(Image credit: Rockstar Games)

The studio art-directed every one of them, creating around 600,000 animations, but appearance is only the surface. These pedestrians are assigned personality traits that help determine how they respond: temperament, aggression, where they are, what they have seen, and how the player has behaved towards them. Different districts have their own demographic and professional textures. —Simon Parkin in Edge's GTA 6 cover story

Grand Theft Auto 6 's NPCs are so incredibly complicated, it briefly sent the studio into a bit of a "horrifying" spin, requiring an entire team of writers and producers to be assembled just to handle the workload.…