gta 4 npc reactions need to come back, the headshot thing has me worried

Watching that gameplay footage again and something's been bugging me. Every single kill I saw was a headshot. Like, not one body shot that I can remember. And I get it, headshots are clean for a trailer, but it got me thinking about how NPCs react to getting shot in general.

In GTA 5, you'd shoot some random pedestrian and they'd flinch for half a second, then just keep walking like nothing happened. It always felt off. Like they were made of rubber or something. You'd unload a whole mag into a guy and he'd stumble a bit, then jog away. No weight to it.

GTA 4 had it right. You'd shoot an NPC and they'd stagger, grab their chest, run into a wall, brace against it, sometimes fall over and try to crawl. It felt like they had an actual physical body. Messing around with the Euphoria physics in GTA 4 was half the fun. You could shoot someone in the leg and they'd limp. Shoot them in the arm and they'd clutch it. It made the world feel alive in a way GTA 5 never quite matched.

I'm really hoping Rockstar went back to that style for GTA 6. The footage we've seen so far looks incredible, but if every NPC just drops from a headshot and there's no in-between, that's gonna be a letdown. I want to see people react differently depending on where you hit them. I want to see them stumble into traffic, trip over curbs, grab onto light poles. That chaos is what makes GTA fun when you're just messing around.

Maybe the headshot thing was just for the trailer to keep it clean. Rockstar knows what they're doing. But I can't shake the feeling that they might have simplified the physics to make the game run better on consoles. I really hope not. GTA 4's NPC reactions are still the gold standard for me, and with the new hardware they should be able to do even more, not less.

Anyway, that's my one worry from the footage. Everything else looked insane. Just please, Rockstar, give us back the stumbling, wall-bracing, crawling NPCs. It's the little things that make the sandbox feel real.

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Source: r/GTA6 · Curated content.