Map & Setting

For long-time fans, the single most exciting word in the GTA VI reveal was “Vice City.” The neon-soaked, Miami-inspired city first appeared as the whole map of 2002’s Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, a love letter to 1980s excess that remains one of the most beloved settings the series has ever built. Its return has been rumoured for the better part of two decades, and GTA VI finally makes it official.

The crucial difference this time is the era. Where the original was a period piece drenched in 1980s synth-pop and pastel suits, GTA VI drops Vice City into the present day. That shift changes everything about the city’s texture: smartphones, social media, livestreams and modern surveillance are woven into the world the trailers show, setting up the kind of contemporary satire the series is known for. It is the same city’s DNA — the beaches, the Art Deco, the glamour and the grime — updated for the world of today.

GTA VI’s biggest structural leap is that Vice City is no longer the entire map — it is the anchor of a much larger fictional state called Leonida, Rockstar’s stand-in for modern Florida. That framing gives the studio room for enormous variety in a single contiguous world: a dense coastal metropolis, a chain of sun-bleached keys, Everglades-style wetlands thick with airboats and wildlife, and industrial towns and rural backroads stretching inland.

This is a deliberate echo of Grand Theft Auto V, which paired the city of Los Santos with the countryside, desert and mountains of Blaine County. Leonida looks set to push that contrast further, with ecosystems — swamp, beach, city, farmland — that feel genuinely distinct from one another. The result, on the evidence of the trailers, is a world designed to be crossed by land, air and water, each region with its own look, mood and rhythm.

It is the question every fan asks first, and the honest answer is that Rockstar has not said. The studio has not published a full world map or a square-mileage figure, and the sweeping numbers you may have seen — most commonly “about 2.5 times the size of GTA V” — come from dedicated fan mapping projects reconstructing Leonida from trailer footage, not from Rockstar itself.

It is also worth remembering that raw size is the least interesting measure of a Grand Theft Auto world. Rockstar has historically cared far more about density — how much there is to see and do per square mile — than about a big headline number. We break down the fan estimates, and why they should be taken with a pinch of salt, in our community guide to the GTA VI map size.