Rockstar has prepared over 600,000 NPC animations for GTA VI – 11 times more than in GTA V, and twice as many as in Red Dead Redemption 2.
Rockstar has dedicated an entire office in Los Angeles to working on NPCs. Residents of different districts of Leonida will behave differently: beachgoers will not repeat the behavior of people on the streets, and characters will have their own reactions and personalities. Some may even open fire if provoked.
NPCs in GTA V can drop an item and soon forget about it. In GTA VI, characters should remember such situations and react to them. Rockstar also emphasizes that NPC behavior is created manually, not just procedurally.
Rockstar North Co-President Aaron Garbut spoke about the extent of the detail:
Someone designed every room in the game. Who sits where, what they drink, what marks are left on the table. In the photos hanging on the walls, you'll see the people who are in that room – with their tattoos on their arms and their families behind them. Everything was created, built, photographed, and placed in a random room of a random building in a huge city and an entire world.