According to GamesRadar, Rockstar veteran Obbe Vermeij says GTA 3 crashed often and sat at 20 fps until the final months of development.
Sources gamesradar.com
Twenty-five years on, a Rockstar veteran describes how GTA 3 spent most of its life as a mess. According to GamesRadar, Obbe Vermeij posted a long Twitter retrospective for the game's anniversary, and his verdict is blunt: "For most of development, GTA 3 was in a sorry state."
It crashed frequently, the frame rate was terrible and the map was full of holes, Vermeij writes, as quoted by GamesRadar. For a long time the team expected 20 fps; 30 only arrived in the final months, and everything came together in the last six.
Rockstar North was still DMA Design, freshly bought by Take-Two. Per Vermeij, Leslie Benzies and Aaron Garbut started GTA 3 unprompted while another team worked on "GTA 2.5", an isometric Miami game. It was cancelled in 2000 and the Dundee office closed. Nothing from GTA 2 was reused: "everything was written from scratch", and only two people worked on both games.
Work was organic. People pitched mission ideas and the fun ones stayed. The story came second: the opening plot, with Catalina trying to kill Claude, was added well into development.
Read also GTA 6: ex-Rockstar designer says layoffs are not the real danger
Vermeij says he does not remember many crazy hours: even in crunch most people left around 9 or 10 pm, and he preferred "eight focused hours" to living at the office. That is one person's recollection and should be read as such, at a time when crunch at Rockstar is still closely watched, as in our piece on the Los Angeles studio built for NPCs.
He also recalls a disappointing E3 showing in May 2001, with those who were interested finding the game too violent. Launch was okay, and sales never tapered off.
GamesRadar draws the line to GTA 6, which Rockstar admits stalled because of conflicting or unclear creative visions, as Jason Schreier's investigation detailed. The outlet adds that studio leadership says future games will be less time-consuming; that claim is GamesRadar's, not Vermeij's.
To replay the series before November 19, our guide on which GTA to start with is a good entry point.
Nothing changes for the release date, still November 19 on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S. But the story is a reminder that Rockstar games often look rough until the very end, and that GTA 6, after roughly a decade of work, has little in common with the small Edinburgh team of 2001.
Sources gamesradar.com
Reported Reported by the press, not confirmed by Rockstar
By Daniel Jasner · GTAVIFRANCE newsroom
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