Rockstar's developers traveled across Florida with cops and gang members, flew low over Everglades mangrove inlets in a helicopter, and spent days immersed in the state's extremes to build the world of GTA 6.
The details come from LOVE Magazine's Issue 27, which hit newsstands today, in an interview with Rockstar head of development Aaron Garbut. "Every game we make starts with research trips. It's where to get to explore both the place and our ideas as a group," Garbut said. "To begin, a small group of us spent some time traveling from Miami through some of the surrounding towns and through the Florida Keys down to Key West. This is one of the best parts of the entire project: a car full of friends, driving for days on end, talking about what we want to make and being immersed in the locations and our ideas."
The team went deep. "We do go in-depth, we hang with locals and we hear lots of stories and learn as much as we can. We travel around with cops and with gang members. Everyone is lovely. Some people are equally scary. We experience the underside as well; although the people who showed us around were among the nicest we've met, the stories, the places, the details could be terrifying. We try to build a world that is believable and varied, with depth, so that is the research we need."
Garbut and the game's art directors also spent a day surveying Miami and the Everglades from the air, studying everything from mangrove inlets to the downtown skyline and the beaches. The helicopter day made enough of an impression that Garbut joked, "I think we made the local news that day," recalling a pass over the mangroves and a hover above a stadium during a live Beyoncé concert.
What the team brought home was a portrait of extremes. "Miami itself is really those extremes — lovely people, incredible wealth, incredible poverty, excess, craziness, the hustle, and showing it all off. That's our research trips — experiencing those extremes so that we can bring them into our world, and it all finds its way into the game in surprising ways."
That philosophy shaped Leonida, the game's fictional take on Florida. Rather than simply recreating the state, Rockstar pushed its collisions of wealth and poverty, ambition and hustle, even further past reality, aiming for a version of modern Florida that feels larger, louder, and more grotesque than the real thing.
The obsession with authenticity extends to the people filling the world. GTA 6 has a dedicated production team for pedestrian dialogue, with hundreds of different voices recorded to build out the population. Character artists studied regional clothing, styling, cosmetics, and hairstyles so that the people of different Leonida communities actually look like they belong to those places, down to the details of how they dress and wear their hair.
Rockstar wants Vice City and Leonida to feel like places players can spend hundreds of hours in, and the detail work reportedly extends even to the state's smaller areas. That ambition lines up with what the studio has said about the map's scale: Leonida is roughly twice the size of GTA 5's world, divided into six regions, and the story alone will not take players everywhere. The campaign is designed to move through as much of the world as possible, with the rest left for players to discover on their own.
The research-first approach is classic Rockstar. For GTA: Vice City, the team flew to Miami after finishing GTA III and roamed the streets soaking up atmosphere. Two decades later, the method is the same — only the helicopters are new.
GTA 6 launches November 19, 2026, on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S.
Source: LOVE Magazine
