It turns out there’s a good reason so many of GTA 5’s missions take you halfway across Los Santos, and it’s not just so the characters can chit chat or you can listen to the funny radio commentators.
Perhaps the thing Rockstar is most famous for is its open worlds. The developer manages to create virtual lands that feel alive, full of character and hidden details. They’re so big that people are still discovering new things in GTA 5 to this day. Despite the size of these places, there’s something to do almost everywhere, and that’s a key part of their design.
Speaking on the GTA VI O’clock YouTube channel, ex-Rockstar developer Ben Hinchliffe, now lead designer at Just Add Water, explains the process. “We have this huge map for these open-world games,” he says. “It’s meticulously planned where content takes place on the map to make sure there isn’t any section of the map missing content, missing gameplay.”
It would be a waste of a world if all the missions only happened in downtown Los Santos, so the team ensures we have a reason to explore everywhere. “Sometimes, missions would overlap, there’d be a lot of stuff going on in one particular area, and then it’s like, ‘well how do we move that mission, that character, that gameplay, from here to here?'” Hinchliffe explains. “It might be a completely different land structure – you’ve made your whole mission work in this urban environment, and now you’re in the desert.”
This strategy isn’t without its pitfalls, however. “You’d obviously have to rework it in a way that made sense, but without having to do it from scratch,” he says. “Sometimes that had to happen […] that was always the worst-case, but you’d try and make it work in these different locations.”
Issues like this are why game development takes so long. A game may be functionally complete, but if you notice there’s no mission on Mount Chiliad, you’ve got to redesign an existing one.
Another restriction is the fact Rockstar’s games are usually set in exaggerated versions of actual places. “It’s always working with the world,” Hinchliffe says. “A lot of the time you had to work with the map itself and how it was laid out – these things were based on real-world locations, and real-world structures. You were working with what you were given.”
As for one of Hinchliffe’s favourite missions he worked on, he tried to add an L.A. Noire Easter egg into a golf buggy chase. “There was a bit of a running joke in L.A. Noir that when you drove really close to pedestrians, they’d jump out the way and go ‘ahh this isn’t a racetrack!’ and I tried to get that line into GTA 5 on that mission,” he recounts. “So when you jumped over the bridge and sped past this group of people they’d dive out the way and I had one of them go ‘hey this isn’t a race track!’ But it got picked up by the writers and they were like, ‘no, we’re not putting that in.'”
By now, you’ve probably played GTA 5 to death, so you should read everything we know about GTA 6 so far.