How big is the GTA 6 map

There are a handful of size figures going around now, and they don't carry anything like the same weight.

The one with a name attached first came from Game Informer. In its issue 382 cover story, out on 29 September, Rockstar art director Aaron Garbut calls Leonida Rockstar's largest map by some way, and the magazine puts it at about twice the size of Grand Theft Auto V's map. RockstarINTEL's write-up gives the twice figure to Garbut directly, while Insider Gaming treats it as the magazine's own summary. Either way it came out of an interview with Rockstar, and he didn't give a square mileage.

Edge repeated it a month later. Its issue 430 cover feature, out on 29 October after a visit to Rockstar North, also has the map at roughly twice Grand Theft Auto V's, and adds that the total landmass, Vice City and everything around it, is nearly as big as the playable maps of Grand Theft Auto IV, Grand Theft Auto V and Red Dead Redemption 2 put together. That's Edge's reporting from Rockstar's own demo, so we're treating it as reported.

The older headline is that Leonida is roughly three times the size of the Red Dead Redemption 2 world. That one came out of preview sessions. Vice reported it as Rockstar's comparison, and our own map size piece ran it that way, but we haven't found anyone at Rockstar quoted saying it on the record. The most useful figure of the lot is that Vice City alone is around twice the size of Los Santos.

Then there's the fan number. A Reddit measurement put the explorable land at about 83 square kilometres, which works out at roughly 1.7 times Grand Theft Auto V and a bit over twice Red Dead. It's a community estimate from trailer footage, and Rockstar hasn't given any area figure to check it against.

The figures don't quite agree

Red Dead Redemption 2's world is generally reckoned to be bigger than Grand Theft Auto V's, so three times Red Dead and twice Grand Theft Auto V can't both be precise. We'd go with the Garbut figure, because it's the one with a Rockstar source, and we think the three times comparison was always loose. The two-to-one Vice City figure sits comfortably with it. Los Santos is only part of Grand Theft Auto V's map, so a city twice its size inside a state twice the size of that map is plausible.

Edge's three-maps-combined line is the awkward one. Grand Theft Auto IV, Grand Theft Auto V and Red Dead put together is a lot more than twice Grand Theft Auto V, so it can only fit if it's counting something bigger than the bit you play in, like water and the land past the edges. Edge's wording points that way, but it didn't spell it out.

Garbut put the emphasis on density more than area: rooftops, alleys and a lot of interiors, as Insider Gaming quoted him. He told Edge there are "an order of magnitude more interiors" than in Rockstar's earlier games. Edge also reports that the roads are narrower than Grand Theft Auto V's, to get the proportions closer to real streets, and that the day and night cycle runs longer. That's the same point this page has always made: it's what's packed in that counts.

Why the area number is the weaker one

Red Dead Redemption 2's world was empty on purpose. It was a game about distance, weather and how long a horse takes to cross a valley, and the space between things was the point. Triple that area in a game with cars in it and you don't triple what's in it.

Map area's also a bad guide to how big a game feels. Fifty square miles of wetland you cross at forty miles an hour feels smaller than five square miles of city you have to learn. If you've driven the length of Grand Theft Auto V's map, you'll know it takes a few minutes and most of that's desert.

Why the Vice City number is the one to watch

Dense city is the expensive kind of space to build, and it's where players actually spend their hours. Los Santos is the busiest city Rockstar has ever made. Double it and you get a place you learn district by district, the way you'd learn a real city, instead of steering by a few big landmarks.

That's the number that tells you how the game will feel. It also says something about development cost, which is part of why most of Rockstar has been working on this game since 2018, with early work going back to 2015.

What makes a map feel big

Going by Rockstar's own history, three things do the work, and area isn't one of them:

• Vertical variety. Mount Kalaga exists partly because Florida's flat, and a map with no elevation feels small.
• Terrain that changes how you travel. Wetland needs an airboat, the Keys need a boat, and the city needs a car that fits down a street.
• Density of things worth stopping for. That's where the 600,000 animations and the hand-directed background characters count for more than the square mileage.

What isn't known

Rockstar hasn't published a map, a square mileage or a road length. Nobody's said whether twice Grand Theft Auto V counts water, and a state built around the Keys and a wetland has a lot of it. We don't know exactly what Edge's combined landmass figure includes, or how long a full in-game day is. The Red Dead comparison comes from previews with no spec sheet behind it, the fan measurement comes from footage, and nobody has called any of the multiples precise. Read them as the rough scale Rockstar wants you to have in your head, and don't treat them as measurements.

Related: the Leonida map, confirmed landmarks.