Five people at Rockstar are quoted by name in these pages. The lines everyone is arguing about are not theirs.
Are GTA 6 missions locked behind money?
Some appear to be, but the sourcing is thinner than the headlines suggest. In a short section on robberies, Game Informer writes that certain missions only open up depending on your current income. There is no quotation mark around it and no Rockstar name attached, so it is the magazine's own summary rather than a developer's words. The word used is income, which is not the same as the cash in your pocket, and nobody has explained what Rockstar means by it. Readers are already split between two readings: money standing in for a level gate, which would be a grind, or something closer to the original Vice City where buying businesses moved the story on. Both are guesses. Given that Rockstar partnered with Game Informer to make the issue free, the line is strong reporting, but it still sits a step below a named person with a job title saying it.
What the issue actually is
It went live at noon Eastern on 29 September and cost nothing, because Rockstar partnered with Game Informer to make the cover story free in the magazine's app, which promptly fell over. Hold on to the word partnered: it tells you this is a document the studio was comfortable with.
It was written by Marcus Stewart, who grew up in South Florida, out of conversations with five named people at Rockstar: Aaron Garbut, Rupert Humphries, Paul MacPherson, Owen Shepherd and Michael Kane. Rob Nelson, the source for most of this year's quotes, does not appear. The article also never claims Stewart played the game. Where it describes how GTA 6 looks in motion, it is describing footage already shown.
What named people actually said
Garbut, co-studio head at Rockstar North, says this is the biggest map Rockstar has built and that the usual trade between scale and detail did not happen, with interiors dense enough that buildings feel real from the inside. Humphries, who runs narrative, describes research trips that included riding around at night with former police officers, which deserved a page of its own.
Shepherd's line on weather is that the system was rebuilt to be local and to persist, inside the same engine used for Red Dead Redemption 2: rain on one part of the map while you stand in sunshine nearby, and ground that stays wet after the storm passes. Kane, on dynamic art, talks about fur that mats with dirt and clumps when wet. MacPherson's passage on what sits between the northern towns is the best thing in the issue: a mud park party, demolition derby races on floodlit ovals at night, bass fishing in a lake. A floodlit derby track in the middle of nowhere is a better selling point than any map measurement.
What the magazine says in its own voice
Twice as large as GTA 5 is credited to Garbut as a description of what he said rather than as a quote, and coverage since has attributed the figure to him directly. No unit is given, so whether that means land only or land and water together is unstated.
The species count is the magazine's own: more than 170 species, including over 60 kinds of bird and upwards of 30 land mammals. For scale, Red Dead Redemption 2 was sold in 2018 on more than 200 species, so a crime game with a city at its centre is landing within reach of the western. That is the most impressive number in the issue, and it ranks above the hurricanes.
The hurricane line, read carefully
The article says yes to tropical storms and hurricanes flatly, and in the same paragraph says Shepherd did not share how often they happen or whether they touch gameplay or the story. What he does describe is heavy cloud, strong wind, a great deal of rain, and water pouring off roof edges and lampposts.
Believing hurricanes are in the game is reasonable: Rockstar helped give this article away, and would be unlikely to do that with a wrong sentence in it. What nobody who read these pages can tell you is whether a hurricane ever floods a street or changes a mission. If a thumbnail shows Vice City underwater, that image did not come from this issue.
What Rockstar declined to answer
Asked about Central Florida, meaning Orlando and its theme parks and the space coast, MacPherson said the team has to boil the state down to what serves the game, and then that they may not have those exact locations. Read slowly, that is not a no. The inference here, labelled as one, is that it reads like a no, because nobody answers a yes with may not. Anyone telling you theme parks are confirmed, or that they are cut, got there without Rockstar.
Trackable animals are sorted into categories including legendary, as in Red Dead, and which ones those are is being withheld. The skunk ape appears in the article as the writer's own wish, so if you see it on a list of confirmed creatures, someone copied a hope into the wrong column.
The regions, and the gap that stays open
The article lists the same six regions as Rockstar's website: Vice City, the Leonida Keys, the Grassrivers, Port Gellhorn, Ambrosia and Mount Kalaga National Park. Capri, the name on a road sign in the Extended Look, appears nowhere in the text. This issue was the first place that could have settled whether a seventh region exists, and it does not.
The one new thing is an adjective: the magazine calls these the six primary regions. That is not enough to build a theory on, tempting as it is.
The story is still missing, and that is fine
Stewart notes the studio has stayed mostly quiet about the plot, and he is right. What is passed along is that decisions large and small change the story's direction enough to make a second playthrough worthwhile, and that whether Jason and Lucia end up as friends or as a couple changes parts of it. That is the magazine's voice again.
After fourteen pages it is still not possible to say what Jason and Lucia want, which is a strange thing to conclude about an article that found room for how fur clumps. With seven weeks to launch, holding the plot back is the right call, because the plot is the one thing a magazine could actually spoil.
What the video covers
- Which claims carry a named Rockstar developer and which do not
- The income-gated missions line, and exactly how it is sourced
- The species count, and how it compares with Red Dead Redemption 2
- What Shepherd did and did not say about hurricanes
- The answer about Central Florida that is not quite a no
What we do not know yet
- What income means in the context of mission availability
- Whether hurricanes affect gameplay or only the weather
- Whether Central Florida locations appear at all
Sources
Evidence tier for what the five named leads say: confirmed, quoted with names and titles. For the map size, species count, hurricanes, the Heat system and the income line: reported, stated in the magazine's own voice in an issue Rockstar partnered on, which is strong but a step below a named quote. The reading of the Central Florida answer is inference. No leaked footage is shown or linked. See how this site grades evidence.
- Game Informer: the digital issue going live, and the cover story itself
- Pure Xbox: the map size, the 170 plus species breakdown, the weather rebuild and the Heat system
- GTA BOOM: the rundown of new details including the robberies section and mission availability
- Variety: the 2018 figure of more than 200 species in Red Dead Redemption 2
Both GTA 6 leaks side by side, and how to tell a real one from a fake: GTA 6 leaks, explained.
GTA 6 
