How Rockstar Chases Bigger, Better, More Immersive Worlds

It has been 23 years since Rockstar Games pioneered the 3D open world with Grand Theft Auto 3 and ever since that industry-shifting release the studio has remained at the very forefront of the genre. Despite there being more contenders to the throne than ever these days, Rockstar’s worlds have consistently proven themselves to be generational leaders largely thanks to the pursuit of immersive realism. The network of overlapping systems and handcrafted elements that make up places like Los Santos and Saint Denis are designed to offer such a sense of authenticity that these simulated cities truly feel alive.

The craft behind such digital realities is something that Ben Hinchliffe knows well. A former Rockstar designer now working in the immersive field of virtual reality, he helped put together the worlds of L.A. Noire, Grand Theft Auto 5, and Red Dead Redemption 2 – games that each pushed the bar higher and higher.

L.A. Noire's facial capture tech made conversations feel very realistic (if quite uncanny) Image credit: Rockstar Games

For 2011’s L.A. Noire, much of that immersion came via its groundbreaking facial capture technology that was able to recreate an actor’s every sneering lip and twitching eye. It’s the feature that liquidated developer Team Bondi will be best remembered for. But Rockstar, who acted as both publisher and co-developer on the project, offered contributions that were informed by its proven strengths in open world design.

That’s something that will no doubt raise a few eyebrows, as L.A. Noire is widely considered a poor open world game due to its lack of side activities and map-populating content. “Because the focus was on Phelps and the police, you were kind of boxed in a little bit,” says Hinchliffe. “How far would Phelps go and what could he do? He couldn't do anything too outrageous. He's law enforcement. It did shape a lot of the content as to where we could take it. Let's say you were a criminal or an outlaw, you probably could have gotten away with a lot more in terms of content and what you could have done.”

Despite this, L.A. Noire’s approach to a sprawling city was closer to Grand Theft Auto’s guiding philosophy than you may expect. It was all about authenticity, something that has only become increasingly important to the studio over the last decade. “[The aim was] trying to get that vibe of the 1940s era and the setting and making sure that all felt very authentic in terms of how it was portrayed throughout the game,” explains Hinchliffe. L.A. Noire’s achievements in this area are largely uncontested thanks to a recreation of the city of angels that is so period-accurate even people who lived in LA during the 1940s praised its depiction.

A reflection of that authentic, painstaking-recreated LA would later be found in Grand Theft Auto 5’s Los Santos, which features large sections of city streets that are map-accurate to the metropolis that inspired it. But realism isn’t achieved by architectural accuracy alone – people are as important as pavements. Hinchliffe worked on several of L.A. Noire’s random crimes, a human element that helped bring the digital city to life. There were mobsters lurking in the backalleys that didn’t care about the main story, and you’d never know when they’d strike next. They lent some authentic everyday frustration to the job of a detective – would you focus on the case, or do your public duty and clean up another one of the city’s messes?

Those random crimes would indirectly evolve into Grand Theft Auto 5’s world events, in which pedestrians would call out for help after being mugged or carjacked. They appeared as part of Rockstar’s mandate to “go bigger and better in every aspect.”

“It was making the cars feel like they handled better, having better damage on the vehicles, having the tyres deflate and stuff, having everything react more realistically,” recalls Hinchliffe. “It was a grand vision of just pushing everything forward.”

The key to enhancing GTA 5’s immersive qualities were the dozens and dozens of automated systems that made its simulation of city life feel truly organic. A tyre bursting was a natural reaction to a player’s driving habits rather than a scripted sequence. But Rockstar learned that sometimes it took a lie to create something that feels like the truth.

GTA 5's traffic behaviour could be hand-crafted to create immersive, cinematic situations. Image credit: Rockstar Games

Hinchliffe worked on The Meltdown, a mission in which you must help paparazzi photographer Beverly Felton score a picture of a drunken celebrity caught in a police chase. To create an authentic race through the streets of Los Santos, Hinchliffe controlled everything.

“A lot of the traffic in that chase is fully hand-scripted,” he says. “It's not ambient traffic. We've made the cars follow a set route and cross over at the set time, and have a garbage truck just pull around the corner at the right time. We've hand scripted all of it to give the player the best experience and the best cinematic feel for that chase.”

“Rockstar’s systems are very clever,” he adds. “The tools are very powerful for design. You can switch between hand scripted and generic behaviors very easily, and even the hand scripted stuff looks like it's organic because of the tools.”

