GTA 6/RDR 2
The GTA 6 trailer is about to cross 120 million views on YouTube, and with 9.8 million likes, the consensus seems to be “wow, that looks really good.”
That’s true both in terms of tone and scope, but also just…visually it looks amazing. Not only the Vice City/Leonida environments, but what really stands out are the character models, from its leads Jason and Lucia to the NPCs you’ll encounter channeling the wildness of the region.
However, there’s always this idea in gaming that trailers are made to look better than the final product. We’ve seen this happen many times in the past, where a cinematic spot will not remotely resemble the end result. Watch Dogs, Cyberpunk, Redfall. We’ve seen it a lot.
But not so with Rockstar games. And that’s why it does seem likely that GTA 6 will literally be as good as it looks. Here’s a comparison from GTA 5’s first and second trailers to the final game:
GTA 5
Or how about Red Dead Redemption 2 instead? Trailer #2 to release for Dutch and Arthur:
RDR2
There are plenty more examples, resolution quality on decade old trailers aside, and the models from the trailers to release are either the same, or actually improved over time in some instances.
What that means is that when Lucia, for instance, looks like this in the game, this is not some special cinematic cutscene. Rockstar does not do that with its trailers. What you’re seeing is how the game should look, whether that’s the main characters or all the supporting ones. And those twerk physics, presumably, are real.
Lucia
If I’m being honest, I’m not sure the face tech is all that many miles beyond what we saw from Red Dead Redemption 2 (which was stellar), at least in these early glimpses. But what feels like it’s different is the performance capture and the overall character modeling, giving life to the citizens of Vice City in a way we haven’t seen before.
But no, Rockstar is not being deceptive here. This absolutely should not be a case of a trailer broadcasting one kind of visual fidelity and tech and the game being a downgrade. More and more studios seem to be moving away from this, but Rockstar has been doing this forever, really, and there’s no reason to believe they’d stop now.
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