Hunting and wildlife

Two of the official screenshots make the case by themselves. One shows two men walking through tall pine forest in Mount Kalaga carrying rifles. Another shows armed men sitting on an airboat in Grassrivers with dead alligators across the deck.

The wildlife shown so far

Alligators, deer, a Florida panther wading a creek with deer on the bank behind it, sea turtles, rays, dolphins, and an iguana the size of a small dog sunning itself on a Keys road. That last one isn't a joke. Green iguanas are an established invasive species in south Florida and they really do get that big, and the panther is the state animal, with a wild population in the low hundreds. See wildlife for the system the two of them belong to.

Game Informer's September screenshots added a third picture that fits the page. A rider on a quad bike with a rifle across his back has stopped at the water, and there are deer drinking right in front of him. Another shot has a woman with a rifle. We went through all twelve, and nothing in them shows a shot being taken.

Trackable animals

Game Informer's issue 382 added the first detail about how the system works. Rockstar says Leonida has more than 170 species, and some animals can be tracked. They're graded Rare, Discoverable or Legendary, and the identities of the harder ones are being kept secret.

Kotaku's summary of the same cover story breaks the 170 down a bit: more than 60 kinds of bird, more than 30 land mammals, sharks, reptiles, and invasive species including monkeys and armadillos. That's Kotaku reading Game Informer, so it's reported.

Tracking and hunting aren't the same word, and Rockstar didn't use the second one. A tracked animal could end at a rifle, at a camera, or as an entry in a list of sightings. What the grading does tell you is that some animals are meant to be looked for. You won't just run into them, and that's how Red Dead Redemption 2's legendary animals worked.

The bar Red Dead set

Red Dead Redemption 2 modelled around two hundred animal species with their own behaviour, pelt quality that depended on how cleanly you killed them, and carcasses that degraded on the horse. It's still the most detailed animal simulation in a video game.

Rockstar built that. Whether it brings the whole thing to a modern-day setting is a separate question, and there's a fair argument that it shouldn't. Skinning and pelt quality make sense in 1899. In 2026 Florida they mostly don't.

Hunting, the Florida way

Reporting has suggested hunting will be more detailed than people expect, with an unusual twist attached. Given the setting, the obvious candidate is that a lot of Florida hunting is nuisance and invasive species control, and it isn't sport at all: pythons, iguanas, and alligator harvest under permit.

That'd be a very Rockstar joke, and it'd let the studio build hunting without asking a modern audience to shoot deer for fun. We're flagging it as the plausible read. It isn't a confirmed system.

What isn't known

Rockstar still hasn't described hunting as a system or said whether either character hunts. It's given a species count, named a handful of animals and graded the trackable ones, but it hasn't said what tracking leads to or which animals are Legendary. We don't know if the quad bike rider's rifle is for the deer, or whether invasive animals like the monkeys are something you're meant to deal with. Everything else on this page is read off screenshots and what the series has done before.