Every GTA city is a funhouse-mirror version of a real place — Los Santos is Los Angeles, Liberty City is New York, and now Leonida is Florida. But how faithful is the reflection? Here's a geography comparison based on what the trailers have shown.
Vice City vs Miami
The connection between Vice City and Miami is explicit and has been since the original Vice City game in 2002. The original was set in 1986 Miami — neon, palm trees, Art Deco hotels, Scarface-era cocaine trade. GTA 6's Vice City is the same city 40 years later: more towers, more traffic, more social media, and the same underlying contradictions of extreme wealth and poverty side by side.
Real Miami's geography — Biscayne Bay, the causeway islands, the Art Deco strip of South Beach, Wynwood's murals, downtown's glass towers — is all visible in distorted form in the trailers. Rockstar never copies one-to-one: they compress, exaggerate, and occasionally flip landmarks, but the visual language is unmistakably Miami.
The Leonida Keys vs the Florida Keys
Both trailers show a chain of low islands connected by a long bridge — an obvious reference to the Florida Keys, the 125-mile archipelago that runs southwest from Miami. The Keys in real life are known for laid-back fishing culture, dive bars, waterfront properties and a genuine sense of being at the end of the road. In GTA 6 terms, they're perfect mission territory: isolated, geography that forces confrontations onto bridges and water, and a distinct cultural identity from Vice City.
The game's version appears compressed (real Keys are over 100 miles long — impractical for a game map) but retains the essential shape of islands-on-a-bridge that makes the Keys iconic.
The wetlands vs the Everglades
Trailer 1 features significant wetland footage: airboats, swamp vegetation, wildlife, and the kind of shallow water that cars can't cross but boats can. This is clearly inspired by the Everglades — the vast wetland ecosystem that covers much of southern Florida. The Everglades in real life is one of the most distinctive landscapes in the US: flat, watery, full of alligators and birds, and practically uninhabitable except by the few communities that have adapted to it.
In game terms, the wetlands serve as a zone where the normal rules of city gameplay don't apply. No road chases, different vehicle requirements (airboats become the car of this environment), and genuine natural hazards. It's the GTA equivalent of a mountain biome — a reason to use different tools.
Inland Florida: Tampa, Orlando, Daytona
Florida has more to it than Miami and the Keys. The trailers show inland areas — highways through flat rural country, small towns, roadside motels — that evoke the Florida that tourists don't see: Central Florida, the stretch of theme parks, strip malls and suburban sprawl that runs up the I-4 corridor. Whether Leonida's map includes analogues for Orlando or Tampa is unknown, but the rural inland footage clearly draws from non-Miami Florida.
Daytona's famous beach racing culture is another Florida landmark — whether GTA 6 includes a racetrack or racing element with a Daytona flavour is pure speculation, but it would fit.
The geography that can't be copied
Real Florida is flat — almost perfectly flat, with the highest natural point in the state a modest 345 feet. Game maps need elevation for interesting traversal, so Leonida will almost certainly exaggerate the terrain. The trailer already shows elevated areas that don't exist in real southern Florida. Rockstar also tends to compress distances dramatically — the real distance from Miami to the Keys is greater than all of GTA 5's map.
Cultural references to real Florida
Florida is culturally specific in ways beyond geography. The Florida Man internet phenomenon (real newspaper headlines about absurd crimes committed in the state) is clearly an inspiration — the social-media-clip tone of Trailer 1 is essentially Florida Man as aesthetic. Spring break, retirement communities, Cuban-American culture, evangelical megachurches, theme park capitalism — these are all real Florida cultural textures that GTA 6's world appears to be mining.
Quick answers
Is Vice City based on Miami? Yes — it's an explicitly fictional version of Miami, always has been.
Are the Leonida Keys the Florida Keys? Inspired by, yes — compressed and fictionalised, but the visual reference is clear.
Does GTA 6 include the Everglades? The wetland environment in the trailers is clearly Everglades-inspired.
