GTA 6 map opens up early, Edge feature says

You won't have to grind through the story of Grand Theft Auto 6 to see the whole of Leonida. According to a new Edge magazine preview, first passed on by the GTA VI O'Clock podcast and reported by IGN Brasil on October 29, the game's map opens up for free exploration relatively early. Story progress won't hold it back.

There is a catch, and it's the one fans would expect. The game opens with introductory story sections that set up the characters and the core mechanics. Once those are done, you are free to go where you like. If you want to head straight for the far northern tip of the state, the game won't stop you.

How Rockstar has handled this before

Rockstar's open worlds haven't always worked this way. In GTA 4, police roadblocks on Liberty City's bridges kept Niko Bellic on one island until the story let him cross. GTA 5 dropped that approach: once the opening tutorials were over, most of Los Santos and Blaine County was open to you.

The Red Dead games went their own way. The first Red Dead Redemption kept Mexico off limits until John Marston's story took him there. Red Dead Redemption 2 let players roam most of its map but held back one big region, the area from the original game, until the epilogue. Anyone who tried to sneak in early was shot dead by snipers.

GTA 6 looks closer to GTA 5. The main story will still take you all over Leonida, but as IGN Brasil puts it, you won't be stuck in Vice City for the first ten or so hours if you'd rather go somewhere else. (That figure is IGN Brasil's own example, not a number from Rockstar.)

A map that surprises its own makers

Opening the map early doesn't mean you'll see everything quickly. Aaron Garbut, co-studio head at Rockstar North, told Edge that he is still coming across new places in Leonida himself. That says something about how dense the world is.

Garbut puts part of that down to interiors. He says GTA 6 has an order of magnitude more indoor spaces than other Rockstar games, and every one of them was built by hand. That fits what Rockstar has already said about the scale of the world: the studio has described the map as roughly twice the size of GTA 5's, and the wider Edge cover feature went into how much detail fills that space.

What it means for players

If you like to wander, the message is simple: get through the opening, then pick a direction. Players who want to follow the story strictly can still do that and let it guide them around the state.

Some things are still unclear. The preview doesn't say how long the introductory stretch lasts, and it doesn't rule out a few specific spots being locked behind story missions, as with Red Dead Redemption 2's hidden region. We're also only hearing about the Edge piece through a podcast and IGN Brasil's write-up, so the exact wording from Rockstar may be more detailed than the summary.

We won't have to wait long to see for ourselves. GTA 6 arrives on November 19 for PS5 and Xbox Series X|S.