GTA 6 has hurricanes, and it can rain on one part of Leonida while another stays dry

Rockstar has confirmed that tropical storms and hurricanes hit Leonida, settling an argument fans have had since the first trailer. It came in Game Informer's 14-page GTA 6 cover story, which went live at noon Eastern on September 29 and was made free to read in the magazine's app after days of complaints about a paywall.

But the line that will change how Leonida feels day to day is not the one about hurricanes. It is the one about where the weather is.

Weather that stays put

"We have re-engineered our weather system to make everything much more localized and persistent, and really wanted the world to feel dynamically solid and achieve a sense of scale we haven't felt before," Owen Shepherd, Rockstar's vice president of art for lighting and rendering, told Game Informer. "The world features new fully dynamic cloudscapes that roll across the map, these give us a broad spectrum of weather from the clear blue skies of a Miami winter to the vertiginous cumulonimbus clouds with sporadic lightning that you see most afternoons in the Floridian summer and autumn."

Localized means you can stand in sunshine and watch rain fall somewhere else. Persistent means the weather over the Keys is not simply whatever the weather over Vice City is, reskinned. In GTA 5 the weather was effectively a single global state applied to the whole map at once; a system that rolls cloud across a map twice that size, and lets one region keep its own conditions, is a different thing entirely.

The wind is the giveaway

The detail that explains how this is possible is buried in a sentence about wind. Shepherd describes a new wind system that includes "offshore breezes after sunset, convectional updrafts, and occlusion from buildings," and adds that "hair and debris will swirl around on roof-tops; gusts of wind will blow ripples over the water surface and bend the grass in swamps."

Those first three items are not decoration. They are the actual machinery of Florida weather. Land heats faster than the sea, the warm air rises, and those convectional updrafts build the towering cumulonimbus that dumps rain on south Florida most summer afternoons; after sunset the temperature gradient reverses and the breeze runs back out to sea. Occlusion from buildings is the wind shadow downtown throws over its own streets. Rockstar is describing causes, not effects — and weather that has local causes is weather that can happen in one place and not another.

What Rockstar has not said

The storms themselves get a description and nothing more. Shepherd says "heavy clouds, strong winds, dense atmospherics, and a lot of rain combine so that everything is dripping wet, water is gushing off roof edges and lampposts, thunder rumbles and flashes of lightning light up the clouds dramatically." He does not say how often the big ones arrive, whether they are scheduled or random, or whether a hurricane changes a mission, closes a road, or moves the story.

So the confirmed fact is narrow and worth stating precisely: hurricanes exist in GTA 6. A hurricane you have to survive, or a storm surge that rearranges Vice City, is still a hope rather than a feature. One of the twelve new screenshots published with the issue shows what the confirmed version looks like — a seaplane over the Keys with a dark front and two lightning strikes building on the horizon, weather happening at a distance, to somebody else. That, more than a named hurricane, is the thing GTA has never had.

The same cover story put Leonida's wildlife at more than 170 species, including over 60 kinds of bird and more than 30 land mammals, and had Rockstar's Aaron Garbut call the map the studio's biggest ever "by some degree."