Grand Theft Auto VI: Florida Man Simulator 2025 (2024)

webmeister

Jan 31, 2007

The answer is, mate, because I want to do you slowly. There has to be a bit of sport in this for all of us. In the psychological battle stakes, we are stripped down and ready to go. I want to see those ashen-faced performances; I want more of them. I want to be encouraged. I want to see you squirm.

Trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdBZY2fkU-0

First off, Let's Talk About The Hack
In late 2022, a kid broke into Rockstar’s internal Slack using a hotel TV and an Amazon Fire stick (seriously). The hacker released about 90 video clips of GTA VI testing, which Rockstar claimed were from 2019 - though file names are from September 2021 to late 2022. If you want to watch, they aren’t too hard to find, particularly on some sort of Internet Archive. There's a lot of minute detail, but most of the clips aren’t very interesting to watch - if you’ve ever done software testing you can probably guess what they look like.

Just in case, I’ll spoiler tag any leaked stuff below. Anything not spoiler-tagged is public knowledge, but as far as I know there’s no major story spoilers or anything like that.

What do we know so far?

Setting: We’re heading to the state of Leonida, Rockstar’s take on Florida, with a specific focus on Vice City (aka Miami).

Protagonists : Two protagonists: Lucia, a Latina woman, and her boyfriend/husband/partner in crime. His name in the leaks is Jason. Lucia’s actress is probably Manni Perez, who looks and sounds like Lucia, and has minor VA credits for GTA Online. Plenty more evidence here if you're interested. The male lead is totally unknown at this stage.

Character switching?: Not 100% confirmed, but two lead characters means character-switching is almost certainly back, probably with an expanded system - unlike V where switching is limited to either open-world roaming or scripted points during missions. Assuming the two protagonists are together most of the time opens up some intriguing possibilities. The leaks show some tactical-style commands between the two during a diner hold-up.

Story: We know zero about the story at this point, though an outlaw couple committing robberies sounds like Bonnie & Clyde, and the car’s bullet holes in the official artwork directly references the Bonnie & Clyde death car. At this stage all we know is that Lucia is in prison during the trailer and is wearing an ankle monitor in the game’s official artwork.

Systems & Tech : Right now, current-gen consoles only (PS5 and Xbox Series X/S). PC gamers will likely have to wait a year to enjoy their driver updates and launcher anguish, when Rockstar inevitably releases a PC edition that we’ll all buy again because we're suckers. Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick all but confirmed that would be the case here too. The DigitalFoundry tech nerds are assuming it’ll run at 30fps on consoles, based on the lighting and effects seen in the trailer.

Release Date : According to the trailer, it’s “Coming 2025”, but Take-Two Interactive’s latest investor update indicated Fall 2025.

Tell me about the map!
It’s Big. A lot of the leaked clips had visible x/y/z coordinates in RAGE engine format, so mappers started building a rough map, then triangulating those against locations shown in the trailer. Current estimate is that it's significantly larger than GTA V and with fewer empty areas. Also seems like more tall buildings, more small towns, more building interiors. So probably a bit larger than RDR2, which is also packed with stuff (remember that a huge chunk of the GTA V map is just empty mountains).

The trailer shows specific Florida locations like Miami Beach, downtown Miami, Wynwood, Little Haiti, Little Havana, Florida Keys, and the Everglades. There’s at least five different counties mentioned. From the leaks, we also know (map spoilers) there’s another city called Port Gellhorn, likely based on Tampa, and other clips have small mountains, but probably nothing like Mount Chiliad. Leaks also mention Florida landmarks like Disney World, Cape Canaveral, Lake Okeechobee, and either Daytona or Sebring Raceway. Currently unknown whether Mar-a-Lardo will make an appearance.

If you’re interested in more about the mapping project, the latest version is here.

Let’s talk about the trailer
The trailer is 90 seconds of in-engine footage, packed with detail. If you’ve got a spare 20 minutes, feel free to watch an exhaustive breakdown of trailer details here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMq4OtZTigk

But a few highlights I enjoyed:

• People interacting with cars in a way we haven’t seen before: a dude is filling up with gas, a woman twerking atop a moving car, Lucia standing up in the convertible (and another guy hanging out another car’s door to film her)
  
• Loads of customised cars
  
• Lots more animals: the trailer briefly showed gators, flamingos, deer, sharks, dolphins, turtles, and a chihuahua. In the leaks there were also rats, skunks, possums and raccoons
  
• It’s Miami, so there’s plenty of boats: jet skis, speedboats, fan boats of course, small yachts and pleasure craft, billionaire yachts, and moving (!!) cargo ships. Boat wakes look fantastic.
  
