Leonida and Vice City: what do we actually know about the map?

The GTA VI map is what most people are curious about and what least is known about. Rockstar has confirmed remarkably little, and the gap has filled with fan cartography, leaks and outright fabrications. Here is what survives once you sort it all out.

Confirmed by Rockstar: the game is set in Vice City, in the fictional state of Leonida. That is it. The company has published no official map, named no counties, given no size and never said whether the map is open from the start.

Leonida is an obvious Florida analogue, just as Vice City was always Miami. The change from 2002's Vice City is that the game is not confined to a single city but spans an entire state — the trailers show a coastal city, keys to the south, swampland and rural country. That expansion is confirmed by Rockstar's own footage, even if no names accompany it.

The fan cartography: the GTA 6 Mapping Project has been reconstructing the map since 2022, working from trailers, screenshots and material from the 2022 breach. The group measures distances between landmarks and claims 95–98% accuracy. Its current estimate is that the map is roughly 2.55 times the size of GTA V's. This is the most rigorous work in the field — but it is still an estimate built from edited marketing footage.

What is likely fake: the "full Leonida map" that spread in August 2026. The Mapping Project itself flagged the image as probably fake: the styling is too simple to be a genuine internal Rockstar asset, and it arrived in the same leak flow that was tied to a crypto pump. When the group with the most to gain from the map being real says it is not, that is worth listening to.

The five county names circulating — Vice Dale, Mariana, Kelly, Leonard and Lummox — all trace to a single source. No independent party has confirmed them and Rockstar has never mentioned them. File them as unconfirmed.

What is more credible: screenshots of the map from inside the game itself, which accompanied the genuine gameplay videos. These show locations such as Dalton Island, Tequesta Retreat, Gloriana Key and Catalan Key, Jason's house on the southern keys, racetracks and a military airfield at the map's edge. Those screenshots line up with the Mapping Project's independent estimates, which is a real signal that they are genuine. Keep them clearly separate from the big poster map — the two have completely different credibility.

What the leaked videos show of the world: crowded beach scenes with strikingly little repetition in character models, a nightclub called NINE1NINE, gas stations with a price list for fuel and repairs, a store selling video games and arcade cabinets, and a nudist colony. This comes from a build likely dating to 2024 or early 2025 and need not reflect the final release.

What nobody knows: whether the whole map is accessible from the start, whether it expands with updates, how the balance of city to countryside falls, how far north the state reaches, and whether locations from 2002's Vice City return in any form.

Why does this matter? Because the map is what people will argue about hardest after release. If an AI-generated map somebody made in August 2026 lodges in people's memories, come November we will be stuck with furious discussions about regions that were "cut" and never existed. That is exactly what happened on a smaller scale with GTA V in 2013.

Once "An Extended Look" has aired we will have the first official view of the world in motion. We will update this article then — based on what Rockstar shows itself, and nothing else.

Sources: Rockstar Games' official GTA VI site, Trailer 1 and Trailer 2, the GTA 6 Mapping Project, GTA Intel, Sportskeeda, Escorenews and Samlover.