the npc faces in the extended look are doing so much heavy lifting

I've gone through the extended look like four times now and I keep catching new stuff in the background. The eyes on these npcs are doing a lot. They don't just stare at nothing, they actually look around and react to whoever's near them.

The girl standing next to the big guy is the best example. She's clearly annoyed by his phone call, rolling her eyes while he's talking. Then Jason walks up and she straightens up, gives him a once over, glances back at Lucia. When she hears Boobie's name she gets this look like oh, you're one of those. All of that in maybe three seconds and she never says a word.

The Megamundo party crowd is the same. Everyone's doing something different. Some are clapping, some nodding along, some just smiling. It's not one canned animation looped across the room. Same with the drug lady, she looks genuinely shocked and scared, and the two people walking away have these weirded out faces like they just saw something they shouldn't have.

I had to rewatch a few times just to catch how different each npc feels. If the budget really was 2 billion, this is where it went. Random background characters have more personality than some main characters in other games.

Source: r/GTA6 · Curated content.

The $2B figure is fun to run the math on. At $79.99 for Standard, Rockstar needs about 25 million copies to break even. GTA 5 sold 11 million in the first 24 hours, and that was 2013. So the eye-rolling npc tech pays for itself in a weekend. Everything after that is nightclub-tier passive income.