Filed under: Speculation / 17_speculation / Report 1196
Leonida is going to be roughly 84 square miles of accessible land, sitting inside a navigable ocean envelope of about 220 square miles, for a total playable rectangle of ~304 sq mi. That is a touch over 3.5x the size of Los Santos and Blaine County in Grand Theft Auto V, and around 20–25% larger than the Red Dead Redemption 2 landmass once you discount the parts of New Austin that were essentially recycled geometry. This piece commits to that number, breaks it down by region, and explains why every other figure you have seen on Reddit is wrong by at least 30%.
The argument is built on four pillars: trailer flyovers, Rockstar's confirmed list of regions (Wikipedia, 2025a), the studio's historical pattern of roughly doubling map area between generations, and the brute reality that a PlayStation 5 with a 16 GB unified memory pool can stream a much wider world than the PS3 ever could. We will also address what is hiding under the water, whether Cuba is in (it is, partially), and which sleepy backwater is going to become the new Sandy Shores meme zone.
Before predicting Leonida, you have to acknowledge what Rockstar has actually shipped. Below is the comparison table the rest of this piece references.
| Game | Year | Setting basis | Land area (approx.) | Total playable area (incl. water) | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| GTA III | 2001 | Liberty City (NYC) | ~3 sq mi | ~5 sq mi | Rockstar maps community archive |
| GTA: Vice City | 2002 | Miami | ~2 sq mi | ~4 sq mi | Rockstar maps community archive |
| GTA: San Andreas | 2004 | California / Nevada | ~13.9 sq mi | ~14 sq mi | Rockstar maps community archive |
| GTA IV | 2008 | New York | ~6 sq mi | ~8 sq mi | Rockstar maps community archive |
| Red Dead Redemption | 2010 | American frontier | ~11 sq mi | ~11 sq mi | Rockstar maps community archive |
| GTA V | 2013 | Southern California (Wikipedia, 2025b) | ~24 sq mi land | ~31 sq mi w/ ocean | DigitalTrends measurement |
| Red Dead Redemption 2 | 2018 | Five fictitious states (Wikipedia, 2025c) | ~29 sq mi | ~29 sq mi | RDR2 community surveys |
| GTA VI (predicted) | 2026 | Leonida (Florida) (Wikipedia, 2025a) | ~84 sq mi | ~304 sq mi | This report |
The pattern is not perfectly linear, but the underlying trajectory is clear: every generational leap roughly doubles or triples the previous flagship. San Andreas to GTA V was a small contraction in landmass but a huge density increase. GTA V to RDR2 was again a modest increase in raw area but a step-change in detail. GTA VI is the first true next-generation Rockstar map: it has had eight years of dev time on hardware that was designed for big open worlds rather than retrofitted to them.
A 3.5x leap over GTA V is conservative if you consider that GTA V was deliberately constrained by PS3 memory. With a PS5 and Series X target, Rockstar finally gets to build the map they wanted for Project Americas before scope-cutting (Wikipedia, 2025a).
Here is the breakdown the rest of the article will defend, region by region:
| Region | Real-world analogue | Predicted land area | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vice City urban core | Miami / Miami Beach | 14 sq mi | Densest tile in any Rockstar game ever |
| Greater Vice City suburbs | Hialeah, Coral Gables, Kendall | 11 sq mi | Strip malls, gated estates |
| Grassrivers (Everglades) | Florida Everglades | 22 sq mi | Largest single biome |
| Leonida Keys | Florida Keys | 6 sq mi land | Strung along ~30 mi of bridge causeway |
| Port Gellhorn | Tampa / Port St Lucie hybrid | 9 sq mi | Industrial / shipping port |
| Ambrosia | Cape Coral / Fort Myers | 7 sq mi | Canals, retirement sprawl |
| Mount Kalaga National Park | Ocala / Apalachicola | 10 sq mi | Forested elevation |
| Leonida City (state capital area) | Tallahassee | 5 sq mi | Government/college town |
| Total land | ~84 sq mi | ||
| Coastal & offshore water | Gulf + Atlantic | ~220 sq mi | Includes Cayo-style island |
These figures are committed predictions. They will be wrong in specific tiles, but the headline number — eighty-four square miles of land — is the one to hold us to.
