A new patent filed by Take-Two Interactive – the company behind Rockstar – may indicate that the developer of Grand Theft Auto may have plans to apply improvements to the NPCs, or non-playable characters, in GTA 6.
According to the document, which was registered in October 2020 and has only now been discovered and shared on Reddit forums, it indicates that the developer plans a method to make these characters more intelligent, to interact more organically with the open universe of the game.
In the patent, which was certified under the name “System and method for virtual navigation in a gaming environment”, in free translation, Take-Two describes how NPCs could react to more complex and dynamic actions. More specifically, the document explains that these improvements would be more targeted at vehicles controlled by non-playable characters.
With this, the developer expects, for example, that they will be able to react in “personalized” ways to certain traffic conditions, instead of following automatic and predefined behaviors. An NPC would be able to better identify traffic to change lanes or to take an exit on a road, for example, while others could be more cautious and drive more slowly under more dangerous traffic conditions.
In the document, Take-Two also describes current software and hardware limitations, such as the difficulty for NPCs to consider factors such as traffic itself when determining navigation. In addition, the producer also mentions the hardware and software limitations of current devices and points out that its technology would not depend on these types of factors.
The patent registered by the developer, of course, does not mention that the new technology will be developed for GTA 6, but the references to several traffic conditions, such as “high-speed chase” and “ambient traffic” found in the document, for example, can leave us hopeful that it is, in fact, for the next title in the Grand Theft Auto franchise.
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It is worth remembering that, at the moment, Rockstar remains silent about the game’s production and no official information has been released so far. However, new rumors continue to circulate occasionally and one of them even points to the possibility of the game having, for the first time, a female main character that can be controlled by the player.