GTA 6 Vice City: Everything Confirmed About the Setting

Official artwork from Rockstar Games' GTA VI media page.

This article covers what Rockstar has actually confirmed about Vice City's setting and tone, plus how it stacks up against the two most relevant past games: 2002's Vice City and GTA 5's Los Santos.

A modern setting, not a period piece

The biggest structural decision Rockstar made for GTA 6 is setting it in the present day rather than returning to the 1980s. This is a deliberate departure from 2002's Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, which was set in 1986 and built almost entirely around Miami Vice and Scarface-style cocaine-era iconography.

• GTA 6's Leonida is explicitly modern, referencing 2020s culture, technology, and politics rather than recreating the 80s.
• Rockstar's own satire in recent games has increasingly tackled contemporary social and political themes; early impressions of GTA 6's marketing suggest it continues that pattern, touching on things like xenophobia and the broader rightward political shift seen in parts of the real US.
• Modern-day tech like drones, hacking, and pervasive internet/social media use are expected to factor into gameplay and satire in ways that simply weren't possible in a 1986-set game.

The 80s aren't gone, they're just a theme now

Despite being set in the present, GTA 6 leans hard into 80s nostalgia as a cultural throughline rather than a literal time period.

• Trailer 2's soundtrack and needle-drops lean into decades-old music, echoing the original Vice City's identity.
• The confirmed pre-order Vintage Vice City Pack bonus includes retro 80s-styled outfits and hairstyles for both Jason and Lucia, plus a classic-styled Vapid Stanier sedan, explicitly designed to nod back to 2002's game.
• The effect is a present-day city that still treats the 80s as part of its cultural DNA, the way real Miami still trades on its Miami Vice-era image decades later.

Vice City vs the 2002 original

Vice City vs GTA 5's Los Santos

GTA 5's Los Santos was a sun-bleached, satirical take on Los Angeles and Southern California, built around three protagonists with largely separate storylines. GTA 6's Vice City differs in a few concrete ways confirmed so far:

1. Scale: Leonida as a whole is estimated at roughly 1.5–2x the size of GTA 5's map (community estimate, not an official Rockstar figure), and includes far more wetland, coastal, and swamp terrain than the desert-and-canyon variety of Los Santos.
2. Narrative structure: Jason and Lucia's stories are one connected narrative told from two perspectives, rather than three mostly-parallel character arcs.
3. Detail level: Rockstar has directly stated Vice City is the most detailed city it has built, citing upgrades in physics, lighting (ray-traced global illumination), and animation that weren't available during GTA 5's original 2013 development.

For the full breakdown of every region in Leonida beyond Vice City itself, see the map guide on this site. For a full features comparison against GTA 5, see the comparison article.

What Vice City looks like in the trailers

Based on Rockstar's two released trailers:

• Art Deco beachfront architecture reminiscent of Miami's South Beach.
• Dense downtown skyscraper clusters.
• Neon-heavy nightlife districts.
• Waterfront luxury developments and marina areas.
• A visibly more varied population and street life than GTA 5's Los Santos, reflecting Miami's real-world cultural mix.

What's still unconfirmed

Rockstar hasn't published an official history or timeline for Vice City within the game's fiction, nor confirmed exactly how it connects (if at all) to the previous Vice City-set games in GTA canon, which have historically existed in a loosely rebooted continuity rather than a single shared timeline. Don't take any claims of direct in-universe continuity with the 2002 game as confirmed.