• Both the hair physics and the lighting are incredible – we even see hair blowing in the wind in a car
  
• Accurately rendered chest hair is confirmed
  
• Intense thunderstorms and hurricanes (it’s Florida!)
  
• Huge amount of NPC interactions, and NPCs directly interacting with each other - taking photos of each other, socialising etc, rather than just spawning near each other and standing around
  
• Smartphones and social media. Loooots of social media.

What’s the in-game social media for anyway?

In short: nobody knows. Maybe a style choice for the trailer, maybe a larger part of the game - it’s all just (fun) speculation at this point. Someone’s phone-filming in almost every trailer shot, so expect video content like TikTok or Instagram Reels to be the focus. It might be VI's version of the Honor system in RDR2, but with Famous vs Infamous instead of High vs Low Honor. The leaks mentioned LifeInvader, and WhatUp! Messenger specifically, but there are almost definitely others.

Official Leaks: Patent Filings
Rockstar/Take-Two have filed a few patents over the last few years for tech that'll probably feature in-game. A couple of highlights include:

• A system for procedurally generating areas (particularly interiors). It works by combing pre-existing assets based on metadata tags (eg “middle-class, Latino, modern”). Rumour is that they’re aiming for 70% of buildings enterable, so proc-gen rather than hand-crafting seems like a requirement.
  
• An NPC system that animates based on detailed environmental cues rather than pre-scripted animations. You can see this in trailer’s: eg the iguana guy begs for change when a group of NPCs walk past, and they subtly change direction to avoid him. A guy takes a selfie with a supercar, a group of guys toss beers between each other on the beach.
  
• A similar system for traffic behaviour, where cars respond more naturally to stimulus, rather than following pre-set paths and basic reactions like “swerve” or “stop”.

What about GTA Online? aka will they finally fix the loving netcode (lol no)

A big unknown. I suspect you'll just launch into GTA Online, then choose between Los Santos or Leonida. Probably you can copy your appearance over and maybe some starting cash, but I doubt the billionaire whales can bring all their toys. Hopefully it succeeds and doesn’t get dropped within a year like Red Dead Online!!

The GTA Online Thread is still active, if you’re needing a GTA fix!

For the role-players, Rockstar recently bought cfx.re, the group behind popular Online roleplaying mods FiveM and RedM, so expect more roleplay features/integration. Singer T-Pain also mentioned that Rockstar told him to stop playing Online RP “now that you’re working on the game”. It's unknown if he’s a voice actor, radio DJ, a music consultant, or something else.

My roleplaying outfit is sorted:

Anything else cool from the leaks?
A frankly astonishing amount of detail has been sifted out of the leaked footage. There’s a 60-page PDF with every miniscule detail you could ever want: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1nWe3VppmntamU6_bvFUbaylwt_OrzPqQ/view

For a few highlights, I’ve put together a list:

• A witness ID system similar to Red Dead 2 shows up in a couple of clips (full ID vs partial description, car colour vs car brand etc)
  
• A diner stickup shows a lot of info on the anticipated robbery/holdup system. Lucia and Jason work together, with options/commands to zip-tie/rob/execute hostages, run crowd control, loot the register etc. Police response is a countdown timer, rather than star levels. The police don’t suicidally charge in on arrival either – they take up defensive positions outside waiting for you to emerge or surrender.
  
• It looks like the character switching is instantaneous, so you can potentially change perspective based on the character’s skills or maybe what you’d prefer to play. Think stuff like driving a getaway car vs shooting at pursuers
  
• Jason’s design is quite different to the trailer. Here he looks younger, scrawnier, paler and more redneck, complete with a filthy singlet, backwards trucker hat and cargo shorts. It might be an earlier design, or maybe SA’s fat/muscle sliders are coming back.
  
• It’s the same "HD Universe" as GTA IV/V, as LifeInvader CEO Jay Norris is mentioned in dialogue.
  
• There might be stealth and/or hacking systems: a “CCTV Detection Meter” is mentioned, while Lucia has a couple of hacking tools in her weapon wheel
  
• The Miami MetroMover is included
  
• Sports are coming back: there’s tennis courts in the trailer; while basketball, fishing, tennis and golf are in the leaks. Plus minimap icons for races.
  
• You can now move while in cover (the police are seen doing this too)
  
• There's a few different weapon wheels - a couple of them might be like RDR2 with unlimited weapons in your vehicle and a limited selection on foot. But that limit isn't in other clips so who knows.
  
• There’s a colossal list of brands/weapons/cars etc that are either new or returning from previous games, but I haven’t added them here as I don’t think it’s that interesting
  
• Likewise, there’s a list of hundreds of events, but with no context it’s hard to draw any useful meaning from a lot of them.

• Profile
• Post History
• Rap Sheet