Seven Fan-Noted Mistakes By Rockstar In The GTA 6 Trailer

It's been some time since we received updates on GTA 6 development or saw any trailers, with the last one being the initial trailer released last December, which was among the year's biggest media highlights. Naturally, fans are starving for news, and some of them, who have recently discovered that polygons are a part of video games, are analyzing pre-release non-game footage, rightfully receiving a bunch of Community Notes on X/Twitter for their absurd claims. 

Recently, an X/Twitter account named GTA 6 Countdown has compiled a thread listing seven "mistakes" that Rockstar Games allegedly made in its first GTA 6 trailer. Let's take a closer look at what the fan is upset about.

Starting with a complaint that the game's protagonist's hair moves way too slowly for the vehicle's speed, the author then makes a stranger allegation, pointing out "visible polygons" on Lucia's arm and the car seat due to "low-res" textures.

This is a 3D model consisting of polygons, and the textures don't change that. Perhaps we should have been using 16K textures all along to achieve the best geometry. And why were we bothering with tesselation anyway?

Next, GTA 6 Countdown pointed out duplicate barrels with identical damage placed across the scene. Readers should know that reusing props is a common practice in game development, and if the game were to use only unique assets, it would take much longer to develop and be significantly larger in size.

While calling hair grainy here might be fair, aside from the fact that necklaces don't typically cast noticeable shadows on the body, can you imagine how costly it would be to render shadows from such thin, small objects?

GTA 6 Countdown also shared a close look at clothes clipping through a character model, and while mesh clipping is annoying, it's quite common in video games because of their current graphical limitations, given that video games aren't real-life footage.

According to mistake number six, shadows are missing in one of the scenes. However, the scene actually features shadows, with multiple light sources coming from various directions, making them appear very faint.

Moreover, if you expect every building and room to be accessible, you may end up disappointed. Even procedural generation would be ultimately meaningless, as in games, the significance of rooms is in their function rather than their accessibility.

Finally, the user argues that Rockstar poorly placed distant NPCs, with some seemingly standing on water, noting that one of the roads in the GTA 6 trailer was badly rendered as well. After addressing optimization multiple times in this article, it's clear that the GTA 6 Countdown isn't familiar with LODs. These choices are intentional to save production time, as these elements are only in the background.

You can check out the full thread here for more bizarre examples, but there's little to gain from a breakdown made by someone who lacks an understanding of procedural generation, anti-aliasing, polygons, LODs, culling, pre-animated scenes, and texture mapping and chooses this sad way of getting attention instead of actually connecting with the work.

In the end, none of these is a big deal, as GTA 6 is still a year away from the release.

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