Vice City

Vice City's back as a present-day city, and it isn't the 1980s version people remember. It's the densest part of Leonida and, by Rockstar's own comparison, around twice the size of Los Santos.

That number tells you more than the state-wide figures do. Los Santos is the busiest city Rockstar's ever built, and doubling it gives you a place you learn district by district, where one or two landmarks won't get you around.

The third time Rockstar's built it

Vice City's been built twice before. The 2002 game was set in 1986, and its soundtrack, colours and references came almost entirely from Miami Vice and Scarface. Vice City Stories went back to 1984. Both were period pieces about a moment that was already twenty years gone by the time they came out.

Jumping to the present day is a bigger change than it sounds, because the pastels and neon that defined the old Vice City were a costume. Modern Miami's a different city with different money in it: foreign property investment, cruise terminals, finance towers along the water, and a tourism business that's turned into an industry. The trailers keep the neon, but now it's mostly something the city sells to visitors.

What Rockstar's shown so far

There are beachfront strips with art deco fronts and neon, a downtown of high-rises, the Pagasi residences on the water, and the Megamundo building where the Extended Look's closing robbery happens.

Confirmed landmarks across the wider map include a large airport, a football stadium, an amphitheatre, a military base and a zoo you can fully explore. The airport has a name now: an overhead sign in Trailer 2 reads VCI Airport, the first time it's been named in anything official (our read of the road signs).

Game Informer's cover story on 29 September came with twelve new screenshots, and one of them is the city at night, searchlights in the sky and a lit-up big wheel out on the water (what's in all twelve). The launch trailer on 15 October has Jason and Lucia shooting out of a helicopter over the streets, and the pair of them jumping off a roof into a hotel pool (our launch trailer breakdown).

How Miami's laid out

Miami's unusually easy to turn into a game map because it's already split into pieces you can read at a glance. There's a barrier island with the beach, the art deco district and the nightlife on it. There's a downtown core of towers across the water. There's a working port. There are rich waterfront neighbourhoods on long fingers of land, and right behind them, a little way inland, there are neighbourhoods with none of that money.

Everything shown so far fits that layout, which is a good sign for a city you're meant to learn by district. It also gives Rockstar the thing it's always been best at: two places a short drive apart with completely different economies.

The names we've got so far

Rockstar still hasn't published a district list, but a fair few names are out. Ocean Beach, Bayside, Stockyard and Vice City Port can be read off signs in the footage. Watson Bay, Washington Beach, Shore Court and the Vercetti Estate come from Rockstar's own copy, mostly the lines explaining where your edition bonus car's parked. Southside and Peacock Bay turn up on one Trailer 2 road sign and nowhere else. Our districts guide keeps the running list, and the districts page takes them one at a time.

The beach has a name too. Official material calls it Vice Beach, and it's where Jason hits a man with a bag of dog poop in the gameplay clip that aired inside South Park on 28 October (the South Park clip).

Roads, signs and a 305 number

Trailer 2's overhead signs give you the start of a road network. There's an interstate, I-97, with a spur, I-397, signed for Port VC and Downtown. There's US 35 North, heading for VCI Airport and Ambrosia. And Exit 3 drops you onto SW 9th Ave, which copies Miami's real habit of naming streets by quadrant.

The Extended Look fills in the street level. There's a tower crane over a building site and a NOW RENTING banner with a 305 phone number, Miami's real area code (the Prairie Sandwich piece). There's a tired strip mall with a video shop called Video Forever, a phone shop called Zeke's Gadgets and a pawn shop, Casa de Empeño (our frame read). And there's Boobie Ike's strip club, the Jack of Hearts. Put the crane next to the video shop that's closing down and you've got those two economies a few streets apart.

Buses, trains and narrower streets

Edge's cover feature in issue 430, out on 29 October and written from a demo Rockstar ran for the magazine, says the buses and trains work properly. Edge reports the team set itself a challenge of reaching Watson Bay on public transport alone, and that a wanted player can hide on a bus, as long as the police didn't see them get on.

The same feature says the roads are narrower than Grand Theft Auto V's, to get a real city's proportions, and that each district has its own population and jobs. Art director Aaron Garbut talks about "an order of magnitude more interiors" across the map. That's about the whole of Leonida, but you'd expect most of them to be here.

Off the map, Miami's been dressed up for launch. A Welcome to Vice City sign has gone up on the Kaseya Center roof, and the Heat play as Vice City on 18 November (the county's side of the deal). That's marketing, and it tells you nothing about the game's city, but it's fun to see.

What isn't known

Rockstar hasn't published a district list or a map, so the names above are only what's been read off signs and press copy, and there are bound to be more. We don't know how many of the high-rise interiors you can walk into, even with Edge's talk of far more interiors, and Rockstar hasn't said whether owning property comes back in the form it took in Grand Theft Auto V. We also don't know how the buses and trains work for the player: whether you pay a fare, ride the whole line or can skip the trip.

Related: the Leonida map.