Grand Theft Auto VI's fictional US state of Leonida, the Florida-inspired setting of Rockstar Games' upcoming title, represents a marked evolution in how the series treats verticality. Where prior entries leaned on dense skyscraper grids (Liberty City) or the singular Mount Chiliad set piece in Grand Theft Auto V, Leonida promises a more layered approach: Vice City's neon high-rise skyline, the inland industrial stacks of Ambrosia, and the genuinely mountainous wilderness of Mount Kalaga National Park along the state's northern border (Wikipedia, 2026; Wilson, 2025). The second official trailer, released on 6 May 2025, alongside accompanying screenshots and location descriptions on Rockstar's website, expanded considerably on the vertical dimensions of the map (Harte, 2025).
Vice City, modelled on Miami, anchors the southern, urban edge of Leonida and supplies the majority of the game's high-altitude geometry. Marketing imagery has emphasised pastel art-deco towers in Ocean Beach, the cruise-terminal cranes of VC Port (advertised as "the cruise ship capital of the world"), and a downtown core of glass-clad commercial towers visible across the bay (Wilson, 2025). The Wikipedia entry for the game notes that Vice City forms part of a six-region map alongside Grassrivers, the Leonida Keys, Ambrosia, Mount Kalaga National Park, and Port Gellhorn, with each region offering a distinct visual silhouette (Wikipedia, 2026). For players, these towers are not merely backdrop: leaked footage and trailer cutscenes show interior penthouse spaces, rooftop pools, and balcony vantage points, suggesting that rooftop traversal and high-altitude infiltration will return as core sandbox activities (MacDonald, 2022).
Beyond Vice City, vertical interest emerges from unexpected places. Ambrosia, described by GamesRadar+ as an industrial biker-controlled region built around the Allied Crystal sugar refinery, contributes refinery stacks, silos, and conveyor structures that punctuate an otherwise flat agricultural landscape (Wilson, 2025). Port Gellhorn — a faded, declining coastal town based on towns like Pensacola — contributes water towers, motel signage like the Starlet Motel, and abandoned attractions whose disused rides and towers offer climbable curiosities (Wilson, 2025). Grassrivers, the Everglades analogue, inverts verticality entirely: stilt houses sit elevated above marshland, producing a unique "low-rise high" architecture suited to the wetland environment (Harte, 2025).
The most overtly vertical region is Mount Kalaga National Park, forming the northern frontier of the state. Rockstar's accompanying website copy and trailer two depict pine-clad slopes, ridges, cliffs, and forest interiors suited to hiking, hunting (deer, mountain lions), off-roading and kayaking through elevated terrain (Wilson, 2025). This represents a direct evolution of GTA V's Mount Chiliad and Blaine County wilderness, scaled up with denser foliage, more navigable elevation changes, and a stated population of reclusive "hillbilly mystics and paranoid radicals" hidden in the backwoods — implying scripted vertical-traversal missions and exploration loops in remote, high-altitude zones (Wilson, 2025).
Taken together, Leonida's vertical spaces serve three design functions. First, they provide silhouette variety across an otherwise predominantly low-lying, Florida-flat state — critical for orientation in an open world predicted to be the largest Rockstar has built (Wikipedia, 2026). Second, they support the series' established sandbox verbs (parachuting, helicopter approaches, sniping perches, rooftop chases) by offering high-density urban verticality in Vice City alongside natural verticality in Kalaga. Third, vertical layering enables narrative contrast: Lucia and Jason's Bonnie-and-Clyde criminal arc can move between gleaming penthouse heists and backwoods militia hideouts, with industrial Ambrosia and stilt-borne Grassrivers as intermediate registers (Harte, 2025; MacDonald, 2022).
Harte, C. (2025) 'Rockstar Shows Off Six Major Areas Of Vice City In Grand Theft Auto VI', Game Informer, 6 May. Available at: https://www.gameinformer.com/2025/05/06/rockstar-shows-off-six-major-areas-of-vice-city-in-grand-theft-auto-vi (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
MacDonald, K. (2022) 'Rockstar owner issues takedowns after Grand Theft Auto VI leak', The Guardian, 19 September. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/games/2022/sep/19/rockstar-owner-issues-takedowns-after-grand-theft-auto-vi-leak (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
Wikipedia (2026) Grand Theft Auto VI. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Theft_Auto_VI (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
Wilson, I. (2025) 'Every GTA 6 location revealed so far', GamesRadar+, 6 May. Available at: https://www.gamesradar.com/games/grand-theft-auto/gta-6-locations/ (Accessed: 14 May 2026).