Grand Theft Auto 6 features a re-engineered, "more localized and persistent" weather system that ranges in intensity from physically credible rainbows to full-bore hurricanes, according to Rockstar vice president of art for lighting and rendering Owen Shepherd. As ever with GTA, the question is to what extent this will materially affect your doings in the new open world game, but at the very least, it seems like there's scope to pack in the core Bonnie & Clyde routine and become an amateur weather watcher for hours at a time.

The insights come via the latest issue of Game Informer, in which Shepherd touts the presence of "new fully dynamic cloudscapes that roll across the map". Apparently, the game will feature localised rain showers – I hope it does that thing where you can stand in a sunny area and see distant, dense clouds fraying at the hem. The game will also feature rainbows under certain lighting conditions, though it's not clear from the write-up whether it's literally simulating the effect of light refracting through water droplets. You can expect puddles and wet ground following a shower, too.

All fancy stuff, no doubt, but I suspect the major attraction for you perpetually overstimulated and cavalier Gamerz will be the tropical storms and hurricanes. In the absence of representative video footage, Shepherd paints a picture for us: "heavy clouds, strong winds, dense atmospherics and a lot of rain combine so that everything is dripping wet, water is gushing off roof edges and lampposts, thunder rumbles and flashes of lighting light up the clouds dramatically."

Again, it remains to be seen how much this will affect such core GTA pastimes as shooting guys and stealing their cars. My suspicion is that they'll time a storm or two to coincide with a car chase, a boat ride, or a rooftop fight.

Single player aside, all of the above will be catnip for GTA Online's existing population of precipitation enthusiasts - as and when Rockstar release GTA 6's multiplayer component, anyway. There's already a GTA Online forecasting service, together with mods for more sophisticated weather on role-play servers, and mods that make the climate conditions more British, i.e. more depressing. Over in Red Dead Redemption 2, meanwhile, players have spent many hours fathoming the logic behind the game's lightning strikes.

The other big GTA 6 takeaway from the Game Informer write-up is the scale of the menagerie, which builds on all the work Rockstar did for Red Dead Redemption 2. They've got 170 animal species in there. Around 60 kinds of bird! Over 30 land mammals! Manatees! Flamingos! Pelicans! Sharks! Rays! Turtles! Jellyfish! When you are not role-playing as an armchair meteorologist in GTA 6, you will be able to bore your in-game girlfriend/boyfriend silly by enthusing about whale populations.

Not that there's anything boring about whales! Make a whale-chasing game next, Rockstar - this compulsive carjacking lark is all washed-up. No, I am not talking about the monetisation.

GTA 6 aside, Rockstar are currently embroiled in legal proceedings with former employees fired on charges of what Rockstar has called "gross misconduct", and what the employees in question describe as "union-busting". Recently, we learned that Rockstar had a mole in a union Discord server for over two years, prior to the firings. Separately, Rockstar are also continuing their love-hate relationship with modders by warning prospective GTA 6 tinkerers against the creation of main story expansions, unauthorised ports and mods that combine GTA maps.