“The Goal Is Not to Be Realistic, It’s to Feel Realistic,” Rob Nelson Says of GTA VI

Confirmed — Rob Nelson, head of development and co-studio head at Rockstar North, said it on the record to Etienne Rouillon of Trois Couleurs, in an English-language interview published on August 27 after the magazine saw the game running at Rockstar North. It is back in the news this week because GTA BOOM picked it up.

The look. Asked whether Rockstar’s games aim for something short of photorealism, Nelson said it is “something that we often talk about wanting and needing to stay on the right side of. As technological capabilities have increased, so has the ability to make something look very real. It has to look better… but you have to find your own angle on it. And it is subtle. It is subtle, but it’s not fully realistic, and that’s not the goal.”

The gameplay. In the same answer: “It’s the same with gameplay – the goal is not to be realistic, it’s to feel realistic and appropriate for what we do, but not to slow things down unnecessarily.” That fits what he said about refuelling, which takes about ten seconds.

How he wants it remembered. Asked how people should remember the games in a hundred years, he said he hoped they would think “they were a funny snapshot of who we were and what it was like to live in our time and through a sort of satirical, skewed lens.”

The limit of this story: this is a design philosophy, not a feature list. Nelson did not say that photorealism “ages badly”, and he did not mention 2035; those framings are the reposts’, not his. The interview has also been quoted as saying Leonida’s towns outside the city are “11 times” GTA V’s. We have left that out until the figure can be read unambiguously; our map-size story has the figures Nelson gave on camera.