Weather

Weather is one of three subjects Rockstar chose to put in front of a magazine seven weeks before release, and it is the one with the least published evidence behind it. Until issue 382 there was no official description of a weather system in Grand Theft Auto 6, no named mechanic, and nothing on rockstargames.com that explained how any of it works.

What has actually been shown

Rain over Vice City in both trailers, wet roads and reflections, heavy skies at dusk, and a storm sequence in the Extended Look. All of it scenery: weather as a lighting state the shot happened to be in.

The hundred and sixty two official press stills are almost entirely clear. The heaviest sky Rockstar has published is the cloudbank over the Vice City sign at the top of this page, and that is a sunset rather than a system doing anything.

The one frame that shows a system

One of the twelve screenshots in issue 382 changes that. A seaplane banks over the Leonida Keys, and across the horizon behind it is a storm front with two distinct lightning strikes in it, while the water directly beneath the aircraft is still bright turquoise.

A front with an edge is a different thing from a global weather state. It means one part of the map can be under a storm while another is clear, and that the boundary between them is somewhere you can be. Nothing published before that image demonstrated it.

Why Rockstar would lead with it

In a Rockstar game weather has historically been a systems question rather than a cosmetic one. Red Dead Redemption 2 changed visibility, how horses behaved on wet ground, and how mud built up on a coat over a ride. Grand Theft Auto 5 changed handling on wet roads and did fairly little else.

Vice City is a driving city on a coastline, and rain is the cheapest way to make the same street play differently on a second visit. Choosing weather as one of three preview subjects, this late, suggests it reaches further into the game than a shader.

There is also a setting argument. Florida is the wettest state in the continental United States by rainfall, its hurricane season runs from 1 June to 30 November, and Grand Theft Auto 6 releases on 19 November, inside that window. The marketing has shown almost none of that.

What is not known

Everything that would make this a specification rather than a subject.

• Whether weather is scripted per mission, on a world clock, or genuinely dynamic
• Whether it affects driving, flying, boat handling, visibility or NPC behaviour, and by how much
• Whether hurricanes or named storms exist as events, which is the obvious Florida question and one Rockstar has never addressed
• Whether flooding is modelled, in a state where it is the defining hazard
• Whether the two lightning strikes in the Keys screenshot represent a simulated front or a composed shot

A lead designer describing a system in a preview is describing intent. Nobody outside Rockstar has played this game.