How GTA 6 Benefits from RDR2’s World Design

Red Dead Redemption 2 might be one of my favorite Rockstar games of all time, and that’s partly due to the rich and interesting world they managed to build in that title. Places feel lived-in, busy, and real.

Compare that to GTA 5, which does have an awesome world, but go beyond the borders of the city and things begin to feel empty, bland, and uninteresting. So this got me thinking: what might Rockstar take away from RDR 2 and apply to GTA 6 to make the world even more amazing than we can imagine?

Without further ado, let’s speculate on what we might see out there in GTA 6.

What Made RDR 2’s World So Great?

I could spend hours in RDR 2 just being in nature. I would sometimes head to the waterfalls and just watch them, watch the birds fly over, watch the animals come to drink, and just be. I’ve never been able to do that in any other game before. I always rush, try to get through the story, because it’s the story that I’m usually most interested in.

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So why was RDR 2’s world so alluring to me? I think it’s simply because of how detailed it was. Be in the right place at the right time, and you get to see a fox pounce into the snow, hunting its prey. You’ll see wolves fighting over a carcass. You’ll see an eagle dive into a body of water and emerge with a fish.

And then it rains or snows; the effects on your clothing show up realistically. When you run into others, they often react in some way based on your current appearance and honor. And then there are all the little weird side quests scattered around the map, allowing us to meet rich and interesting characters that some playthroughs may never even get to experience.

The breeze through the trees, the thunder of the waterfall, the howl of a blizzard. The sound design was the best I’ve ever seen in a game, and that, too, makes a difference.

At the end of the day, these are all relatively small things that combine to create a world that, above all, feels alive. And that’s the secret to stunning world design, in my opinion.

If you never interact with the world, you just have the feeling that it can go on without you just fine. People go about their routines, get into fights, hammer in railroad spikes, grab drinks at the saloon after work, and your presence doesn’t matter to them — until you start shooting the place up, of course.

It’s this wild attention to detail that has always made Rockstar’s games a cut above anything else. The small details make a huge difference. But there is a slight problem with RDR 2 that just wouldn’t fit within a GTA game, and that’s the pace.

RDR 2 is a very slow game, and everything you do takes time, from cooking to skinning to bathing. It all creates an almost hyper-realistic experience that suits the game very well, but I feel would be out of place in a GTA game. So, what might we see in GTA 6 when we look at RDR 2’s world design?

What GTA 6 Gets from RDR 2’s World Design

GTA has always been a little less serious than RDR, and so the NPCs we get will likely be a lot more comedy-oriented. They may have their own daily routines just like in RDR 2, but they’ll likely have much goofier dialogue and reactions to the world. So the city will likely feel a lot like other GTA cities.

It’s the countryside I’m more interested in seeing adapted from RDR 2. If I had to guess, based on the performance expected on the current-gen consoles, we’re going to have a lot of simulation going on in the background. I hope a large chunk of this is reserved for the swamps, oceans, and hills of Leonida.

But I don’t just want animals. I want to find that lonely cabin somewhere in the swamp or the woods, and have someone actually living in it, ranting like a crazy person, trapping animals out there to survive.

We’ll have many secrets to discover, that’s for sure, similar to the killers in GTA 5. But while roving the natural landscape, I would love to have it feel lived-in, alive, and as though it would just keep going without my presence.

You might think we had something like this in GTA 5, more or less, since there were animals and such. But these animals never really did anything. They’d just spawn in and roam around as you approached the area. And, of course, attack you while your back’s turned (man, those mountain lions were annoying).

You couldn’t just sit and watch a deer be, or a pack of coyotes do their thing. The deer would mostly stay still and wait to get shot. The coyotes would roam until something happened, then run off into the distance. But now we have to remember that GTA 5 was made for the PS3. The PS5 is somewhere between 30 to 70 times more powerful. Let that sink in for a minute.

So we might well finally get a GTA map that feels as good as RDR 2. It has been eight years, and I’m sure Rockstar has used much of that time to perfect the systems from both RDR 2 and GTA 5, and I’ll bet that GTA 6 will blow minds, far more than what GTA 5 did at launch. For example, people found it amazing that if you crash into a tree, leaves fall. Yeah, 2013 was a different era at this point.

What Do You Want to See in GTA 6?

I’m always curious about what others want to see, above all, in the game. In my article, 10 Things We Predict GTA 6 Will Do, I cover a wider variety of features I think (and hope on some) that we’ll see in GTA 6. I’d love your thoughts there or on the GTA 6 world here.

What do you think we’ll see?

If you’re up for more casual reading and a trip down memory lane, check out Ali’s take on all the GTA protagonists, ranked.