GTA 6's Narrower Roads Were a Deliberate Choice, and They Came With Costs

Rockstar Games is still releasing details about Grand Theft Auto 6 ahead of its November 19 launch on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S, and the newest batch comes from journalist Jason Schreier. In a recent video, he shared what he learned while speaking with Rockstar staff, and one of the more notable points concerns the road network.

GTA 6's roads are significantly narrower than the ones in GTA 5, according to Schreier's account of what Rockstar's Aaron Garbut told him, and that was intentional. Players should expect denser traffic. GTA 5 had long stretches of open asphalt where you could tear around like an action movie hero, and that kind of wide-open driving is less common here. Garbut said the team committed to narrower roads from the start of development, and the decision had knock-on effects. Tighter streets meant building more structures and filling more space with other elements to make the city feel full. "All these things come back to bite you later," he said.

Schreier also described a rough stretch for the project between 2019 and 2022. The COVID-19 pandemic was part of it, but so was a long internal debate over how realistic the game should be. Rockstar was trying to balance grounded simulation against the arcade-style fun the series is known for, and that tension reportedly spilled over inside the studio.

Weapons were part of the same debate. Rockstar's Rob Nelson told Schreier the team had considered a more realistic approach that would limit how many weapons a player could carry at once. Rockstar spent what Schreier described as "months if not years" testing new designs that would either evolve the traditional weapon wheel or replace it altogether. In the end, the studio kept the familiar wheel.

The last section of the video is about how the game gets made. Garbut said there is "no one person that has this whole thing in their head." Individual developers have enough room to add small touches that colleagues may never notice. Schreier used Red Dead Redemption 2 as the example: a horse's testicles shrink or swell depending on the weather. That detail was never on a features list, and no director asked for it. A developer or team simply built it and put it in the game. Schreier says GTA 6 will have its own version of these hidden details, added by individual teams and likely to go unnoticed by most players.

With release less than a month away, expectations are enormous. The game is widely expected to be a commercial blockbuster, and the reporting says it is already tracking ahead of recent AAA releases.