Game Informer's GTA 6 issue confirms hurricanes and more than 170 animal species

Game Informer issue 382 went live digitally on September 29, 2026, and two free pages from the cover story confirm what the September 25 reveal would not say. Leonida has tropical storms and hurricanes. Storms are local, and the ground stays wet after they pass. The state has more than 170 animal species. The release date is still November 19.

The 14-page story itself, “Welcome to Leonida,” sits behind a Game Informer subscription. This page uses the two pages anyone can read, then only the sentences that more than one outlet reproduces in the same words from the subscriber story. The 12 screenshots stay with Rockstar and the magazine. We do not host them.

What the free pages actually say

	Confirmed on the free pages	Still unstated
Weather	Dynamic clouds, local storms, puddles and wet surfaces after rain, rainbows in the right light, tropical storms and hurricanes	How often the big storms happen, and whether they change missions or the story
Wildlife	More than 170 species on land, in the air and in the sea. Named: flamingos, manatees, pelicans, alligators, green iguanas, cane toads, feral cats, rhesus macaques	A full species list. The identities of the rare animals
Tracking	Some animals are categorized Rare, Discoverable or Legendary, and can be tracked	What tracking pays, and whether it is a hunt
Issue	14 pages, 12 new screenshots, digital on September 29. Print follows for subscribers and newsstands	A Rockstar Newswire post. There isn’t one for this

Marcus Stewart wrote both free pages. They point at the cover story for the rest.

Hurricanes, and weather that does not cover the whole map

The weather page says Rockstar confirmed the systems, built to simulate Florida’s tropical climate rather than permanent sunshine.

Clouds roll across Leonida, from clear sky to overcast. A storm can be pouring in one place while you stand in sun and watch it. Drive there after it passes and the puddles and wet surfaces are still there. Rainbows show up when the light is right.

Tropical storms and seasonal hurricanes are in the game. Stewart writes the limit in the same paragraph: the magazine does not know how often those larger storms occur, or how they affect gameplay and storytelling. Presence is confirmed. A mission built around a hurricane is not.

Outlets that read the subscriber story quote Owen Shepherd, Rockstar’s vice president of art for lighting and rendering, and they quote him the same way. IGN, Dexerto and others all carry this:

“We have re-engineered our weather system to make everything much more localized and persistent, and really wanted the world to feel dynamically solid and achieve a sense of scale we haven’t felt before.”

And the cloud line:

“The world features new fully dynamic cloudscapes that roll across the map, these give us a broad spectrum of weather from the clear blue skies of a Miami winter to the vertiginous cumulonimbus clouds with sporadic lightning that you see most afternoons in the Floridian summer and autumn.”

On the storms themselves, the same outlets quote him: heavy clouds, strong winds, dense atmospherics and a lot of rain, so that everything is dripping wet, water gushes off roof edges and lampposts, thunder rumbles, and lightning lights the clouds. Wind is described as its own system, including offshore breezes after sunset, convectional updrafts, and buildings blocking the air. Hair and debris swirl, gusts ripple the water, grass in the swamps bends.

That is depiction. It is not a rule for how often a hurricane arrives, or for whether the bridges close the way they did in Vice City in 2002. That older game used a hurricane warning on the radio to lock the islands at the start. A radio excuse and a simulated storm are different things.

More than 170 animal species

The wildlife page says Leonida has over 170 species across land, air and sea, several of which have never appeared in a Rockstar game.

Named on that page:

Native: flamingos, manatees, pelicans, alligators
Invasive: green iguanas, cane toads, feral cats, rhesus macaques

Flamingos, manatees, pelicans, alligators and green iguanas were already in official trailers. Cane toads, feral cats and rhesus macaques were not on our trailer roster. Game Informer notes that Florida really does have the monkeys. The full on-screen list we already kept is on the wildlife page, which now includes the new names.

The same free page says Rockstar is building on Red Dead Redemption with iridescence, bioluminescence, translucency and feather types, plus new hair and fur on coats and pelts. That is how the animals are rendered. It is not a description of animal AI, migration or predator behavior. Those are still undescribed.

Players can track some animals marked Rare, Discoverable or Legendary. The identities of the harder ones are secret. Tracking is the confirmed verb. The page does not say what you get for it, and it does not say you hunt them.

