Rockstar appears to be spending a lot of time staring at the sky. According to Owen Shepherd, the studio’s vice president of art for lighting and rendering, Grand Theft Auto 6 ships with a rebuilt weather engine that is more localized and persistent than anything the series has offered before. The range runs from convincing rainbows all the way up to full hurricanes.
The comments come from the latest issue of Game Informer, where Shepherd walks through the technical side of the game’s atmosphere. Whether any of this changes what players actually do in the open world is still an open question, but there is clearly room to ignore the story missions for a while and simply watch the horizon.
Clouds that roll and rain that stays put
One headline feature is a set of fully dynamic cloudscapes that drift across the map rather than sitting in place as a backdrop. Showers are localized, so it should be possible to stand in sunshine while heavy clouds gather somewhere in the distance. Rainbows appear under the right lighting conditions, though the write-up does not confirm whether the game literally simulates light bending through water droplets. Either way, expect damp ground and puddles once a shower passes through.
Storm season hits harder
The part most players will remember, though, is the severe weather. Shepherd describes tropical storms and hurricanes that stack up multiple effects at once: thick clouds, powerful winds, heavy atmospherics and a lot of rain. Everything ends up soaked, water pours from roof edges and street lamps, thunder rolls overhead, and lightning flashes illuminate the clouds.
How much this interferes with the usual business of shooting people and taking their cars remains to be seen. A reasonable guess is that Rockstar has timed a storm or two to land during a chase, a boat trip or a fight on a rooftop, since that is the kind of set piece the studio tends to build.
A menagerie of 170 species
Weather is not the only area where the game is expanding on past work. The wildlife roster, which builds on lessons learned during Red Dead Redemption 2, now covers 170 animal species. Around sixty of those are birds. More than thirty are land mammals. The list also includes manatees, flamingos, pelicans, sharks, rays, turtles and jellyfish.
So when players tire of playing amateur meteorologist, they can instead spend an evening talking at length about whale populations to whoever their in-game partner happens to be. Wildlife systems on this scale tend to create their own little communities of observers, and Rockstar has already seen how that plays out.
An audience that already checks the forecast
GTA Online has long had its own forecasting service run by players, plus mods that add more sophisticated weather to role-play servers and others that make the climate gloomier in a very British sort of way. Over in Red Dead Redemption 2, meanwhile, fans have spent years trying to work out the logic behind the game’s lightning strikes. If anything, a more detailed system gives those groups more to dig into once the multiplayer side of GTA 6 eventually arrives.
Legal fights and modding warnings
Away from the weather talk, Rockstar is currently caught up in legal proceedings with former staff who were dismissed over what the company calls gross misconduct and what the employees describe as union busting. It recently emerged that Rockstar had someone inside a union Discord server for more than two years before the firings took place.
The studio is also continuing its uneasy relationship with the modding scene. People hoping to tinker with GTA 6 have been warned away from building main story expansions, making unauthorized ports, or creating mods that stitch different GTA maps together. Given how much attention the game’s simulated skies are already drawing, it seems safe to assume modders will ignore at least some of that advice.
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Source: Rock Paper Shotgun