Grassrivers

Grassrivers is Rockstar's Everglades: shallow water, sawgrass, airboats and wildlife that can kill you. It's one of the biggest natural regions in Leonida.

It's also where the most eye-catching image in the official screenshot set comes from. Jason and Lucia are out there at sunset while three police airboats and a helicopter close in on them.

The name is the geography

Grassrivers is close to a straight translation of what the Everglades actually are. The region isn't really a swamp in the usual sense. It's a very wide, very shallow river of fresh water creeping south through sawgrass. The Seminole name usually given as Pa-hay-okee means grassy water, and the phrase river of grass caught on through Marjory Stoneman Douglas's 1947 book of that title.

So the name's a fairly straight reference, and not a joke, which is unusual for this series. It suggests Rockstar's treating the area with some sincerity.

Why it works as a place to play

Open water with no roads is hard to make interesting, and the Everglades solves that. The sawgrass grows tall enough to block your view while the water stays passable, so the place feels open and closed in at the same time. Airboats don't care how deep the water is, so a chase can go anywhere. There aren't any natural bottlenecks either, which means getting away is about which direction you pick. You aren't stuck on a set route.

Grand Theft Auto's never had ground that behaves like this. The closest thing before was the Blaine County backcountry in Grand Theft Auto V, and that was still basically roads and hills.

Alligators and the rest

Alligators are the obvious ones, and the screenshots include other Leonida wildlife too. Red Dead Redemption 2 built a lot of its world out of how animals behave, and we'd really like to know how much of that the studio brings to a present-day setting. It's one of the more interesting open questions about this region.

Some of it's been answered since. Kotaku's write-up of Game Informer's 29 September cover story counts more than 170 species in the game, and two of the twelve screenshots that came with it are from out here (what's in them). One's a fishing camp up on stilts at dusk, an airboat tied up alongside and three alligators a couple of metres below a man. The other's a marsh with deer, a crane, egrets and a lot of other birds.

And the dead alligators on the airboat deck above are about as clear a sign of hunting as you'll get without a menu. GamesRadar's run-down of official material counts it as hunting shown, and it reports fishing as catch-and-release only, so you can't keep or sell what you catch (our activities list).

At night, in the launch trailer

The launch trailer on 15 October has a night operation out here: Jason and two armed men wading through the swamp with night vision goggles pushed up on their heads, as described across the coverage. So it's somewhere you work on foot as well as a place you cross by airboat. Rockstar hasn't said what the operation is or whether it's a mission.

By airboat

The Extended Look drives an airboat down a green channel through the wetland, past a wooden lookout tower, with the map in the corner of the screen. That's a player at the wheel, so the airboats aren't only for the police. Game Informer's fishing camp shot has one moored at a civilian camp, too.

What isn't known

Rockstar hasn't said how big Grassrivers is compared with the rest of the map. Hunting shows up in official material and fishing's reported as catch-and-release, but nobody's said how deep either one goes out here, and there's no sign of any survival systems. We've seen the player drive an airboat in the Extended Look, but not whether you can own one or just take whatever's tied up at the nearest camp. Rockstar also hasn't said what the launch trailer's night operation is.