The level of visual detail in GTA 6 is staggering already, but there's going to be even more going on when you start interacting with all the NPC pedestrians that fill the world.

According to The New York Times, Rockstar said GTA 6 has well over 600,000 NPC animations compared to GTA 5's 55,000 and Red Dead Redemption 2's 300,000.

Judging from the recent GTA 6 extended look on Netflix, this will mean everyone you meet will move and react in different ways unique to them. And the only way Rockstar was able to pull this off was by dedicating an entire office in LA just to NPCs.

The goal was to make the world feel more bespoke and realistic. You won't be driving past crowds that mimic the same behavior as the people chilling on the beach. Everyone will have their own personality that will direct what they do—which might even include firing back at you if you threaten them.

Rockstar gave an example of an NPC dropping an object and immediately ignoring it in GTA 5. In GTA 6, NPCs will remember that kind of stuff because they're all hand-crafted rather than procedurally generated.

Co-studio head at Rockstar North Aaron Garbut explained how NPCs you encounter will materially exist in the world. "Every room in the game, somebody thought about this," he said. "Who's sitting where, what they're drinking, the marks that are left on the table. The pictures on the wall will have people that are in that room, with their tattoos on their arms and their family behind them. The whole thing has been made, and build, and photographed, and placed in this random room in a random building in a huge city, in a world."

All of this has me eager to pull an AnyAustin and follow NPCs around when the full game is out in November. I'm sure the main story will have its thrills, but I need to know what life is like in Leonida as the people who actually live there, not some shmuck like me who just showed up to cause some chaos.

The GTA 6 map is 3 times bigger than Red Dead Redemption 2's

Warlock, the next big D&D game after 2023's Baldur's Gate 3, made a big splash at this week's Gamescom Opening Night Live 2026, straight-up spoiling RPG nerds with a nearly ten-minute showcase including breathtaking cinematics as well as combat and exploration-focused gameplay. And while there's zero doubt Warlock is a D&D game through and through, featuring an original story pulled from established lore, developer Invoked Studios is very much designing the game as a standalone RPG bearing the developer's unique trademark.

"We're working really closely with the TTRPG folks as well as Wizards of the Coast to try and see how we can bring our own secret sauce to the game," Warlock creative director Jeffrey Hattem tells GamesRadar+ during Gamescom 2026.

"We're not just there, right? We respect the brand of D&D. We're building on the shoulders of giants, obviously. It's a 50-plus year game that has a collaboration of many storytellers, writers, artists, and we're looking to put our own contribution to the world of D&D as well. We're adding new spells as well. It's not just what you're typically expecting."

In the same interview, Hattem made a point to distance Warlock from Baldur's Gate 3 despite calling Larian's award-winning RPG "a great game" and expressing anticipation for Divinity. He also confirmed you'll be able to enjoy Warlock completely without any previous knowledge of D&D, which is great to hear as someone whose only experience with the franchise is Baldur's Gate.

"We're building a game that is intended for players that could have never played Dungeons and Dragons," he says. "It's not required to come in. [Protagonist] Kaatri is a stranger in a strange land ... players can go along that journey with her as well at the same time and learn what they need to know, but if you're a fan of D&D, I hope that you're going to find a lot of Easter eggs and secrets and realizations of things that you would expect and find familiar as well."

Warlock escapes Baldur's Gate 3's long shadow with a very different take on D&D that I'm happy to roll my dice on

The big Netflix showcase isn't the only GTA 6 news coming out today. Some YouTubers and streamers were given a special look at the game by Rockstar, and they learned some interesting things from the studio.

Like YouTuber TGG, who says he visited Rockstar North and saw three hours of the game (as spotted by Kotaku). He asked Rockstar about the size of the map and came back with some useful comparisons:

"The map is twice the size of GTA 5's map. Three times the size of Red Dead Redemption 2's map. Vice City itself is twice the size of Los Santos, and Vice City and its surroundings suburbs is 11 times bigger than Los Santos and its surroundings."

Wowza. For those wondering if TGG has the sizes of GTA 5 and RDR2 mixed up there, I think it's the case that RDR2 feels bigger because it's more densely packed and you travel more slowly through it, but GTA 5 has always been bigger overall. And if GTA 6 is twice that, well, that sounds like a landmass Rockstar could build upon for years and years.

I'm most excited about the size of Vice City itself, though—these days Los Santos feels a little too small to meaningfully mimic Los Angeles, but Vice City is looking absolutely massive.

There's a lot more GTA 6 stuff to read today, including a live blog chronicling details from the Netflix stream and my thoughts on the missions we saw live.

The big gameplay reveal for GTA 6 has come and gone, and I'm surprised by how mixed I am on it.

In some ways, I'm more excited than ever play it. Vice City gives an amazing first impression—I'm already convinced it'll be the special sort of open world that you just want to exist in. Rockstar is packing it full of little activities and human touches that might make GTA 6 a borderline life sim: eating, drinking, sleeping, recreation, hanging out with buds, skydiving, dirt bike racing, and store robbing (I didn't say the activities were all aspirational). I'm seeing a lot of stuff I want to do.

That stuff looks so good it's almost overwhelming, but the bits in between all that—those fragments of story missions—were less impressive. I was hoping 13 years would change the shape of GTA's authored action, but Rockstar is still very much working with the same tools.

In the first mission we see Jason and Lucia doing a drug deal for Boobie Ike, and I bet you can guess what happens: The pair exchange some uneasy words with the buyer, then the deal goes wrong when the cops show up. Our heroes shoot their way out of the building.

A mission shown off later in the video takes place further in the story: Jason and Lucia are more established, taking on a job as security detail for some corpo bigwig. There's some walking, some talking, a speech about a company's new US headquarters, then the party is interrupted by professional killers with guns. The pair shoot their way out of the building.

This isn't just a trend throughout this gameplay reveal. Rockstar missions have had this pattern since the early GTA days: meet a weird new character, talk and drive with them for a while, then shoot 18 people, mission over. It's as if Rockstar believes every story beat has to check off the same bullet points. The format wore especially thin in Red Dead 2's overly long story, so much that I've struggled to replay the whole thing despite loving everything else about it.

My hope is that the majority of GTA 6 can buck this trend, and that today's reveal prioritized action for the sake of spectacle. I want to see quieter moments—missions centered around choices, mysteries, or just having fun. I know it's GTA, but wouldn't the explosions of action be more thrilling if they weren't always expected?

We've got a lot of GTA 6 reading for you today, including a live blog that catalogued details from the reveal as they happened.