Interviews describe intentions. Footage shows what shipped into a build. These are not the same evidence and should not be mixed.
What can you do to NPCs in GTA 6?
On the evidence of the footage rather than the interviews, more than any previous GTA and less than the headlines suggest. The clearest single moment is an interaction menu appearing over a dog with three options: scold, pet and study, which is Red Dead Redemption 2's interaction system arriving in a GTA. Beyond that, the Extended Look shows strangers reacting to proximity, people moving away from a drawn weapon, a fight that can be defused by aiming rather than firing, and a robbery where four people in one room react four different ways. It also shows the wanted system starting from a witness rather than from the game deciding you earned it. What it does not show is any of the systems Rockstar has only described in interviews, and the distinction between those two categories is the whole point of counting.
The menu over the dog
Three prompts, on screen, about two minutes in: scold, pet, study. That is the Red Dead interaction wheel in a Grand Theft Auto, and it is visible rather than described, which puts it in a different category from almost everything else written about GTA 6's NPCs this year.
Study is the interesting one of the three. In Red Dead it fed a compendium, and its presence here suggests the animals are catalogued rather than decorative. Rockstar has not published what studying does in this game, so what the prompt leads to is unknown.
Standing too close, and carrying a gun
The footage shows what happens when you stand near a conversation rather than walking past it, which is a behaviour the older games did not model at all. It also shows strangers moving away from a weapon held in the open, which lines up with what Rob Nelson has said about crowd behaviour, and is one of the few places where an interview claim and a visible moment agree.
There is a moment where aiming at a fight ends it rather than escalating it. That is a small thing with large implications, because it means the crowd is reading the threat rather than reacting to the shot.
Four people, four reactions
The jewellery store sequence is the densest piece of NPC behaviour in the whole 27 minutes. Four people in one room respond differently to the same robbery, which is the sort of thing that is easy to describe in an interview and hard to fake in footage.
It also shows how the wanted system begins. A witness, rather than an invisible decision by the game, is what starts the chase, and that matches what Nelson told IGN about a crime needing to be seen or an alarm to sound before anything reaches the police.
What is in the interviews but not on screen
Rain affecting behaviour, NPCs keeping schedules, people remembering and acting on what you did to them. All of that has been described and none of it is visible in the footage, which does not make any of it false. It makes it a different tier, and treating the two as one source is how a described intention becomes a confirmed feature in a thumbnail.
The same applies to phones and filming. What the footage supports and what the interviews claim overlap, and the overlap is smaller than the coverage implies.
The patent that matches something a developer said
Take-Two has a pending patent application titled System and method for runtime retargeting, published in March 2025, describing a system that adapts existing animations in real time to characters of different sizes and proportions, with examples including scaling an animation from a heavier character to a slimmer one.
That is a real document with a real assignee, and it lines up with what a Rockstar developer has said about body shape mattering. What it is not is proof that the system shipped. Patents describe what a company explored, not what is in the box, and that distinction holds here as firmly as anywhere.
Why the counting matters
Separating 72 scripted moments from 99 gameplay ones is tedious and it is the only way to make the footage say anything reliable. A cutscene shows what Rockstar wants a scene to look like. A gameplay moment shows what the systems do when nobody is directing them.
Everything in this article from the first category is labelled as such, and everything from an interview is labelled as an interview. On a subject where most coverage flattens all three into confirmed, that separation is the finding.
What the video covers
- The scold, pet and study prompts, and what they inherit from Red Dead
- Eavesdropping, drawn weapons, and defusing a fight by aiming
- The jewellery store, where four people react four different ways
- How the wanted system starts from a witness
- The Take-Two retargeting patent, and what a patent does and does not prove
What we do not know yet
- What studying an animal actually does
- Whether NPC schedules and memory exist beyond the interviews
- Whether the retargeting system in the patent shipped
Sources
Evidence tier for everything visible in the Extended Look: confirmed as footage, with scripted moments counted separately from gameplay. For NPC schedules, weather reactions and memory: reported, described in interviews and not visible on screen. For the patent: confirmed as a filed document, and not established as a shipped feature. No leaked footage is shown or referenced. See how this site grades evidence.
- US patent application US20250095261A1: Take-Two's pending runtime retargeting application and its handling of different body sizes
- GamesRadar: Nelson on crowd reactions to a weapon held in the open
- GamesIndustry.biz: Take-Two's position that generative AI has no part in what Rockstar built
- IGN: Rob Nelson's interview and the wanted system explainer, including the witness requirement
Both GTA 6 leaks side by side, and how to tell a real one from a fake: GTA 6 leaks, explained.
GTA 6 
