Mount Kalaga National Park

Mount Kalaga National Park covers the remote high ground: lakes, rivers, forest and wildlife that can really hurt you.

It's the region people most often compare to Ambarino, which is a way of saying it's probably where the exploring, the fishing and the hidden stuff live. The missions are more likely to happen elsewhere.

A mountain in Florida

This is the one region that isn't a straight copy of somewhere real, because Florida doesn't have mountains. The highest natural point in the state is Britton Hill in the panhandle, at about 345 feet, and that's the lowest state high point in the country. There's no Florida version of a mountain national park.

So Rockstar's made one up, and we want to be clear about that, because a lot of writing about this region assumes there's a real place behind it and there isn't. The closest real equivalents are the forested, rolling hills of the panhandle and north Florida, and they look nothing like what the name suggests.

Why make one up

Height does things a flat map can't. You get views, and those count for a lot in a game people screenshot constantly. You get switchback roads, which drive differently from a grid or a causeway. You get spots that are hard to reach, and that's where collectibles and secrets go. And the map gets somewhere that actually looks cold, to balance out six other regions that all look warm.

Red Dead Redemption 2 opened in Ambarino and used it to show you how big the world was before dropping you into farmland. Leonida getting its own version suggests Rockstar wanted that feeling available here too.

What you'll probably do here

Fishing, wildlife and exploring have all come up in coverage of the park. Going by the studio's recent games, expect systems more than missions: things you do because the place is there, without anybody phoning you to ask.

There's more to go on than there was. GamesRadar's run-down of official material counts the two men with rifles in the pines, pictured above, as hunting shown, and it reports fishing as catch-and-release only, with about the depth of Red Dead Redemption 2's, though you can't keep or sell what you catch (our activities list). Game Informer's cover story on 29 September talks up wildlife on land, in the air and in the sea (our piece on the cover story), and Kotaku's write-up of it counts more than 170 species.

Two of Game Informer's twelve new screenshots look like they belong here, though neither one names the region (what's in them). One's a state park with a waterfall and a wooden footbridge, people walking dogs along it, and it's almost certainly Mount Kalaga. The other has a rider on a quad bike with a rifle, deer down by the water.

What isn't known

Rockstar hasn't gone into detail on the park and hasn't shown extended footage of the region. Fishing's only reported, so nobody's said how it works here or whether it's any different on a mountain lake. We don't know how big it is next to Grassrivers, nobody's given a height for the mountain, and Rockstar hasn't confirmed that the waterfall screenshot is actually in the park.