Leonida

Leonida is the largest and most varied open world Rockstar has ever built, set in the modern day after the events of GTA V and part of the HD Universe. Rockstar has now put official figures on the scale. Rob Nelson told creators at the Extended Look preview that the map is twice the size of GTA V’s map and three times the playable area of Red Dead Redemption 2, that Vice City itself is twice as big as Los Santos, and that the built-up area outside Vice City is eleven times the built-up area outside Los Santos. The state has denser cities, far heavier traffic on narrower and more realistically scaled roads, more enterable interiors, and a transport network of highways, trams and bus stops where the player can wait for a bus. Leonida is divided into five confirmed counties, the Leonida Keys archipelago, the Grassrivers wetlands, and Mount Kalaga National Park. Each region draws on a real Florida or Georgia counterpart, from Miami Dade in the southeast to the Florida Panhandle in the northwest and the Everglades in the south.

Leonida is Rockstar's take on Florida. The real Florida is a flat subtropical peninsula of beaches, wetlands, and sprawling suburbs, running from the Panhandle pine country down to the coral islands of the Keys.

The official size comparison replaces the earlier community estimates. In Rob Nelson’s words, the map is twice the size of GTA V and three times that of the playable area of Red Dead Redemption 2, the city itself is twice as big as Los Santos, and the built-up area outside Vice City is eleven times the built-up area outside Los Santos. Rockstar’s preview material describes it as the biggest map the studio has worked on. Lucia’s skydiving sequence in the Extended Look is the clearest single illustration of the scale, with near infinite draw distance across the bay.

Fog of war returns. A fresh save covers the pause menu map in fog to encourage exploration, as it did in GTA V, and the map only fills in as regions are visited. One creator who attended the preview saw the full map for around three seconds and said it was covered by the fog of war, so no exact shape could be read. From that glimpse he recalled what looked like an airport or some sort of base, possibly military, down in the Keys, and said he saw no Panhandle-style arm on the map. Both recollections are unconfirmed and Rockstar has not published the map.

Rob Nelson has also explained how the regions were chosen. Miami is the anchor, and the surrounding areas such as the Everglades and the other inhabited spots outside the city were picked deliberately for what they add that the city cannot, with biomes compressed so that transitions feel natural. That is why the Extended Look moves from dense Vice City streets and packed beaches to the islands of the Keys, wetlands crossed by airboat, ports, highways and rural towns, with jet skis, kayaks and dirt bikes covering the ground between them. The footage was weighted heavily towards Vice City and Lucia, however, and only brief shots of the Grassrivers and Mount Kalaga made the cut. Small state-wide touches include highway warning signs reading that turn signals are now required in Leonida, and Leonida City Tours buses that run through the city.

The state name Leonida is a deliberate echo of the real Florida state motto (Sunshine State) and the city of Leonida in classical Greek history, while Gloriana points at the historical name for the British monarch Queen Elizabeth I, often associated with Georgia, the US state Gloriana is modelled on.