Vice City in GTA VI is not the boxy 2 sq mi of the 2002 game. The second trailer showed Ocean Drive analogues, downtown high-rises matching Brickell, an obvious Wynwood arts district, a Little Haiti analogue, a port, and a beachfront strip with mid-rise hotels (Wikipedia, 2025a). That is six distinct neighbourhoods minimum, and Game Informer's post-trailer breakdown described "six major areas of Vice City" already visible (Harte, 2025, as cited in Wikipedia, 2025a).
A Miami-sized urban core, modelled at Rockstar's RDR2 density, lands at roughly 14 square miles for the city proper. Add suburbs — and the trailers showed clear suburban sprawl, including the canal-lined cul-de-sacs typical of South Florida — and you get an additional 11 square miles. That puts the Greater Vice City Metropolitan tile at roughly 25 sq mi, which is by itself about the size of GTA V's entire landmass.
Hidden-interior count for Vice City alone: I am calling ~120 enterable buildings, of which around 40 will be mission-critical, 30 will be shops/restaurants, and the rest will be apartments, strip clubs and the inevitable Burger Shot equivalent. That is roughly double GTA V's enterable count.
This is where the map gets huge and where most armchair analysts underestimate Rockstar's ambition. The trailer made the swamp a hero region — alligators in driveways, airboats, the works (Wikipedia, 2025a). Real-world Everglades National Park is 2,357 sq mi; Rockstar will compress that by ~99% but it will still be the biggest single biome on the map.
Prediction: 22 square miles of swamp, sawgrass marsh and cypress dome. Most of it traversable by airboat, with only a handful of roads cutting through. Expect a clear analogue of the Tamiami Trail running east–west.
Grassrivers is also where the Sandy Shores meme hotspot is going to spawn. Every Rockstar map has one settlement that becomes a cultural touchstone for being deranged and underpopulated. In San Andreas it was Bone County. In V it was Sandy Shores. In RDR2 it was Lemoyne's bayou hamlets. In VI, I am calling it now: a settlement in the Grassrivers interior, almost certainly the gas-station-and-trailer-park hybrid teased in trailer two, becomes the "Florida Man" meme epicentre. Expect a meth-cooking subplot.
The Keys are confirmed (Wikipedia, 2025a). Real-world Overseas Highway is 113 miles; Rockstar will compress it dramatically, probably to a ~30-mile in-game causeway strung with ~6 sq mi of actual island land spread across perhaps a dozen islands. The reason this matters is that the Keys give Rockstar an excuse to build a very long ocean drive — the kind of stretched road that defines a getaway sequence. Bet on at least one mission ending with a multi-island chase across this causeway.
Underwater scale is the second story here. Florida Bay between the Keys and the mainland is shallow and packed with content opportunities (wrecks, drug stashes, reef diving). I predict the playable underwater map will be the largest of any Rockstar title — roughly 80 sq mi of detailed seabed out of the 220 sq mi total ocean envelope, with diving meaningfully rewarded.
Port Gellhorn is confirmed as a distinct settlement (Wikipedia, 2025a; cited from BBC and GamesRadar's post-trailer coverage). It reads as a Tampa-meets-Port St Lucie hybrid: working docks, container terminals, refineries. Predicted footprint: 9 sq mi, including a sprawling shipping yard that will absolutely become a stunt-jump and player-bounty hotspot in GTA Online.
Port Gellhorn is the structural counterweight to glitzy Vice City — the place where the dirty work happens. Expect heist setups, weapon-buy missions, and a smuggling minigame. The port also gives Rockstar a plausible spawn point for cargo ships, which means freighter interiors as instanced spaces.
Ambrosia, also confirmed (Wikipedia, 2025a), reads as a Cape Coral analogue: an obsessively canal-gridded retirement and boat city. Predicted area: 7 sq mi, with — and this is a confident sub-prediction — more navigable inland waterway than any previous Rockstar map. If Cape Coral is the template, the canal network is over 400 miles in reality; even a 10% compression gives you 40+ miles of in-game canal.
