Weather

Weather's one of three subjects Rockstar chose to put in front of a magazine seven weeks before release, and it's the one with the least published evidence behind it. Until issue 382 there wasn't any official description of a weather system in Grand Theft Auto 6. There was no named mechanic, and nothing on rockstargames.com explained how any of it works.

What Rockstar told Game Informer

Game Informer's web exclusive on the cover story lays out the parts Rockstar was happy to describe:

• Localised storms. You can stand somewhere dry and sunny and watch rain falling somewhere else on the map. Clouds roll across Leonida, so the weather drifts in and out and doesn't just switch on and off.
• Persistence. Drive to where a storm's just been and the ground shows it, with puddles and wet surfaces that hang around after the rain's gone.
• Rainbows after a fresh shower, when the light's right.
• Tropical storms and seasonal hurricanes. Bigger, more violent systems exist in Leonida, just as they do in Florida.

Reports on the print issue, including RockstarINTEL's, add a new wind system: offshore breezes, updrafts, and buildings that block or redirect the wind, with all of it moving hair, debris, water and vegetation. That detail isn't in Game Informer's free web article, so we're treating it as reported from the magazine. We haven't read it at source ourselves.

None of that in Game Informer says how weather affects play. Rockstar described what you see there, and didn't say what weather does to a car on a wet road or a boat in a swell. Edge got some of that a month later.

What Edge saw in October

Edge's 29 October cover feature went further, from a demo Rockstar ran for the magazine. Edge reports that:

• Clouds move on their own, pushed around by wind, humidity, fog, the time of day and the season.
• You can watch a storm build in the distance, lightning and rain included, and conditions change gradually as you head towards it.
• Wet surfaces dry at different rates, and buildings keep dripping after a storm's passed.
• Sheltered waterways stay calm, while exposed water can rock a boat.
• Planes can hit turbulence and pick up minor damage in severe storms.
• People in the street look for shelter when a storm's on its way.

That's the first time anyone's described weather doing something to play. A boat that rocks, a plane that takes damage and a street that empties all change what you're doing in the moment. It's still Edge's account of a demo, though, and Rockstar hasn't published any of it itself.

What's actually been shown

Rain over Vice City in both trailers, wet roads and reflections, heavy skies at dusk, and a storm sequence in the Extended Look. All of it's scenery, weather as a lighting state the shot happened to be in.

Rockstar's official press stills, the screenshot pack and the edition images together, are almost all clear skies. The heaviest sky Rockstar's published is the cloudbank over the Vice City sign at the top of this page, and that's just a sunset. There's no system doing anything in it.

A storm front over the Keys

One of the twelve screenshots in issue 382 changes that. A seaplane banks over the Leonida Keys, and across the horizon behind it there's a storm front with two distinct lightning strikes in it, while the water right under the plane is still bright turquoise.

A front with an edge is a different thing from a global weather state. It means one part of the map can be under a storm while another's clear, and that the boundary between them is somewhere you can actually be. Nothing published before that image showed it, and it's exactly what Rockstar's description of localised storms predicts.

Weather in Rockstar's last two games

In a Rockstar game, weather's historically been about systems more than looks. Red Dead Redemption 2 changed visibility, how horses behaved on wet ground, and how mud built up on a coat over a ride. Grand Theft Auto 5 changed handling on wet roads and did fairly little else.

Vice City is a driving city on a coastline, and rain's the cheapest way to make the same street play differently on a second visit. Picking weather as one of three preview subjects, this late, suggests it reaches further into the game than a shader.

Hurricane season and a November release

There's also the setting to think about. Florida is one of the wettest states in the US by rainfall, its hurricane season runs from 1 June to 30 November, and Grand Theft Auto 6 comes out on 19 November, inside that window. Rockstar calling its hurricanes seasonal suggests the game keeps a calendar of some kind, though it hasn't said so. Edge's line about clouds changing with the season points the same way. The marketing's shown almost none of it.

What isn't known

Most of the detail that would make this a specification is still missing.

Edge's report says storms rock boats, knock planes about and send people looking for shelter. But nobody's said how much weather changes driving on a wet road or visibility, or by how much any of it matters in a chase. We don't know how often a hurricane arrives, what seasonal means in a game with no fixed calendar, or whether a hurricane's a free-roam event or a story set piece.

Flooding and storm damage are another gap. Nobody's said whether either one is modelled, in a state where that's the defining hazard. It's also unclear whether the wind system does anything beyond moving hair, water and grass, and whether the two lightning strikes in the Keys screenshot come from a simulated front or a composed shot.

A lead designer describing a system in a preview is describing what they intend, and a demo is something Rockstar drove. Nobody outside Rockstar has said they've played the game yet. Review codes are reported to be out, with reviews expected on 18 November (the embargo report), so that's when outside accounts of the weather should start.