Where Is GTA 6 Set? A Guide to Leonida and Vice City

Ask a longtime GTA fan where the series is headed next and most of them will say the same word before you finish the question: Vice City. It’s not wrong, exactly, but it’s incomplete. GTA 6 is set in Leonida, a fictional U.S. state modeled on Florida, and Vice City, Rockstar’s long-running satirical stand-in for Miami, is its centerpiece rather than its whole world.

That distinction matters more than it might sound like. The original Vice City, back in 2002, was essentially one city and its immediate surroundings, a tight, dense playground built around an ’80s aesthetic. Leonida is being built as an entire state: Vice City sits at its heart, but the trailers and official material have also shown swampland, small towns, coastline, and rural stretches that have nothing to do with nightclubs or pastel skyscrapers. Rockstar’s own marketing has put real names to some of these places already: Port Gellhorn, a working coastal town; Mount Kalaga, an inland highland area that looks nothing like the Florida most people picture; and the Leonida Keys, a chain of islands doing the postcard-tropical work Vice City itself no longer has to. This is a state, not a stage set.

Scale is the other piece people underestimate. Rockstar hasn’t published an exact square-mileage figure, but the studio’s own promotional language has described the map as roughly three times the size of Grand Theft Auto 5’s Los Santos and Blaine County, already one of the largest open worlds the series had ever built. Whether that multiple holds up to the square foot once players are walking around in it is something nobody outside Rockstar can confirm yet, but even a conservative reading of that claim points to the biggest map the series has attempted.

Vice City itself has changed with the times in ways that go beyond just newer graphics. Where the 2002 game leaned almost entirely on cocaine-cowboy ’80s pastiche, GTA 6’s version is being presented as a modern, functioning American city with all the contradictions that implies: luxury condos next to overlooked neighborhoods, influencer culture next to old money, a skyline that’s clearly Miami without literally being Miami. It’s less a theme park recreation of a decade and more an attempt to satirize the present the way the original satirized the ’80s.

None of the specifics here are final until the game ships. Rockstar has a long history of trailers showing off locations that end up looking or functioning differently at launch. But between the confirmed name (Leonida), the confirmed centerpiece (Vice City), and the handful of named locations Rockstar has already put in front of players, the shape of the map is clearer at this point than it’s ever been for an unreleased GTA. It’s a state built to be explored, not just a city built to be remembered.