This is where the boat-customisation economy will live. Ambrosia is also a strong candidate for the side-character side-quest hub, the way Sandy Shores housed Trevor. Bet on at least one protagonist safehouse here.
Mount Kalaga is the most interesting region from a level-design perspective because it provides the vertical play Rockstar has historically struggled to match in their flat-map outings. Confirmed in the second trailer (Wikipedia, 2025a), it appears to combine Ocala National Forest with a fictionalised mountain — Florida famously has no real mountains, so this is artistic licence.
Predicted area: 10 sq mi, with elevation up to ~2,500 feet. Expect cable cars, hiking trails, hunting (RDR2-style mechanics ported over), and a wilderness lodge or two. Mount Kalaga gives Rockstar their RDR2-grade nature simulation slot.
The least discussed confirmed region. Leonida City reads as a Tallahassee analogue: state capitol building, university campus, smaller scale than Vice City. Predicted area: 5 sq mi, primarily mission-driven rather than free-roam-heavy. Likely contains a state-government heist setup and a college-radio side narrative.
Here is the speculative payoff. GTA Online's Cayo Perico DLC proved Rockstar can ship a self-contained offshore island that streams in via cutscene or load zone (Wikipedia, 2025b). The leaked early code names included Project Americas, suggesting at one point a partial South America build was considered (Wikipedia, 2025a, citing The Know report).
My prediction: a Cuban analogue exists on the map but is gated behind specific missions and online updates. Call it Isla Sombra or similar. Expect:
The reason I am confident this is not pure invention: the trailers showed Caribbean-coded music, several characters of Cuban descent, and the Hispanic-coded protagonist Lucia (Wikipedia, 2025a). Cuba is structurally implied even if it does not appear on the launch-day map.
A map this big breaks the GTA V "one continuous cell" model. Expect:
Train fast-travel — last seen as Tri-Rail jokes in GTA V — likely returns more substantively, given Florida's Brightline rail expansion in the real world.
Putting this in context: at 84 sq mi of land, Leonida is roughly:
The competitor that gets obliterated hardest is not size-for-size — it is density-per-sq-mi. Ubisoft's open worlds rely on repeating points-of-interest. Rockstar's pitch will be that every square mile is hand-detailed. That is the line Take-Two and Strauss Zelnick have been selling investors (Wikipedia, 2025a, citing the cybersecurity and budget discussions). At a budget reportedly above $1 billion (Wikipedia, 2025a), the per-sq-mi spend is roughly $12 million — which is absurd and also exactly why competitors cannot match this scope.
I am committing to a number here: at least 250 enterable interiors, of which around 60 are mission-essential and the rest are free-roam-accessible. For comparison, GTA V shipped with around 80 enterable interiors (counting heist scenarios as one each). RDR2 raised the bar to roughly 150. VI should triple GTA V.
Expect:
This section is the honesty audit. Not everything above is equally well-grounded.
High confidence (≥75%):
Medium confidence (40–70%):
Pure guesswork (<40%):
The single most likely way the headline number ends up wrong: Rockstar may have built more water than I think, pushing the total playable envelope past 350 sq mi while keeping land below 70 sq mi. That would still align with the "obliterates competitors" thesis but would shift the regional breakdown.
Leonida ships at 84 square miles of land, 220 square miles of ocean, 250+ enterable interiors, with a Caribbean cell either in the base game or in the first major content update. The Grassrivers gas-station-and-trailer-park becomes the Sandy Shores of 2026, the Keys causeway becomes the most-screenshotted road in gaming, and Mount Kalaga becomes the surprise sleeper hit because nobody expected Florida to have a mountain.
When the game launches on 19 November 2026 (Wikipedia, 2025a), come back to this report and tally the score.
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).
Wikipedia (2025a) Grand Theft Auto VI. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Theft_Auto_VI (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
Wikipedia (2025b) Grand Theft Auto V. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Theft_Auto_V (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
Wikipedia (2025c) Red Dead Redemption 2. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Dead_Redemption_2 (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).