GTA VI var ursprungligen mycket, mycket större

"In 2015, Nelson and a group of other top staff flew to Miami for their first research trip. They had ambitious goals for GTA VI, which they code-named “Project Americas” because it aimed to feature big swaths of land across both North and South America. (Later that would be cut down to Miami and its surroundings.) Their hope was to develop the game concurrently with Red Dead Redemption II, which was helmed by the San Diego office. But as that game’s ambitions grew, Nelson realized he needed to mobilize most of Rockstar, including the senior leadership, to help finish it. That meant pushing GTA VI back several years, but the benefit was that everything they built could “pay off when we get to the game,” Nelson says. In the past, Rockstar had juggled multiple games simultaneously across different offices. Now the bulk of the company’s staff would be focused on just one project at a time.

After Red Dead Redemption II, several top staff departed, including Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser, who’d been the lead writer for most of the company’s games. As a result, Nelson saw his role expand. He and two other veterans, Phil Hooker and Aaron Garbut, all received the title head of development, reflecting their supervisory roles. (Nelson and Garbut were also studio heads of the Edinburgh office.) This sort of arrangement is unusual for video game development; it’s far more common for a single director to run the show. The three leaders say their day-to-day jobs didn’t change much, as they supervised teams and filled in gaps as they did for the last game. But some staff griped there were too many cooks in the kitchen, complaining about indecision and conflicting visions. “Nobody ever really directly said to me, ‘It’s really annoying having three of you making decisions,’” Nelson says. “But I’m aware that people would say that.” He adds that the same problems emerge when a game has just a single leader. “They may be slow in making decisions,” he says. “They may change their mind all the time.”

By the end of 2019, the leadership team had figured out the skeleton of the story, which would feature a criminal couple named Jason Duval and Lucia Caminos as they robbed their way through the seedy underbelly of fake Miami. But determining GTA VI’s other fundamentals proved time-consuming for the three leaders. Some elements were no-brainers: Just like previous Grand Theft Auto games, this would be a satirical, open-world action game in which you could hijack cars and get into shootouts with both cops and criminals. But the contours of the design were tricky to define. Just how true to life would this fictional Miami be? Most video games eschew realism for fun and convenience; if you go into a store to buy a case of beer, you simply select what you want and press a button. But when the graphics are as high fidelity and the systems are as detailed as they are in GTA VI, it can be off-putting to watch a beer bottle appear in the main character’s hand out of thin air. Nelson says he and the other creative leaders debated: Would you have to go to the store’s refrigerator, grab the beer, bring it to the counter and manually pay? At what point was the game going to become less enjoyable as a result? To make a stat-boosting sandwich in your apartment, would you have to go to the grocery store and buy the ingredients? Or could you simply go prepare a sandwich? Making each of these decisions required a lot of guesswork because so much of the game wasn’t yet finished."