Rockstar art-directed 600,000 animations for GTA 6's background characters. Six hundred thousand. For the people you'll walk past without a second glance.
Meanwhile, a design studio held an actual séance to research a rebrand for a psychic services platform. Not as a team-building exercise. As genuine design research.
Both sound like excess. Neither is.
Two stories about going too far
Two very different design stories this week, making the same argument from opposite ends of the industry.
Rockstar Games has revealed that for GTA 6, they didn't just loop a handful of idle animations for background NPCs. They art-directed hundreds of thousands of individual animations so that passers-by move, react, and behave like believable people. The goal wasn't to create characters you'd study — it was to make the ones you'd ignore feel real anyway.
Separately, Mother Design took on a rebrand for a psychic platform and made an unusual research call. Before sketching a single concept, the team sat in on an actual séance. Not to mock it, not as a novelty — but to genuinely experience what the platform's users experience. The resulting identity avoids every mystical cliché you'd expect, precisely because it was built on firsthand understanding rather than a Pinterest board.
In most organisations, both of these decisions would get the same label: unnecessary.
The periphery is where the feeling lives
I've sat in enough project reviews to know what happens to this kind of work. It gets filed under "nice to have." It's the first thing cut when timelines shrink or budgets tighten. And on the surface, the logic seems sound — why invest heavily in things users might never consciously notice?
Because they do notice. They just don't know they're noticing.
The difference between a game world that feels alive and one that feels like a set is exactly this kind of peripheral detail. The difference between a brand that feels authentic and one that feels like a template is exactly this kind of deep research. You can't point to a single animation or a single design choice and say "that's the one that did it." The effect is cumulative. Atmospheric. You feel it before you can name it.
We've got very good at measuring direct interactions — click-through rates, conversion lifts, task completion times. All useful. All important. But these metrics have a massive blind spot: they can't capture the compound effect of a thousand small, considered details working in concert. No A/B test will tell you that animation number 487,302 made GTA 6 feel more immersive. No ROI spreadsheet will prove the séance was worth it. But strip those decisions out, and you'd feel the difference immediately.
There's a growing push to build UX business cases with hard numbers, and I get why. Designers need to justify investment. But if we only ever invest in what we can directly quantify, we end up designing experiences that are efficient, functional, and completely forgettable. The periphery — the stuff happening at the edges of attention — is where the emotional response actually lives.
This gap is about to widen
Here's what connects both stories to where design is heading right now. AI tools are getting remarkably competent at producing polished, middle-of-the-road work. The centre of the quality bell curve is getting crowded fast. Any team can generate clean layouts, serviceable copy, decent illustrations in a fraction of the time it used to take.
What AI can't do — at least not yet — is decide that background NPCs deserve six hundred thousand unique animations. It can't decide to attend a séance. It can't make the irrational-sounding creative call that turns competent work into memorable work.
That kind of judgment is a peripheral skill too. It's not something you'd list on a CV or explain in a job interview. It's the instinct to say "this needs more" when everything already looks finished. And it might be the single most valuable thing a designer brings to a project right now.
I'm not arguing against efficiency — ruthless efficiency in execution is a genuine advantage. But there's a difference between being efficient about how you do the work and being reductive about what work is worth doing. Cutting the atmospheric details, the deep research, the "nobody asked for this" refinements — that's not prioritisation. It's settling.
Takeaway
Next time you're scoping a project and someone suggests cutting the details that don't have a direct metric attached, pause. Ask yourself: are these genuinely dispensable, or are they the reason the whole thing will feel like something?
Not every peripheral detail is worth fighting for. But the ones that shape how an experience feels? Those aren't extras.
They're the work.