GTA 6: Game Informer's Cover Story Reveals Map, Weather, Rideshare App
A twice-as-big map, a hurricane that can flood your route, and a rideshare app that lets NPCs chat you up: here's what Game Informer's GTA 6 cover story actually confirmed.
Rockstar says Leonida is twice the size of GTA 5's map and the biggest thing the studio has ever built, which is the kind of claim that means absolutely nothing until someone with a stopwatch and a dirt bike actually crosses it. Game Informer got the cover story and the hands-on access, GameSpot rounded up the highlights, and its own channel put the same rundown on video. Same account, told twice, which is worth knowing before you treat it as two confirmations instead of one well-distributed one.
Size claims aside, there's actual structure here. Jason starts the story solo, running jobs out of Leonida Quays while Lucia finishes a prison stint tied to her family history. She's a transplant from Liberty City. Once she's out, the two take a score they both frame as their ticket to a better life, it goes wrong the way these things always go wrong in this series, and the fallout apparently stretches across the whole map. None of that is new in shape, but it's the first real shape we've gotten.
The Map, By The Numbers Rockstar Will Let You Have
Leonida splits into six regions, and Game Informer named all of them:
- Vice City, the Miami stand-in and presumably where most of the playtime lives
- Leonida Quays, Jason's starting turf
- Grassrivers, the Everglades analog
- Port Gellhorn, small-town tourist-trap Florida
- Ambrosia, described as the industrial heart, factories and distilleries, which in GTA math means gunfights
- Mount Kalaga National Park, off-road terrain with some wealthier pockets mixed in
Calling it bigger than Red Dead Redemption 2 is a hell of a bar to clear on paper. Whether six regions actually feel unified instead of stitched together is a question no cover story answers, because that's a thing you test by driving the seams yourself.
Weather That Claims To Be 'Dynamic,' Hurricanes Included
The weather system gets the most air-quote-worthy treatment: localized, concurrent storms you can watch roll in from a plane while another patch of map sits in sun, rain that leaves puddles and wet pavement behind instead of vanishing on cue, wind that's apparently been rebuilt since Red Dead 2 and now moves clothes, hair, and water surfaces independently depending on local conditions. Hurricanes sit on top of all that, with Rockstar specifically calling out overflowing gutters and flooded ground. Nobody's confirmed whether a hurricane can actually close a road or just look moody while you drive through it unaffected, and that gap between weather you see and weather that does anything is exactly where 'dynamic' usually turns out to be doing a lot of unpaid marketing work.
Everything Else They Wanted You To Notice
- RydeMe, the in-game rideshare app, reportedly lets you chat with NPC drivers, listen to music, and get ferried around, an expansion of the cab-hailing bit from GTA 4
- Over 170 wildlife species are named, including manatees, alligators, feral cats, and non-native monkeys, with fur that reacts to wet or dirty conditions
- Activities list includes base jumping, kayaking, airboating, mini-golf, and the zoo
- NPC looks are tied to region rather than randomized, so clothing, tattoos, and haircuts should shift as you cross the map
It's a thick list of promises, and promises are cheap right up until a reviewer loads a save file. Game Informer got the magazine exclusive; the rest of us get to wait for the part where the claims meet a controller.