Of everything in Edge magazine's October 29 cover story, one phrase will outlive the rest. Rockstar North co-studio head Aaron Garbut said GTA 6 contains "an order of magnitude more interiors" than Rockstar's previous games.
It is a bigger claim than the map-size headline that ran alongside it, and it is worth taking apart carefully, because "order of magnitude" is a phrase people use loosely and it has a literal meaning.
What the phrase actually commits to
Read literally, an order of magnitude is a factor of ten. Read the way most people use it in conversation, it means "a lot more, not a bit more." Garbut is a studio head talking to a magazine, not an engineer filing a spec, so the honest reading is the second one with the first as the ceiling.
What makes it checkable is that we already have a figure to anchor against. The campaign has confirmed 700-plus interiors in GTA 6, which we cover in our interiors explainer. GTA 5 shipped with a few dozen genuinely enterable buildings depending on how you count shops, safehouses and mission-only spaces. Against that baseline, 700-plus is roughly an order of magnitude, which means Garbut's phrase is not hyperbole layered on top of the confirmed number. It is a description of the confirmed number.
That is reassuring in a way a brand-new figure would not be. Nothing was inflated for the preview.
Why interiors are the hardest content to fake
An enterable building is the most expensive kind of space a studio can build, and the least forgiving. It needs its own geometry, its own lighting solution, its own collision, its own props, and on a game with confirmed ray-traced global illumination and reflections, its own answer to how light behaves once you step out of the sun.
It also cannot be padded. A copy-pasted apartment is immediately obvious because the player is standing inside it with nothing else to look at. This is why Garbut's supporting comments matter more than the headline:
- "Every back alley is as densely detailed and interesting as the others."
- "You can go anywhere, any random location, and so many people have thought about that location."
- Per coverage of the feature, each home has a distinct feel, with signs of the NPCs and families living there.
The last point is the real claim. Not "there are many rooms" but "the rooms have been lived in." One concrete example from the feature: Jason visibly recoils on entering a house a dog has trashed.
What this changes about how the map works
Interiors at this scale quietly rewrite three confirmed systems.
The wanted system gets somewhere to go. GTA 6's information-based wanted system works on what witnesses saw and what police know. A pursuit that can only ever happen on streets is a chase. A pursuit that can go indoors becomes a search, and a search needs interiors to search.
Density stops depending on crowds. A street feels busy because of traffic and pedestrians, which are expensive to simulate and reset the moment you leave. A street feels real because the buildings along it are places rather than facades. Interiors are the cheaper-to-persist version of liveliness.
Exploration without map markers becomes viable. Unmarked exploration rewards require a world where opening a door is worth trying. Three dozen interiors make that a lottery. Seven hundred make it a habit.
The counterargument
There is a version of this that disappoints, and it is worth naming. A high interior count can be reached cheaply by counting every convenience store, every stairwell and every one-room shopfront, and those spaces are not what players mean when they ask for enterable buildings. The question nobody can answer from a preview is the distribution: how many of the 700-plus are distinctive, and how many are the same fried-chicken counter with a different sign.
Garbut's quotes point the right way. The launch tell will be whether the second apartment you enter in a given neighbourhood surprises you, not the first.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many interiors does GTA 6 have?
The confirmed figure is more than 700. Garbut's "order of magnitude" comment in Edge describes that figure relative to past Rockstar games rather than adding a new one. No exact total has been published.
Does that mean every building can be entered?
No, and nothing in the feature suggests it. Vice City alone contains far more than 700 buildings. The claim is about the number of enterable spaces, which is a subset.
Can you enter interiors outside of missions?
The design intent described across the campaign points that way, and interiors are tied to confirmed systems like store robberies and exploration rewards rather than to scripted sequences alone. Rockstar has published no rule on free access.
Is this more than RDR2 had?
Garbut's comparison covers Rockstar's previous games collectively, which includes RDR2. RDR2's enterable spaces were numerous but heavily weighted toward shops, saloons and homesteads. See our GTA 6 versus RDR2 comparison.
The Bottom Line
The interiors line is the most important thing in Edge 430, and it is more credible than the map-size headline precisely because it restates a number Rockstar already gave rather than inventing a bigger one. Seven hundred-plus enterable spaces is roughly ten times what GTA 5 offered, so the phrase holds up literally as well as rhetorically. Whether it feels that way depends on variety rather than count, and that is the one thing a studio visit cannot demonstrate.