IGN and other write-ups of the subscriber story add a split the free page leaves out: more than 60 kinds of bird and more than 30 land mammals, plus reptiles and fish. Treat that split as reported from the issue, not as a line on the free page.

Twelve screenshots, and what a rifle near a deer is not

The issue includes 12 new screenshots. Outlets describing them mention one of Jason in open country with a rifle, near deer, in at least one telling with a quad bike. Rockstar’s own earlier screenshots already show a hunter with a scoped rifle and another leveling a double-barrel shotgun at an alligator. A person carrying a hunting weapon is not a hunting minigame.

Rockstar’s area copy for Mount Kalaga National Park already names hunting, fishing and off-road trails. The site has treated that as a promise in the brochure, not as a confirmed system, and this issue does not change the rating. The hunting and fishing claim stays a rumor. The wildlife page has the line between animals that exist and activities you can start.

”Twice the size of GTA 5” is still a paraphrase

VGC, IGN and others headlined the issue as Rockstar confirming that Leonida is twice the size of the GTA 5 map. The person they are summarizing is Aaron Garbut, Rockstar North’s co-studio head. The words he is quoted as saying are that it is the biggest map Rockstar has made “by some degree,” and that it is denser, more detailed and more interactive. “Twice,” and in some write-ups “around twice,” is the reporter’s description of that passage. It is not inside quotation marks.

That is the same claim the trailers produced, and it stayed a rumor after August 27. That day, three Rockstar-sanctioned conversations gave three different multiples. The direct interview was with Rob Nelson, Garbut’s co-studio head, and he gave IGN no figure at all. A paraphrase of a subscriber-only interview does not retire that record. Square miles are still unpublished. The living verdict is on how big the map is and on the leak tracker.

What Garbut did say, in a sentence IGN, GamingBolt and others print the same way, is about interiors. The team “obsessed about every part,” the rooftops, the alleys, the internals and everything in between, until they hit “a critical mass with the numbers of our interiors” and buildings “feel more real inside and out.” He calls the world “a cohesive whole with the density of content and a hand-crafted quality to every bit.”

On the pressure around the project, the same outlets quote him: “As the pressure for us on this project is huge, we dealt with that by doing our best to overdeliver.” He says the usual trade, scale against detail or detail against interaction, went the other way, and that “everything is dialed up”: detail, scope, breadth, scale, interaction and density. “I don’t think we have ever created anything close to this before.”

“Critical mass” is not 70 percent of buildings, and it is not the rumored “700 interiors.” Both of those numbers are still leaks. Nelson had already said in August that you can enter “a lot of buildings, a lot, a huge number,” after a hands-off demo in which he robbed a gas station from inside. Garbut’s line agrees with “many.” It still does not say an ordinary door opens, or what share of the city that is. The enterable-buildings claim stays a rumor.

Outlets that read the full issue name five Rockstar staff in it: Garbut, senior vice president of narrative Rupert Humphries, senior vice president of environment art Paul MacPherson, Shepherd, and vice president of dynamic art Michael Kane. The free pages do not print those names.

The six regions those write-ups list are Vice City, the Leonida Keys, Grassrivers, Port Gellhorn, Ambrosia and Mount Kalaga National Park. Rockstar had already named those six. The issue restates them. It does not add a seventh. The regions page is unchanged on that point.

What the September 25 reveal was, and what this replaces

Game Informer announced the cover on September 25. Stewart’s reveal promised 14 pages, interviews with several lead designers, 12 screenshots, and Rockstar cover art of Jason Duval and Lucia Caminos. It named three topics and called them never-before-shared: weather that simulates Florida’s less sunny phenomena, the amount of wildlife, and how the studio researched Miami and Florida. It did not say hurricanes. This page said so on purpose until the issue existed. The issue now says hurricanes.

The magazine’s post on X from the reveal week called the issue a collectible. The digital-issue note on September 29 says subscribers can read it, and that a print subscription can start with this issue in the US and in 52 other countries. The hub for the issue is gameinformer.com/GTAVI.

GTA V was the December 2012 cover, issue 236, an 18-page story about ten months before that game shipped. This one lands seven weeks before November 19, after two trailers, the Extended Look and a large Rockstar gallery. In May 2026 a blacked-out Game Informer cover was read as GTA 6 and turned out to be The Blood of Dawnwalker. This cover names the game.

Nothing in the issue moves the date, announces a PC version, or adds a trailer.