Thirteen years is a long time. It can feel especially long when you’re developing a game in a series that loves nothing more than to satirize the times we live in. GTA 6 has the challenge, then, of not feeling out of touch with the world its trying to find the funny side of.
It’s something that Rob Nelson, co-studio head of Rockstar North is astutely aware. “That’s a question a lot of people ask: how do you deal with satire in today’s world?” he told IGN on an exclusive visit to the developer’s Scottish office.
“I think there’s always stuff to satirize. As long as humans are humans, other humans will figure out ways to satirize what we do. For us, because we work on such a long development cycle, we have to not jump on stuff and instead choose our angle of approach carefully and decide what things are going to be a bit more timeless. We’re not a TV show coming out every week or every month. We have to be careful that what we’re choosing to satirize is not going to feel dated in a weird way. I think those broader things are OK to satirize, but very specific political issues or memes will date fast. Even the way our characters speak we think about it a lot, so that they're not using extremely contemporary slang. Even though our characters are a certain age, they need to feel somewhat timeless.”
Being able to feel a connection with the two protagonists is a huge part of Rockstars’s games. They are, typically, people commits crimes and doing horrible things to one another, so creating a warmth toward them is a real challenge. This is something that Rockstar has decades of experience doing by now, though. Making sure they feel true-to-life when talking, and giving them believable, and somewhat relatable backgrounds is a huge part of this.
“Jason and Lucia as characters have rich backstories that we sometimes explicitly talk about, sometimes just allude to,” Nelson reveals. “I think there is enough detail there if you want to pay attention, but we also have purposely left them with some room for interpretation so that hopefully the connection can be enhanced between the player and these characters. That is maybe as important as it has ever been for these characters in particular because I think for this story to work for you, for you to buy into this relationship, you have to be able to connect with them in some way. Hopefully a good number of people will feel like they can do that.”
Satire, nor characters, are the aspects that Rockstar settles on first when developing a new Grand Theft Auto game, though. The origin point is the world, and, in the case of GTA 6, a return to Vice City.
“A lot of people ask how do you think about satire and what angle to use? But satire is not usually the first thing that we think about, it’s something that develops,” Nelson explains. “The first thing we think about is where are we going to set it? – OK, Miami and Florida – Vice City and Leonida. Then we go there and start meeting with as many different people as we can. We start figuring out what sorts of experiences we want the player to have, and what places we want them to go, and what types of people we want them to meet. Then we figure out what’s a good character set to take the player through that? Those are the big things. Then, we ask, ‘What do we want to improve upon that we did before?’ Certainly choice. Another big thing is trying to connect who you are in the narrative with who you are in the open world as much as possible, so it feels like one singular experience.”
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