GTA 6 Adds Smell Reaction System, Joining Red Dead Redemption 2’s Shrinking Horse Balls as Rockstar’s Latest Immersive Detail of Excess

Any reminder of Red Dead Redemption 2’s temperature-sensitive horse testicles brings a smile to my face. In truth, I can’t say I’ve ever zoomed in close enough to properly take in the spectacle of Arthur Morgan’s mount having its nuts dynamically expand and contract based on whether he’s riding through snowy mountains or across baking plains, but I do always get a kick out of knowing such a thing’s happening as I play. To this point, the horse balls have been the most infamous or meme-worthy example of Rockstar’s obsession with going all-in on realistic detail to an arguably unnecessary degree, one that borders on overindulgence which players could conceivably never notice if they weren’t expressly told about it.

That philosophy’s gone nowhere, so GTA 6 was always going to have a feature that’d become as much of a metaphor for excess as those beloved balls. It may well be the smell reaction system revealed in Edge’s long read on the game.

According to this latest rundown of things in GTA 6 and how they were made, Rockstar devs at one point had to make a character react to a not nice smell for a specific bit of “explorable content” stuffed into the game. Cool. One person scrunching their face up to show things are getting stinky in one minigame or mission. Leave it at that.

They reportedly did not leave it at that, later going back to flesh out this one smell reaction into a broader system which other locations to inspire various degrees of face-scrunching by protagonists Lucia and Jason. Cue, in the demo of the game in action which Rockstar gave Edge, Jason walking into a house and starting to act like someone who’s just walked into a shower-averse teenager’s bedroom during a heatwave despite that not having been set up as part of a deliberately crafted encounter. It’s horse ball-esque dynamic systems playing off each other, and voila, a man going eewwwwwwwwwwwww.

Would GTA 6 be any worse off if, as in previous entries, you weren’t being shown as expressly which places the criminal whose boots you’re sharing finds a bit too pongy for their liking? Almost certainly not, but hey, when you’ve decided your business is taking the detail to levels other games could only dream of having the budget for, getting to the point where you’re adding a fiftieth layer of icing to a cake so packed to the gills with different tastes and flourishes that your guests will struggle to appreciate or even notice them all unless you painstakingly point out each one is sort of inevitable.

Another layer of gold wrap on the Bugatti, another brick made of diamonds in a wall projected to be the most lucrative of all time, another farty stench in a room already drowning in foul aromas. It’s beautiful in the perverse sort of way that I imagine the Palace of Versailles was to anyone who wandered its gilded halls just prior to the French revolution. To be clear, this isn’t any sort of slight on the devs who’ll no doubt have worked hard to bring this system and others in GTA 6 to life, a number of whom have a recognition vote on their unionisation efforts coming up next month.

From a player perspective, one can only hope that by the time GTA 6 hits PC, the RAM crisis has led hardware makers to invest heavily in smellivision tech, so that players around the world can drink in the guffs causing their butt naked on-screen analogue’s eyes to water or revel in the stink caused by hitting someone with a bag of dog shit. Forget AI bollocks, this is the future, I scream as I retch into a toilet bowl while some funky tunes from Justice play in the background.