Thanks to a rather short-lived leak, Rockstar Games’ new Grand Theft Auto 6 trailer has already been officially released ahead of its scheduled time and it’s looking seriously good. Aside from the impressive graphics and the hilarious references to real-world news throughout, one thing that really has us taken aback is the GTA 6 map – of which we have already seen a number of unique environments. We always knew GTA 6 would be a big game, but eagle-eyed fans are already piecing together the new map and it really is going to be massive.
When you look at all the fantastic new Xbox games and new PS5 games on the way in the next couple of years, it’s hard to think of another game with more hype behind it – and more potential to definitively become one of the best games of all time – than Rockstar Games’ Grand Theft Auto 6. Both GTA 5 and Red Dead Redemption 2 (and, if you want to look even further back, GTA 4 and Red Dead Redemption) are among the best open world games to grace our consoles and it looks like that trend of unmissable experiences is set to continue with GTA 6 on Xbox Series X|S and PS5.
While you’re still going to have to wait a while longer for the already long-awaited GTA 6 release date to arrive, we’re already getting quite a good sense of what our eventual return to the iconic Vice City (and its surrounding areas) will look like thanks to a fantastic teaser trailer and fans who have already spent their spare time picking that same trailer apart in the hours after its release.
Thanks to the impressive collaborative efforts of hundreds of eagle-eyed Grand Theft Auto fans on this staggering 72-page thread on GTA Forums, almost every single frame of the new Grand Theft Auto 6 trailer has been deconstructed and analysed; several real-world landmarks have been identified already and a rough idea of what to expect when it comes to the new GTA 6 map is already taking shape – and you can check it out for yourself on ‘VIMAP‘.
Or, you can just look at what the map looks like so far down below. Everything in red is speculation based on the latest trailer and sporadic leaks – almost all of which have been taken down – and obviously the blue part is the water (not the land, as Buster Bluth would suggest). Vice City itself doesn’t initially look as big as Los Santos’ city center, but with the surrounding areas it’s clear that this map is going to be a fair bit bigger than GTA 5’s and – we can imagine – a little larger than Red Dead Redemption 2’s, too.
While this fan-made map does seem quite believable as fan-made maps go, and it does strike some resemblence to the Grand Theft Auto 5 map (for better or worse), it’s still worth taking with a huge pinch of salt. In fact, the fact that it does seem so similar to Los Santos – with the urban areas largely in the bottom half of the map and the rural areas in the top half, and a large lake dominating that rural landscape – does make us question just how accurate that map really is.
However, if you compare this fan-made map to a map of Florida, you can clearly see the similarities – and, it’s very clear that Florida is the inspiration behind the setting of Grand Theft Auto 6. Vice City is Miami, the Leaf Links and ‘Gator Keys’ is a combination of the Everglades National Park and Key West, and Lake Leonida is clearly a reference to Lake Okeechobee. Port Gellhorn, on the left side of the fan-made map, could also be a combination of both Fort Myers and Tampa – although the former seems more likely given the geographical location of both.
Interestingly, fans are also using Google Maps to map the real-world locations of some of the landmarks in the official Grand Theft Auto 6 footage and leaks we’ve seen so far – and, of course, almost all of them are located in Florida. As you might imagine, with the trailer showing off quite a lot of Vice City itself, a lot of these marked locations are in Miami itself. However, several have been identified in both Marathon and Big Pine Key (on the southern peninsula) as north as Jacksonville and Panama City.
Georgia’s Augusta State Medical Prison has also been identified as a location featuring in Grand Theft Auto 6. This, rather notably, is not in Florida and could be representative of where a prologue might take place; the opening prologue of Grand Theft Auto 5 doesn’t take place in Los Santos, after all.
Ultimately, though, while this map does seem more accurate than not, it’s all worth taking with a pinch of salt until we know more. With past rumors claiming that Grand Theft Auto 6 would feature post-launch map expansions, take players to both Vice City and a Cuba-inspired island across the Carribean Sea, and even take place in both the 1980s and modern day, it’s hard to take anything we see unofficially as fully true. With official footage out there and a release date window confirmed, however, we should start to see more authentic and realistic information released – rather than these unsupported claims and wild rumors we’ve had to deal with for the last year or two.
One thing we don’t need an official Rockstar Games announcement to tell us is true, though, is that Grand Theft Auto 6 is going to be a huge game when it comes to your hard drive. So, if you’re still yet to expand your internal storage space with one of the best Xbox expansion cards or one of the best PS5 SSDs out there, you really should consider doing that at some point. If not for GTA 6, for everything else already available and available in the coming months.