Rockstar reveals why GTA 6's world is its biggest yet

Rockstar isn't just building another Vice City. According to studio head Rob Nelson, GTA 6's world represents the furthest the studio has ever pushed its own open-world formula, and he's tying that ambition directly back to the lessons of Red Dead Redemption 2.

Nelson, when speaking to IGN, mentioned that the game Red Dead 2, released in 2018 but comparable to many other 2026 games, gave Rockstar Games the time, tools, and the team necessary to craft "a fully realised, consistent-feeling world". 

GTA 6 continues that approach and aims to create "the largest, deepest, most densely populated, and most complex world we have ever built."

Thus, GTA 6 becomes a kind of spiritual sequel to Red Dead 2, not only to GTA 5. There are a number of features present in GTA 6 borrowed directly from Red Dead 2. These include Jason's Dead Eye and the feature of gathering creatures, among other elements.

The language used by Rockstar focuses explicitly on population as being the feature where Rockstar has put in the most efforts to make improvements rather than the size of the map.

While Rockstar has not yet officially revealed the size of the map for GTA 6, previous information indicated that it is twice the size of GTA 5’s and thrice the size of Red Dead 2’s map. Coupled with Nelson’s remarks on density, this gives an indication of a world constructed in terms of encounters and less on size.