The former Rockstar Games technical director who worked the beloved GTA trilogy and GTA IV has shared his thoughts on GTA 7. During a new interview, the ex-Rockstar developer gave an insight into where the industry is going and how Rockstar will create their next Grand Theft Auto title after GTA 6.
Obbe Vermeij worked as a technical director at Rockstar Games from 1995 to 2009. His work helped build several games and was part of the success they had. Over the past few years, he has become best known within the GTA community for sharing interesting behind the scenes details about how Rockstar made their classic GTA games and other titles such as the cancelled AGENT game. This led to some high up at Rockstar not being so pleased and the removal of the blog posts.
GTA 7 Prediction
This week, the developer spoke with KIWI TALKZ, a YouTube channel that primarily interviews game developers about their experience in the industry. The interview covered a wide range of topics on Rockstar Games and the development of GTA games. When talking about the cost of GTA titles and other games like them, Obbe shares his prediction for the future.
“My prediction is that GTA 7 will be cheaper to make than GTA 6. I think so. We’ll have to wait 15 years to see if i’m right or not because that’s how long these games take these days.”
His reasoning for this prediction is due to advancements in AI speeding up pre-production and set up phases of development. The former technical director explains:
“I would imagine that let’s say you do a cut scene, all the characters in the cutscene could just be rendered by an AI including the conversation if you just describe the scene, that could be your first pass of a cut scene and you’ll still have tons of artists do the higher level creative stuff and there will be glitches to fix and all that stuff but I think the bulk of the work is probably going to be replaced.”
So there you have it, AI won’t replace the creatives doing the most important work but the more time consuming parts that lack creativity could be sped up. Besides, AI is already being used in the development of games.
Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick said similar things earlier this year. He revealed “We’ve been using digital tools since the very beginning. I would say the interactive entertainment business in an innovator within what people call AI now. I think it is worth noting though the genius is human. The tools might be digital but the creative genius is human.” Whilst Rockstar’s future games won’t be made by AI, it will assist in some areas but not replace the creativity.
Be sure to watch the full interview with the tech director here. It is an extremely interesting interview and well worth listening to in full. KIWI TALKZ has interviewed other Rockstar Games developers in the past. We reported on how one developer revealed the bad parts of the company’s past culture plus another who discussed a canned combat overhaul for GTA V. You can read all about it here.
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