There exists a region of the GTA 6 map that whispers 'Everglades' as soon as you lay eyes on a frame of it. Sawgrass, cypress, airboats, alligators, homes on stilts, and the horizon lowering and widening as the trees give way. Trailer 2 spends real screen time here, and the area is one of the most visually unique on the whole map.
This guide gives you a walking tour. We discuss what we can tell from what you see in the trailer, how it matches up to the real Everglades, and where we have to draw the line between what we know and what we're inferring. The map-detail companion to this article is the Everglades wetlands map page; read this article for the regional experience.
What you see when you look at the wetlands frames
Sawgrass as far as the eye can see. Cypress hammocks - little islands of trees where water levels allow roots to grow. Airboats slicing through grass and knee-deep water. Alligators right next to the boats. Stilt houses bordering the water. A wooden walkway cutting through the sawgrass. Trailer 2 captures all of this in a quick montage - the visual coding is very deliberate and precise.
The wetlands show up again in aerial frames, where they form a pale-green swath cutting across the centre of the state. The colour palette in those frames does real work - the wetlands feel unlike the urban Vice City frames, and unlike the Keys to the south too.
How this compares to the real Everglades
The real Everglades is actually a slow-moving river - a sheet of fresh water that flows south through Florida from Lake Okeechobee down to Florida Bay. The fauna that we see depicted in the GTA 6 trailers - alligators, wading birds, presumably panthers and deer - is authentic to the real Everglades ecology. The architecture - stilt houses, weathered docks, abandoned-looking outpost buildings - is true to the Everglades' fringe areas of Big Cypress and Ten Thousand Islands.
What probably won't match, though, is the geographic precision. The Everglades is massive; condensing it to fit into an area within Leonida means you get a stylised depiction, not one you can measure. That's the same kind of compression every Rockstar map uses on its real-world counterparts, and we don't think people should get hung up on it.
What this region is likely to feel like to play
Slower paced than Vice City. More sedate. Your visibility is limited by trees and water. Travel around the area will rely heavily on airboats and on roads that snake along the higher ground. The mechanics of wildlife encounters are guesswork for now (we cover the wider wildlife list separately), but visually Rockstar is strongly suggesting you will be encountering wildlife, not just seeing it as background.
Storm/flood mechanics remain unknown. There are shots of flooding in Trailer 2, but Rockstar hasn't confirmed dynamic flooding as gameplay. That's explained in detail on the storm scenes page, but in short: it's been shown, it's mechanically plausible, but it's unconfirmed.
What's likely to live here in terms of side content
Pure speculation, but interesting to consider. Real Florida wetlands feature a ton of Rockstar's favourite iconography: smuggling outposts, illegal fishing holes, isolated shacks, disputed back-country. In GTA 5, Blaine County fulfilled a similar function for rural-and-weird side content. Leonida's wetlands seem poised to do the same here.
We're not promising side missions. We're saying that historically, Rockstar games with areas that look like this have been chock full of random little unscripted things - encounters, secret locations, easter eggs - and there's already weird, off-the-road imagery in Trailer 2 that fits that pattern.
What we don't know yet
The size of the wetlands region compared to other map regions. Does it contain named towns within it? Is it fully accessible from launch? Are airboats confirmed as the primary traversal vehicle, or will smaller boats share this role? Specific wildlife AI behaviour. The region's exact role in the story. Will Lucia and Jason spend a lot of time here, or will it be primarily side-content territory?
All of these are perfectly valid questions. None of them are answered by anything Rockstar has released so far. We update this page when we learn more.