Rockstar Games‘ open worlds are humungous affairs full of things to buy, shoot, collect, rob, and do. Although with games as lush and extravagant as Red Dead Redemption and GTA 5, it might surprise you to learn that Rockstar Games is actually quite restrained, and the developer cuts a lot of content before passing the finish line.
That’s according to former GTA 5 producer John Ricchio, who recently told Kiwi Talkz about how the Grand Theft Auto developer trims the fat on its mammoth games. “There was so much stuff in GTA, particularly GTA 5 – oh my god, there was so much stuff that was like done,” he says in the interview. “Like, minigames that were completely done and ready to go, except for like animation, right?”
Minigames were allegedly binned because “the animation team were getting destroyed,” and there was “so much animation work to do to bring everything to the same level” in a game as large as GTA 5 “that we had to cut stuff that was otherwise completely done.” There simply wasn’t enough time on the calendar to have everything meet the same level of quality.
Ricchio was often told by fellow developers that sweeping cuts are just “‘a thing that happens, you know, because the game is so big – GTAs are always gigantic.'” Rockstar leaders wouldn’t hesitate to bin larger parts of the game, either: “They’ll throw out entire levels and they’ll throw out entire things because they don’t have enough resources to get everything to the same level.”
Major cuts were sometimes “hard to deal with” for the dedicated developers who had been working on features or levels or minigames for a “really long time,” especially when everyone on the team was happy with the cut work. “It wasn’t like they went into DLC or anything… They just disappeared,” Ricchio adds.
But he also acknowledges that such cuts are part of working under a “large production” like Rockstar Games, and it’s sometimes for the best. “Every decision can’t be made by everyone,” he says, and when a developer’s headcount stretches as wide as Rockstar’s, there’ll inevitably be decisions that not everyone will agree on.
According to another ex-developer, an entire single-player Agent Trevor DLC was abruptly scrapped after the dizzying success of GTA Online. Rockstar Universe also lists all of the games’ supposed cut content, mostly based on glimpses of features from old trailers that never made it into the finished product.