GTA 6’s second trailer has taken a “giant leap” in terms of lighting compared to trailer one, and a former GTA 5 animator reckons that could have played into its delay

In case you’ve been living under a rock, GTA 6 finally got that second trailer people have been begging for yesterday. Naturally, it’s taken hardly any time for an ex-Rockstar developer turned YouTuber to dissect it, and make some interesting points about the difference between this trailer and the first one.

The dev in question is animator Mike York, who worked on both GTA 5 and Red Dead Redemption 2 during his almost six years at Rockstar New England. We previously reported on his reaction to trailer one back in 2023, when he was blown away by how much he reckoned Rockstar was pushing hardware to its limits.

York’s been just as blown away this time, but mainly for two reasons – the sheer amount of details packed in and the way Rockstar has “stepped up a notch” in terms of lighting with this trailer. In fact, the dev reckons the latter could potentially be one of the factors that’s played into GTA 6’s delay to next May.

“If you want something that’s quality, that takes time,” York says towards the end of his 30 minute trailer analysis, “Whether it be 13 years, 15 years, when you’re trying to do something as real as this and you’ve kind of unlocked new secrets as you go.

“Sometimes during production you figure out something that changes everything, and in here it could be lighting. They’re like ‘Oh no’, they figured out how to solve this new thing to make the lighting look much better, and then they just crank that up to 10, 11. They start really focusing on changing a lot of stuff and redoing all the lights because they found this new kind of method maybe to do the lighting, the reflections and all the different stuff for the ray tracing.

“That sometimes can get reworked and that can be a delay, right? That’s why a game can get delayed, like I explained earlier in my video, is making certain decisions along the way that alter this path of the game, and it looks like the lighting is definitely one of them. They’ve done something to the lighting.”

It’s fair to say York’s bullish on all of this effort and detail making the final product live up to whatever price it ends up shipping with. “No other game has the detail and the amount of realism that this does and will have when it’s released, so everybody complaining out there needs to just zip it, because whatever amount this game costs, $80 bucks or whatever, is going to be worth it.

“All these other games that come out for 70 bucks, 90 bucks, I mean look you’ve got Mario Kart for $90 – you think Mario Kart competes with a game like this as far as how much stuff they’ve got to put into a game?”

It’s worth checking out the entirety of York’s video, as in going through the trailer, he points out a bunch of interesting stuff you might have missed, including some incredibly subtle animations and nuances that couldn’t make it into GTA 5 due to time contraints.

Do you think the lighting’s what really brings this second GTA 6 trailer to life? Let us know below!