That approach really comes into its own in Red Dead Redemption 2. While the 2018 western is Rockstar’s most simulation-heavy open world to date, much of its authenticity only exists because the world is so authored. The frontier may feel alive and reactive, but behind the scenes are thousands of hand-crafted responses to the many actions players can perform.

Red Dead Redemption 2's conversation system gave impressive, authentic life to every NPC. Image credit: Rockstar Games

“A big aspect of Red Dead 2 was that the higher ups wanted to push forward that feeling of the NPCs feeling more real and make that world around you feel like a living, breathing world,” Hinchliffe recalls.

“You've got these smaller towns and less of a population density, so you need the NPCs to feel a bit more real,” he explains. “It was a big drive to [allow players] to talk to people and be more involved in the world, to make you feel bad if you just shoot a random person. [Because of that conversation system] maybe you'd feel a bit worse about that than just mowing down 20 people in GTA 5.”

Pretty much every NPC in Red Dead Redemption 2 has some kind of interior life. Even if that life is just riding a cargo wagon along the same route over and over, it’s a job with a destination that players can turn into a highway robbery opportunity. This level of detail is vital for Red Dead Redemption because of the limited population density Hinchliffe mentioned. At the modern metropolitan scale of Grand Theft Auto, though, with its streets home to thousands of pedestrians, such a sense of authentic life is much more difficult to achieve. It feels like a pipe dream to expect the upcoming Grand Theft Auto 6 to replicate RDR 2’s immersive achievements… but that’s not to say it’s impossible.

Hinchliffe worked on Grand Theft Auto 6 until he left Rockstar in 2022, which means he both knows the scope of its ambition and is bound by a Non-Disclosure Agreement to keep that scope a secret. But as a veteran designer of open world games, he has his own informed opinions about what is possible.

“From a theoretical standpoint, and what you might be able to do if you had the budget and the team size, I don't see any reason why you couldn't have that [Red Dead Redemption 2] level of NPC interaction in a much larger scale game,” he says.

Such interactions are not where his current priorities lie, though. Hinchliffe now works at British indie developer Just Add Water, acting as lead designer on virtual reality construction simulator Dig VR. In many ways it’s a galaxy away from his experiences at Rockstar, but there is an element that unites his past and present: immersion.

“VR just adds another level of immersion by default because you're in the space,” Hinchliffe says. “But it's harder to then make the player feel like they're immersed and that place is real because they're in it.”

“Obviously VR is super tactile,” he continues. “You are using your hands in most stuff, and the challenge is making sure that the things you are doing with your hands or anything you interact with feels real. If it doesn't, you can instantly break the immersion.”

Those challenges really highlight two very different approaches to immersion. Where in GTA it’s all about the detailed city-wide simulation, in VR it’s about physically turning the key in the ignition. It’s smaller, more intimate. That requires a complete reset of your expectations and ambitions when compared to traditional gaming. That goes for much more than just immersion, too.

“A huge achievement for us [in Dig VR] was getting the dynamic terrain working so you can fully dig the ground and then dump it out,” he explains. “That's a first for any Meta Quest game. Now, people in the traditional flat screen world are going ‘Whoop-de-do, you've done dynamic terrain. There's like a million games with dynamic terrain. What's the big deal?’ But for us in VR, that's a huge deal because there was no reference point, no one to learn from. We just had to figure that out and make it work.”

The current state of virtual reality feels like a repeat of traditional gaming’s infancy. Because the medium is so different, everything demands starting from scratch. And so Dig VR’s achievements are literally groundbreaking. Furthermore, it may inspire other VR developers to incorporate dynamic terrain in their projects. “It's those baby steps of helping each other and helping the medium go forwards,” says Hinchliffe. “As each game comes out with a new feature that hasn't been done in VR, the whole space starts iterating and moving forwards.”

23 years ago, Rockstar transformed its Scalextric-esque 2D roads into a fully three-dimensional city. It pushed the industry forwards, paving the way not just for its own games but laying the groundwork for the likes of Assassin’s Creed, Forza Horizon, and Cyberpunk 2077. The open world genre is now a patchwork of different developer contributions, each one having iterated and moved the concept forward. And next year, with the release of Grand Theft Auto 6, we’ll finally see what Rockstar’s next contribution to immersive worlds will be.

Matt Purslow is IGN's Senior Features Editor.
Views expressed in this interview are the personal opinions of Ben Hinchliffe and do not represent the thoughts or opinions of Rockstar Games.