Grand Theft Auto VI returns the series to Vice City, but this time the playable space stretches far beyond the city limits. Rockstar's officially confirmed setting is the fictional US state of Leonida, a parody of Florida that bundles together a Miami analogue (Vice City), an Everglades analogue (Grassrivers), the Leonida Keys, the resort town of Ambrosia, the rural panhandle of Port Gellhorn and the wilderness of Mount Kalaga National Park (Collins and Richardson, 2025; Harte, 2025; Wilson, 2025). The scale and density of this world has become one of the most fiercely debated pre-release topics. Where Grand Theft Auto V's San Andreas measured roughly 76 square miles (approximately 49 sq mi of land and the remainder ocean) and Red Dead Redemption 2 covered around 75 square miles of largely rural terrain, GTA VI is widely expected to exceed both, while simultaneously offering considerably greater interior, vertical and underwater fidelity. This report consolidates the most credible size estimates, contextualises them against earlier Rockstar maps, and examines what Trailer 2 and the May 2025 website update reveal about the playable scope.
Rockstar has not published an official square-mileage figure, and the studio's historical reluctance to do so means every number in circulation is an estimate derived from leaked map imagery, trailer geography, and known Florida proportions. The September 2022 "teapotuberhacker" leak included an early development map that dataminers and outlets such as IGN's Matt Purslow used to project a landmass several times larger than GTA V, although the leaked material was acknowledged to represent work in progress and not final scale (MacDonald, 2022; Purslow, 2023). Following Trailer 2 on 6 May 2025, GamesRadar+ and Game Informer mapped the six confirmed regions and concluded the playable state is, at minimum, comparable in footprint to real-world Florida's southern half, though heavily compressed for gameplay (Wilson, 2025; Harte, 2025). The most frequently cited fan estimates, aggregated by community cartographers and discussed in pre-release coverage, sit in a 80 to 120 square mile band, with Trailer 2's confirmation of additional inland regions pushing analyst expectations upward. Digital Foundry's John Linneman, in his Trailer 2 technical breakdown, cautioned that raw square mileage is a misleading metric because Rockstar appears to have prioritised verticality, interior access and traversal time over flat geographic spread (Linneman, 2025).
Grand Theft Auto V's combined Los Santos and Blaine County map has been measured at approximately 75 to 76 square miles, of which roughly two-thirds is water and mountain wilderness; the dense, walkable city of Los Santos itself accounts for a relatively small slice. Red Dead Redemption 2, by contrast, offers about 75 square miles of almost entirely land-based terrain, spread across five fictional states, with low building density but exceptionally high environmental fidelity (Wilson, 2025). GTA VI's Leonida differs structurally from both. Trailer 2 confirms a single, contiguous urban core (Vice City) that appears denser than Los Santos, flanked by the Grassrivers wetlands (a clear RDR2-style natural environment), an archipelago in the Leonida Keys, and additional inland settlements (Collins and Richardson, 2025; Harte, 2025). The result is a hybrid: GTA V's urban density married to RDR2's rural breadth, rather than a simple expansion of either. GamesRadar+ characterised the reveal as Rockstar's "most varied" world to date, citing the contrast between neon Vice City boulevards and the swamps and small towns shown in the same trailer (Wilson, 2025).
A recurring theme in coverage of the 2022 leak and the 2025 trailers is the apparent leap in interior accessibility. Whereas GTA V featured a relatively small number of mission-specific interiors and RDR2 expanded this through saloons, shops and homesteads, leaked GTA VI footage repeatedly showed seamless entry into convenience stores, diners, strip clubs, motels and apartments without loading transitions (MacDonald, 2022). Game Informer's Trailer 2 breakdown noted shop interiors visible through windows, populated nightclubs, and what appeared to be a fully modelled hospital interior, reinforcing the view that Vice City's "walkable square mileage" is higher than its raw outdoor footprint suggests (Harte, 2025). Digital Foundry's analysis highlighted dynamic interior lighting and crowd density that would have been infeasible on the previous console generation, arguing this is where the PS5/Xbox Series X hardware budget is most visibly being spent (Linneman, 2025).
Vertical scope is the dimension that traditional square-mile comparisons most obviously miss. Trailer 2 included shots of high-rise condominium balconies overlooking the beachfront, rooftop pools, a parasailing rig, and several elevated highway interchanges, all suggesting accessible verticality on a scale beyond GTA V's Maze Bank Tower (Wilson, 2025; Harte, 2025). Mount Kalaga National Park, confirmed in the May 2025 website update, introduces genuine terrain elevation that Florida itself does not possess, granting Rockstar a credible mountain biome within the Leonida fiction (Harte, 2025). IGN's reveal coverage and the BBC's trailer analysis both flagged interior-floor variation in Vice City apartment blocks as a deliberate design choice that effectively multiplies the usable surface area of the urban core (Collins and Richardson, 2025).
The playable boundary in any Rockstar map is ultimately defined by the vehicles available to traverse it. Trailer 2 confirms returning vehicle categories including sports cars, motorcycles, speedboats, jet-skis and at least one light aircraft, with the Leonida Keys clearly designed around boat traversal (Harte, 2025; Wilson, 2025). Swimming appears substantially upgraded: Trailer 2 features an underwater shot of a submerged vehicle with visible aquatic wildlife, suggesting the seabed is modelled to a meaningful depth rather than being a flat plane as in GTA V. Coverage from Digital Foundry suggested aircraft traversal times across the full state may exceed those of GTA V's San Andreas by a noticeable margin, consistent with a larger overall landmass (Linneman, 2025). Driving range across the confirmed regions, from Port Gellhorn in the north to the Leonida Keys in the south, would represent the longest continuous overland route in any Rockstar open world to date if community map reconstructions prove accurate.
Until Rockstar publishes an authoritative figure, every square-mile number attached to GTA VI should be treated as provisional. What the trailers, the leak and the May 2025 website update do establish with reasonable confidence is that Leonida is bigger and structurally more varied than either GTA V's San Andreas or RDR2's frontier, that interior and vertical density represent a generational step rather than an incremental one, and that the traversal sandbox spans urban, wetland, coastal, archipelagic and mountainous biomes within a single contiguous space. The headline metric of choice is therefore shifting in pre-release discourse from "square miles" to "playable volume", a framing that better captures how Rockstar appears to be allocating the game's reportedly billion-dollar-plus budget.