GTA 6's Game Informer Cover Story: What We Learned

Game Informer’s GTA 6 cover story landed on September 29, 2026 in the digital edition of issue 382. It runs 14 pages under the title “Welcome to Leonida,” carries 12 new screenshots, and is built around interviews with the Rockstar North team. Where the Netflix Extended Look was about how the game plays, this feature is mostly about the place you’ll be playing in.

Here’s what it confirmed, and what it means for questions this site has been tracking for months.

The map is about twice the size of GTA 5’s

This has been one of the most argued-over numbers in GTA 6 discussion, and our own map size explainer spent a long time sorting leaked estimates from guesswork. Game Informer’s feature puts it plainly: Leonida is roughly twice the size of GTA 5’s world, and Rockstar calls it the largest map it has built. The feature also stresses density over raw size, saying the state is more detailed and more interactive than anything before it, with more enterable interiors than any previous Grand Theft Auto.

The state is split into six regions: Vice City, the Leonida Keys, Grassrivers, Port Gellhorn, Ambrosia and Mount Kalaga National Park. Those names match what Rockstar listed on its own site earlier, so nothing new there, but this is the first time Rockstar has put a size comparison on the record.

Hurricanes are confirmed

Until now the honest answer to “will GTA 6 have hurricanes?” was that reporting pointed that way but Rockstar hadn’t said so. That changed with this feature. The weather system has been rebuilt on top of the technology from Red Dead Redemption 2, and it’s now more local and more persistent: clouds form and drift across the state, conditions differ from one area to the next, and puddles and wet surfaces stay around after a storm passes instead of vanishing the moment the rain stops.

Tropical storms and hurricanes are both confirmed. What Rockstar hasn’t said is how often they happen or whether they’re tied to story moments. We’ve updated our weather and hurricanes explainer to reflect this.

More than 170 animal species

The wildlife numbers are the most specific figures in the feature. Leonida has over 170 animal species, including more than 60 kinds of bird and more than 30 land mammals. The species named in coverage of the feature read like a field guide to South Florida: manatees, flamingos, pelicans, alligators, iguanas, armadillos, cane toads, feral cats and rhesus macaques on land, with sharks, whales, rays, turtles and jellyfish offshore. Our wildlife explainer has the full picture.

Jason and Lucia’s relationship can go different ways

The most interesting story detail is about the two leads. According to the feature, their relationship can stay platonic or turn romantic depending on your choices, and small moments between missions add up. Robberies that go well can bring them closer, and some of the free-roam activities look a lot like dates, with hiking mentioned among them. That’s a bigger role for player choice than any previous GTA has given a central relationship, and it adds weight to what Rockstar told LOVE magazine a week later about the pair being opposites who learn from each other.

The activity list keeps growing

Alongside the systems shown on Netflix, the feature runs through a long list of side activities: base jumping, billiards, gyms, kayaking, mini golf, scuba diving, street and off-road racing, zoos, airboats and jet skis. None of this is surprising for a Florida-inspired setting, but it confirms Leonida is meant to be lived in between jobs rather than just driven across.

Why this feature matters

Rockstar rarely does print features, and when it does they tend to be the most carefully controlled reveals of a campaign. Coming seven weeks before launch, this one reads like the studio deciding exactly which questions to answer before release day: how big is it, what’s the weather like, and what is the relationship at the center of the story. The questions it skipped (PC, online, frame rates) are worth noticing too, because they’re the ones Rockstar has avoided all year.

You can follow the remaining days on our GTA 6 countdown, and our interactive map covers each of the six regions in more detail.