Former GTA 5 and Red Dead Redemption 2 animator says GTA 6 is likely playable "all the way through" right now
"I would assume that the game's probably playable now, and a bunch of people are testing the whole thing all the way through"
One former Rockstar Games animator with credits on GTA 5 and Red Dead Redemption 2 reckons that GTA 6 is "probably" playable start-to-finish with the studio mainly focused on squashing any pesky bugs and glitches that might surface.
That comes from former Rockstar Games developer Mike York, in a now unlisted interview with Kiwi Talkz, who speculated about the state of the studio's newest blockbuster slated to come out this year. With Rockstar Games' history of high-profile delays, there's been lots of chatter around whether GTA 6 will also slip into next year, but York thinks the team are close to the finish line.
"They're probably still making a few new things here and there or adding to things here and there, of course, but I would assume that the game's probably playable now, and a bunch of people are testing the whole thing all the way through," he guessed. "There's probably a ton of bugs" - as is the case with crowded open-world games still in development - "and they're fixing all those bugs, and they're trying to find more bugs, and they're trying to find as many bugs as they can before they release because a game like GTA is unlike any other game."
York even said that, during his time working on GTA 5, the team "played the game all day, every day for, like, 8-to-10 hours a day." York also explained how creating a huge, densely-populated game, such as GTA 6, differs from something like The Witcher 3 as players can get up to all sorts of antics that the developers simply can't anticipate during production.
Along with GTA 6, check out all the other new game release dates of 2025 to look forward to.
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Kaan freelances for various websites including Rock Paper Shotgun, Eurogamer, and this one, Gamesradar. He particularly enjoys writing about spooky indies, throwback RPGs, and anything that's vaguely silly. Also has an English Literature and Film Studies degree that he'll soon forget.