Most of the GTA 6 map conversation gets stuck on one of two questions - 'how big is it' and 'where's Vice City'. Both miss the more useful frame. The map is more usefully described as four regions, each with its own pace and design vocabulary.
We use this four-region split everywhere on the site. It is how the Vice City breakdown sits inside the larger Leonida guide, and it is the structure trailer footage organises itself around if you watch it cold.
Region one: Vice City proper
The dense urban core. Sits in the south of the state. Built around an art deco strip that reads unmistakably as the South Beach analogue, a downtown that reads as a denser version of Brickell, a port and industrial waterfront, and a residential belt that fades into suburbs as you move north. This is the densest region in terms of pedestrians, traffic and interactable buildings - which is the way Rockstar tends to frame their cities.
Most of the trailer footage you have already seen is here. The mall, the strip clubs, the night-life frames, the police chases through bright streets - all Vice City. We cover this region in full inside the Vice City silo.
Region two: the suburbs and inland small towns
North of Vice City, the map transitions through suburbs into smaller towns that read as inland Florida - strip malls, trailer parks, gas stations, retail strips and the occasional county road. This region tends to get less coverage in pre-launch discussion than it deserves, partly because it does not headline trailers the way Vice City does. It is also the region that is most likely to surprise people on launch day, because Rockstar's suburbs in GTA 5 were where some of the strangest, smallest, most memorable side content lived.
We cover named towns we have spotted, the highway transitions between them, and the agricultural backdrop in a series of articles starting from Leonida's rural towns and the northern suburbs.
Region three: the wetlands
The Everglades-coded region. The most visually distinct of the four, defined by sawgrass, cypress, airboats, alligators and stilt houses - all visible inside Trailer 2. Rockstar has not named this region in official material, but the visual references are precise enough that the analogy with the real Everglades is the right way to read it.
This is the region where unfamiliar things will probably happen in the moment-to-moment of the game - airboat traversal, swamp-side missions, hidden encampments. We cover the spatial layout in the wetlands map page and the region experience in the Everglades region guide.
Region four: the Keys
South of Vice City, a chain of islands extends across the map - clearly modelled on the real Florida Keys. Bridges link the islands. The aesthetic is brighter, smaller, slower - dive bars, marinas, the kind of place where the road just ends in the water. Trailer 2 frames the islands several times and the visual reference is direct.
We cover the Keys analogue in the Florida Keys map page and the comparison with real Keys geography in a separate piece. The bridge route between Vice City and the islands is a single drive worth its own article and it gets one.
What this frame does not include
Two things. First, no specific neighbourhood-level structure - that lives inside the silo articles. Second, no claim about exactly where the borders sit between the regions. The transition between Vice City suburbs and inland towns, for example, is fuzzy in the trailers and we do not pretend otherwise. The four-region split is a working frame, not a Rockstar map projection.
The honest advice for any reader thinking 'this all sounds neat, but how do I know where one region ends': it is going to be soft on launch day. Rockstar's open worlds have always favoured continuous transitions over sharp borders. The four regions exist for editorial clarity. They are not four discrete zones the game enforces.