Hunting and wildlife

Two of the official screenshots make the case on their own. One shows two men walking through tall pine forest in Mount Kalaga carrying rifles. Another shows armed men sitting on an airboat in Grassrivers with dead alligators across the deck.

The wildlife shown so far

Alligators, deer, a Florida panther wading a creek with deer on the bank behind it, sea turtles, rays, dolphins, and an iguana the size of a small dog sunning itself on a Keys road. That last one is not a joke. Green iguanas are an established invasive species in south Florida and are exactly that size, and the panther is the state animal with a wild population in the low hundreds. See wildlife for the system the two of them belong to.

Why the precedent matters

Red Dead Redemption 2 modelled around two hundred animal species with individual behaviour, pelt quality that depended on how cleanly you killed them, and carcasses that degraded on the horse. It is still the most detailed animal simulation in a video game.

Rockstar built that. Whether it brings the whole apparatus to a modern-day setting is a separate question, and there is a reasonable argument it should not. Skinning and pelt quality make sense in 1899. In 2026 Florida they mostly do not.

The Florida framing

Reporting has suggested hunting will be more detailed than expected with an unusual twist attached. Given the setting, the obvious one is that a great deal of Florida hunting is nuisance and invasive species control rather than sport: pythons, iguanas, and alligator harvest under permit.

That would be a very Rockstar joke, and it would let the studio build hunting without asking a modern audience to shoot deer for fun. We are flagging it as the plausible read rather than as a confirmed system.

What is not known

Rockstar has not described hunting as a system, named a single species, or said whether either character hunts. Everything above is read off screenshots and series precedent.