We read all twelve of the new GTA 6 screenshots frame by frame. Here's what's actually in them

Game Informer's issue 382 went digital yesterday with twelve new Grand Theft Auto 6 screenshots in it, and most of the coverage since has been the images with an adjective stuck on. So we did the boring version. We isolated all twelve, looked at every corner of every one, and wrote down only what's legible.

Four of them have something worth stopping on. The other eight are still worth cataloguing, because knowing what's been shown now is how you'll tell a genuinely new detail from a recycled one over the next seven weeks.

The four worth stopping on

The citrus grove has a named brand. A crop duster comes in low over an orange grove while pickers keep working in the dust. Behind them is a water tower built in the shape of an orange, which is real Florida roadside architecture, and Rockstar didn't make it up for a laugh. The pickup parked in the grove is lettered Tucker's Citrus Farms, and under that, Since 1968. Fruit crates sit on the grass beside it.

It's the first farm business Rockstar has named in Leonida. Every business named before this has been a bar, a garage, a salon or a club. Citrus is the industry inland Florida actually runs on, and a studio that makes up a founding year for a fruit company is building a working economy, with more going on than a pretty backdrop.

There's lightning in the Keys shot. A seaplane banks over turquoise water, island chains and causeway bridges. Look past the plane and there's a storm front across the horizon with two distinct lightning strikes in it, while the water underneath is still bright blue.

This is the most useful frame in the set, because it's the first published image that actually shows off what the issue is about. Weather in this game doesn't look like a global switch that turns the whole sky grey. It's a front, with an edge, sitting over one part of the map while another part's clear. That's a lot harder to build, and a lot better to drive through.

Three alligators, and nobody's reacting. It's a fishing camp at dusk, built on stilts over the water. An airboat's tied up, there are oil drums and stacked chairs on the deck, and a man in a cap is standing at the rail. In the water right below him, maybe two metres away, are three alligators, clearly modelled and clearly not an event.

The lack of any reaction is the detail. In most games an alligator is an encounter. Here it's part of the furniture, which is how it works in the places this camp is based on.

The marsh frame holds four species at once. There are deer standing in shallow water at first light, a crane in the foreground, egrets behind, and birds in the air above all of it. Land, water and sky in one composition, which is exactly how Rockstar put it when it described the wildlife system.

The other eight, catalogued

• Vice City at night. Searchlights sweeping the towers, a lit big wheel down on the water, and individually lit windows across the skyline.
• The beach. A dense crowd, a flag, loungers, a dog, and birds on the sand. The thing to notice is how many separate people fit in one frame.
• A state park. A waterfall, a wooden footbridge, and ordinary people walking dogs across it. Almost certainly Mount Kalaga.
• A quad bike. A rider with a rifle across his back, stopped at the water, with deer drinking in front of him.
• A biker bar. Neon, a pool table, and club patches rendered one by one on individual jackets.
• A shop counter. A man stood behind it with a baseball bat up on his shoulder, standing in a way that doesn't look like he's the owner.
• A woman with a rifle. Bandana up, weapon out, in flat daylight, with bystanders watching from maybe twenty feet away.
• A masked rider. A pistol drawn over motorbike handlebars, a crew behind him, and chickens in the road.

We got the panther wrong

While checking these against Rockstar's own set we opened `mount-kalaga-national-park-05` properly for the first time. The big animal wading through the water in that screenshot isn't a capybara, which is what this site has said since early September. It's a Florida panther: long heavy tail, rounded ears, tawny coat, and four deer on the bank behind it.

That's more than a species name. The Florida panther is the state animal and one of the most endangered large mammals in North America, with a wild population in the low hundreds, almost all of it in the south west of the state. Putting one in a frame with its prey is a deliberate choice by somebody who looked the subject up. The hunting and wildlife page has been corrected.

Why there are no Game Informer images here

None of the twelve is in Rockstar's press packs. We re-downloaded all three the morning this was written, and the screenshot pack still holds the same 99 files it's held since 27 August. So the only published copies are Game Informer's, and the versions going around are watermarked frames lifted from walkthrough videos. That's why there aren't any Game Informer images on this page, and why the issue's linked instead.

Keep in mind a screenshot is a composition, too. It doesn't demonstrate anything on its own. Somebody at Rockstar chose where the panther stood and when the lightning fired, so none of this tells you how often the weather changes, whether the alligators can be provoked, or whether Tucker's Citrus Farms is a place you can go into or just a decal on a truck.

What it does show is what the studio wanted in the frame when it had twelve frames to spend. Seven weeks out, that's worth having.