With Grand Theft Auto VI's launch approaching fast, Rockstar Games is slowly ramping up its marketing. Today, the title was revealed to be Game Informer's latest cover story, with the studio going into detail about features like advanced weather systems and map features.
Leonida, the fictional U.S. state that Grand Theft Auto VI is set in, will have a diverse weather system, according to Rockstar. This won't be the same across the land either, with different types of weather being present in different areas of the map at the same time as the clouds roll by.
“We have re-engineered our weather system to make everything much more localized and persistent, and really wanted the world to feel dynamically solid and achieve a sense of scale we haven’t felt before,” tells Rockstar's vice president of art for lighting and rendering Owen Shepherd to Game Informer.
There will be aftereffects to weather phenomena too. If a storm passes by an area in this Florida-inspired land, the environment will be wet and broken apart for some time afterward. It's unclear if getting hit by a hurricane will have any gameplay-altering effects, but considering Rockstar's attention to detail, players may have to prepare for natural disasters as well.
Meanwhile, Rockstar also confirmed that this is the biggest map it has ever created for a game, one that is double the size of Grand Theft Auto V and with much more detail. It will be split into six regions for players to explore, them being the Leonida Keys, Grassrivers, Port Gellhorn, Ambrosia, Mount Kalaga National Park, and Vice City.
"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," added Rocsktar's head of development, Aaron Garbut. "This world is a cohesive whole with the density of content and a hand-crafted quality to every bit."
Some other aspects of the world and gameplay systems were confirmed today too. These include a fast travel system using ride sharing (while having conversations with random NPCs), scrolling on the in-game social media platform Snapmatic, animal tracking for rare hunts, almost 200 animal species, as well as participating in side activities like scuba diving, kayaking, going to the gym, and more.
Grand Theft Auto VI will be released digitally on November 19, 2026, across Xbox Series X|S and PlayStation 5. While a collector's edition is also coming, it doesn't have a copy of the game included in it. A physical soundtrack release is confirmed though, with CD and vinyl options available for pre-order.
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