Vehicle Destruction in Games - What Damage Model Should GTA 6 Use?

Just caught this deep dive by Dark Space on YouTube breaking down how vehicle destruction actually works under the hood in games, and honestly it got me thinking about Vice City's cars nonstop.

The Damage Spectrum

The vid walks through basically every approach devs use, from the super basic stuff all the way to insane sim-level physics:

• Minimal Damage — barely anything, just a visual nod that you hit something
• Scratches & Texture Swaps — paint scrapes and swapping out clean models for dented ones
• Model Swapping — the old-school swap between pristine and wrecked states (GTA has lived here for a long time)
• Detaching Components — bumpers hanging off, doors flying, wheels coming loose
• Vertex Morphing — deforming the actual mesh in real time, so dents form where you impact
• Full Soft Body — BeamNG territory where every part of the chassis crumples realistically
• Voxel-based — teardown-style destruction where material literally gets destroyed at a granular level

Where GTA Has Landed

Historically Rockstar's been in the model-swap plus component-detachment zone. GTA V added some nice touches with doors and panels peeling off, but the underlying deformation was still pretty preset. Compared to what vertex morphing or soft body can do, it's night and day.

What We're Hoping For

Full soft body in an open world this size is probably a pipe dream — the processing cost would be brutal with dozens of cars on screen. But vertex morphing? That feels like a realistic step up. Imagine crunching your Buccaneer into a wall and watching the fender actually buckle around the impact point instead of just swapping to a pre-baked crumple model.

The video makes a solid point that good destruction isn't just about realism — it's about feel. The satisfaction of a takedown in Burnout came from how over-the-top and readable the damage was, not from physics accuracy.

Rockstar's always walked that line between arcade fun and grounded detail. The question is where they'll land with next-gen hardware to play with.

What level of vehicle destruction are you expecting — or hoping — Rockstar will target for GTA 6?

Source: Dark Space (YouTube) · Curated content.

Vertex morphing seems like the sweet spot, but honestly I'm more curious about how deformation could interact with other systems. Like, if a crumpled hood affects aerodynamics or engine performance differently depending on where the dent formed, that's where it gets interesting for me.

The model-swap approach in V had some funny edge cases too — remember how you could flip a car, tap a wall, and suddenly it's fully wrecked? Preset thresholds without positional awareness made damage feel random sometimes.

Vertex morphing at least ties the visual to the physics event that caused it. Even if soft-body is off the table, morphing plus better component detachment propagation would be a huge leap.

Vertex morphing is the sweet spot, but I'm more interested in how damage ties into mission failure states. Think back to "Three Leaf Clover" — that chase loses tension when your car barely shows the punishment it's taking. If GTA 6 makes visible damage actually communicate vehicle health, suddenly you're making real-time decisions: push this wrecked car harder or bail and find another? That's better mission design through better destruction modeling. Component detachment already does this partially — losing a door mid-chase is visceral — but deformation that reflects impact location? That's the next level. Full soft body's overkill for a game that needs to track 50+ NPCs simultaneously. Give me readable, location-specific dents and I'm sold.

That Burnout point is crucial — Rockstar prioritizes readability over simulation. That said, RDR2 quietly pushed vertex deformation on wagons and coaches, and the leap from last-gen to current-gen gave them serious headroom. I'm expecting vertex morphing plus enhanced component detachment as the baseline, not a full model-swap retreat.

One detail people keep sleeping on: Trailer 1 showed that Marina scene with multiple vehicles in frame during a chase. If they're rendering that density with the lighting overhaul we saw, they've clearly solved for the per-frame cost somewhere. Deformation budget feels like it got a serious upgrade.

Vertex morphing is the sweet spot, but not for the tech reasons — for the story it tells. Think about Walter Hill's The Driver: every dent on that car is a beat in the narrative. You read the chase on the sheet metal. Model-swapping kills that. One second you're pristine, next frame you're a prop from a junkyard lot. No arc, no cinema.

Rockstar gets this. They've always built set pieces, not simulations. I just hope they remember that crunch needs to land like a Michael Mann collision, not a physics demo reel.