Grand Theft Auto 6 gamers will be roaming a map around twice the size of the playable environment in GTA 5, Rockstar Games has confirmed.
In the latest issue of Game Informer, Rockstar has gone on the record about the enormity of the map, which the developer says is the largest it has ever created.
The fictional state of Leonida (based on the US state of Florida) is split into six regions all inspired by real places in the sunshine state. They are: Vice City, the Leonida Keys, Grassrivers, Port Gellhorn, Ambrosia and Mount Kalaga National Park.
Vice City is obviously Miami, while the Leonida Keys will be the Florida Keys – the rugged chain of islands that sit off the south coast of the state. Grassrivers are the Everglades, the vast gator-infested region west of Miami that cuts through the centre of the state.
“This new world is different. We obsessed about every part – the rooftops, the alleys, the internals and everything in between to the point we hit a critical mass with the numbers of our interiors, and you start to feel the buildings are more real inside and out. This world is a cohesive whole with the density of content and a hand-crafted quality to every bit,” said head of development/co-studio head Aaron Garbu.
As an adopted Florida Man, seeing these diverse landscapes represented so vastly and so authentically greatly excites me. As does the promise of the diverse wildlife featuring in the game – 170 animal species in total.
The in-game weather also sounds like a game-changer. Just like a Florida summer, you’ll see brilliant sunshine and potential downpours from street to street, while you’ll also experience hurricanes and tropical storm conditions.
“We have re-engineered our weather system to make everything much more localised and persistent, and really wanted the world to feel dynamically solid and achieve a sense of scale we haven’t felt before,” said Owen Shepherd, who is the VP of art for lighting and rendering.
“The world features new fully dynamic cloudscapes that roll across the map, these give us a broad spectrum of weather from the clear blue skies of a Miami winter to the vertiginous cumulonimbus clouds with sporadic lightning that you see most afternoons in the Floridian summer and autumn.”
GTA 6 is out on November 19.
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