600,000 NPC Animations, Against GTA 5's 55,000

Most of what came out of the Extended Look is something you can see. This is something Rockstar told us, and it is the most quotable figure in the entire reveal: more than 600,000 NPC animations in GTA 6, against roughly 55,000 in GTA 5 and around 300,000 in Red Dead Redemption 2.

Double Red Dead. More than ten times GTA 5. And GTA 5's crowds were not considered thin at the time.

The number on its own would be marketing. What makes it interesting is the second claim next to it: Rockstar says its NPCs are art-directed individually, rather than generated by procedurally combining body parts and clothing, which is how open-world crowds have been built for twenty years.

That is the expensive way to do it, and it explains a detail that is otherwise hard to account for. Leonida's population reportedly spans a far wider range of heights, weights and body types than previous Rockstar games, and the animations scale to an NPC's size so that people handle objects, and each other, at their own proportions. A crowd assembled from interchangeable parts cannot do that, because the animations have to assume a standard body.

This is also the quiet answer to why so much else in the footage works. Petting a dog after asking its owner, a leash that reacts to your arm, a stranger recognising your clothes and calling the police, a man in the road who needs a lift home: none of those are animation-cheap. They are all the same investment showing up in different places.

Rockstar has not said how many of those animations are unique versus variations, which is the number that would settle how much of this is density and how much is variety.