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Comment by mkl95 | Hacker News Reader

It's been 9 years and this footage looks like a moderate improvement over GTA V. On the other hand, GTA V was released 9 years after San Andreas and the improvement was huge. Is it tech debt, API complexity, financial hurdles, or something else?

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You are judging a leak as if it is the final game. If RDR2 is n indication of the quality level of Rockstar GTA VI will be a pretty nice game.

That looks like early development footages. They are probably still working on both the engine and the assets. What you see as little to do with what it’s going to look like in the end.

The question then shifts to why this hacker is posting some early footage. You would expect the newer stuff to be immediately accessible without searching etc. This is allegedly the same guy who hacked Uber and called them out for underpaying drivers, so maybe he's trying to raise awareness about poor security or something.

Because GTA 6 is still in the early phase of development?

It wouldn’t be surprising. GTA Online makes so much money, Rockstar probably was in no rush to develop a follow-up game.

GTA 6 is likely still years from release, it is still "early" when it comes to graphical polish.

You’d be surprised at the amount of games that “come together” during the last 1-2 years of development.

This is early build stuff, not worth judging it at this point.

my anecdotal experience from working on 3 AAA titles indicates that ErneX is spot on.

Most games really don't exist as a playable format until about 1y before release, there are separate gates for features and content; content/UI/Graphics are worked on until about 2 months before release. Nothing before 6 months even looks like the final product in most cases: just a rough outline.

Yea, I wouldn’t be surprised if the recent GTA5 upgrade on next gen consoles was just a port of the assets to the newest RAGE engine so they could playtest the initial GTA6 missions and gameplay mechanics on it while the next version of the engine is perfected and the assets for fake Miami are developed more.

Maybe they aren´t working on some of the visual components, but you can also say they are owning up to that style, as in part of their current gen GTA series.

Like you had a very distinctive visual style on GTA 3, VC and San Andreas - which in part was probably due to hardware limitations, but R* owned it.

So it wouldn´t shock me if it would be something in these lines, to be distinctive yet familiar. Most likely the bigger improvements will be on online gameplay.

I'm not sure the lower end but 80% most popular GPUs have gotten that much stronger in the last 9 years, and that's the spec they likely need it to primarily work on.

I agree that it does not look next-gen at all but let's comment when they actually release the game. From what we know this can be ancient build.

What games do look next-gen?

Games that utilize techniques available on the latest generations of hardware. For example ray-tracing. Ratchet & clank, Returnal, Astro's Playroom. On PC decent example is HL Alyx.

There is a huge expectation towards GTA since Rockstar has a history of being one of the best. The RDR2 was stunning on the previous gen.

Seeing how Genshin receives a major update basically every month - the size of each major version update is comparable to a new expansion for WoW -, I wish Chinese game development caught on faster. Having 5k devs/artists etc work on a project does make faster release cycles.

The technical art, textures, models, etc. are definitely not finished. I am 99% that the final product will have many visual improvements over this leaked footage.

To be fair, the game still seems to be in early stages and the latest gossip suggests a 2025 release date.

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