GTA 6 weather and wildlife headline Game Informer's cover story

Game Informer revealed the cover of issue 382 on September 25, 2026, and it belongs to Grand Theft Auto VI. The magazine runs a 14-page cover story built on exclusive interviews with several lead designers at Rockstar Games, alongside 12 new screenshots. The digital edition goes live on Tuesday, September 29, 2026, 51 days before the November 19 release.

The writer, a self-described lifelong native of South Florida, says Rockstar walked the magazine through “never-before-shared features.” Weather comes first:

“Grand Theft Auto VI’s advanced weather systems that simulate Florida’s less sunny weather phenomena”

Wildlife is the second: “a staggering amount of wildlife,” native and otherwise, roaming Leonida “on land, air, and sea.” The animals guide lists every species Rockstar has shown so far.

The third topic is how Rockstar researched Miami and Florida to build what the magazine calls Rockstar’s most “culturally and aesthetically accurate and lifelike world to date.” The story focuses on how Rockstar brought Leonida and Vice City to life.

The issue went live on September 29, 2026, and it names what the reveal page held back. Leonida gets tropical storms and hurricanes, and weather runs locally: clear skies in one spot, heavy rain a short way off, VGC reported the same day. Owen Shepherd, Rockstar’s vice president of art for lighting and rendering, sets out the idea:

“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.”

Shepherd describes fully dynamic cloudscapes rolling across the map, from “the clear blue skies of a Miami winter” to the cumulonimbus and “sporadic lightning” of a Florida summer afternoon. In heavy storms, water cascades from rooftops and lampposts.

Wildlife now has a number: more than 170 species, including 60 kinds of birds, 30 land mammals, and sharks, whales and jellyfish at sea, per VGC on September 29, 2026. In the same issue, Rockstar North co-studio head Aaron Garbut puts the map at twice the size of GTA 5’s. He leans harder on density than on size, in a passage VGC quoted:

“…to the point we hit a critical mass with the numbers of our interiors, and you start to feel the buildings are more real inside and out.”

Garbut names the rooftops and the alleys among the spaces the team “obsessed about.”

The cover is original artwork supplied by Rockstar Games: Jason Duval and Lucia Caminos sit in a red car riddled with bullet holes, as VICE described it on September 27, 2026. Game Informer’s weekend roundup, posted on September 25, says the digital story is for subscribers. Print copies reach subscribers and US bookstores and newsstands “in the coming weeks,” and the issue is only on sale for a limited time.