6, Carr was asked if this same fat trimming process is applied, and he said yes, and explained it's a better approach to have more than you need, than to get to the launch day and need to crunch for that extra 5% or 10%. In other Grand Theft Auto 6 news, the CEO of Take-Two Interactive, the publisher of the Grand Theft Auto franchise, recently alluded to pricing.