why enterable interiors in gta 6 are a bigger deal than i thought

I'll be the first to admit I have zero game dev background, so don't come for me. I keep seeing people talk about how insane it is that GTA 6 is supposed to have a ton of enterable interiors. I'm hyped for that as much as anyone, but I honestly don't get why it's such a big deal from a technical standpoint.

Is it just the raw time it takes to model each location, design the interior layout, set up NPC routines, all that? Or is there something deeper going on that I'm missing?

From what I've pieced together reading threads here and there, the art side is one thing. Making rooms look good takes effort, sure. But the real headache is streaming. Open world games have to swap interiors in and out on the fly. You can't keep every room loaded at once or the memory would explode. So the game has to pull them in seamlessly as you walk through a door, no loading screen, no pop in. That's a whole layer of engineering on top of the modeling work. Then you've got AI pathfinding inside tight spaces, lighting that has to match the outside, making sure the player can't break things by bringing a car through a doorway. It adds up fast.

Designing a believable motel room or a corner store is no small task either, especially when Rockstar's standard is that every object feels placed, not copy pasted. But the technical plumbing behind it is probably what makes it "insane" to people who know what they're talking about.

Either way, if the final game has even half the interiors people are speculating about, that alone will make Leonida feel way more lived in than Los Santos ever did. I'm just glad I get to experience it without having to write a single line of code.

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Source: r/GTA6 · Curated content.