GTA 6 map and story is twice as big as GTA 5 reveals Rockstar

Rockstar is promising one of the biggest maps in gaming history with GTA 6, along with one of its longest campaigns yet. 

The GTA 6: An Extended Look video on Netflix was packed with details, but it didn’t give an indication of the game’s size. In fact it didn’t say anything at all, with no voiceover and only what you could glean from watching it.

Rockstar titles are known for their massive open worlds,and while they’re technically not as large as something like No Man’s Sky or Microsoft Flight Simulator, they’re far more dense when it comes to graphical detail and interactive elements. 

GTA 5 is Rockstar’s largest map to date in terms of landmass, but Red Dead Redemption 2 is arguably more dense. However, unsurprisingly, the developer is promising to eclipse them both with GTA 6. 

Following the Extended Look, YouTuber TGG, who was invited to Rockstar North earlier this month, posted a video to share ‘exclusive’ details from his conversation with Rockstar’s head of development Rob Nelson. 

One of the key details was the size of the map. Speaking in the video, TGG said: ‘The map is twice the size of GTA 5’s map, three times the size of Red Dead 2’s map. Vice City itself is twice the size of Los Santos, and Vice City and its surrounding suburbs is 11 times bigger than Los Santos and its surrounds, which is, like, nuts, dude.’

We already know GTA 6 is set in the Florida-inspired setting of Leonidas, which covers Vice City and other locations, such as the Leonida Keys and Port Gellhorn. 

Rockstar hasn’t officially released a graphic of GTA 6’s map yet, but a version did seemingly emerge as part of the recent wave of leaks. We can’t share it here, for legal reasons, but it seems to boast more city areas in comparison to GTA 5’s map. 

Beyond the size of the map, Nelson revealed to the New York Times the game’s length in terms of story content. In the interview, he said his most recent playthrough in February this year took around 80 hours to complete, which encompasses the main story and ‘optional goals with narrative ramifications’. 

That suggests there’ll be side missions which will affect the main story. If you want to compare this figure with GTA 5, that game’s main story takes 32 hours to beat, and 51.5 hours with side content, according to website HowLongToBeat. In other words, unless Nelson is a slowpoke, GTA 6’s story is significantly longer. 

This means GTA 6’s story will be comparable to the length of Red Dead Redemption 2, which takes roughly 84.5 hours to beat when you include side content. If you prioritise the main story, it lasts around 50 hours.

In a separate interview with IGN, Nelson revealed how they considered increasing the number of playable characters from GTA 5 in GTA 6, but in the end they dialled it back from three to two, to increase the ‘amount of player time with each’. 

‘As the narrative unfolds, we’re quite conscious to try and make sure that players have enough time with each character,’ Nelson said. ‘After doing GTA 5, we talked about different ideas of – do we do more characters? How do we follow up three characters? Is it four characters now? But we worried about diluting the amount of player time with each and therefore player connection with those characters. 

‘So we decided to step in this direction of two characters in a relationship.’

Based on the Extended Look, it seems like a wise decision – as the dynamic between Jason and Lucia seems to be one of the strongest aspects so far. However, we’ll have to see how it turns out when the full game launches on November 19, 2026. 

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