GTA 6 Fans Are Split Over Whether Key West Is in the Game

Rockstar's extended gameplay preview and a fresh map leak have pushed Grand Theft Auto 6 fans back onto the same question two months before the November 19 launch on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S: is Key West in the game?

The argument, spotted by Eurogamer, turns on one absence. Key West is the southernmost city in the United States, sitting at the western tip of the Florida Keys, and it is exactly the kind of landmark a Vice City game would be expected to cover. The leaked map, which appears to show an early beta version of GTA 6's world, does not have it.

That leak is separate from the CyberLeek posts that circulated earlier this summer, and those did not feature Key West either. Two unrelated sources missing the same place is what pushed the current theory: Rockstar planned the city and cut it at some point in development.

Plenty of fans reject that reading. Reddit user TheHulk305 put the counterargument in the form the community keeps repeating.

"I don't see why they'd work so hard doing all the keys and leave out the most important one Key West."

— TheHulk305

He added that it doesn't look like a Rockstar decision, given that GTA 4 handed players the New Jersey side of New York. Others suggest Key West was folded into other parts of the Keys rather than dropped, which would give Rockstar the shape of the island chain without a full tourist city to build and populate. Every version of this argument rests on a map leak that could itself be false.

The series has never dealt in one-to-one recreations. Rockstar researches its settings heavily and then compresses them, so a place missing from a leak can still be alluded to in a neighbouring location, renamed, or shrunk to a fraction of its real size. A single street of bars and a lighthouse would satisfy most of what players actually want from the location.

The GTA 6 leak with 2015 data cuts both ways here. An early GTA V build, close to 200GB, carried references to the sixth game and let players drive around an early version of its map. Fans reconstructed removed areas in the north and south from that build, including a version of Key West and a section standing in for South America. That supports the theory that the city existed at some point, and it also dates that version of the map to roughly a decade ago, long before the world seen in the Netflix extended look.

I run a Telegram channel about GTA and open worlds, so I watch this cycle restart every few weeks, and the Keys are the one part of the map I keep thinking about. I think a compressed island chain with one long bridge road serves the driving better than a faithful Key West with named streets and a marina. I need the Keys to be worth crossing more than I need them to be accurate.

Key West is not the only blank on the board. Rockstar has still not announced a GTA 6 online mode, while Take-Two confirmed at its September 17 shareholder meeting that it will support GTA Online after the sequel ships. Twitch CEO Dan Clancy told Bloomberg the multiplayer component arrives in 2027, which would leave the single-player game alone in front of the audience for over a year.

The GTA 6 cast sits in the same position, as Rockstar has confirmed almost nobody, so fans are matching voices themselves: one X user compared Manny Perez's speech to Raul Bautista's in-game dialogue and called the resemblance obvious. Manni L. Perez was already confirmed as Lucia after the Netflix extended look, and Stephen Root and Jim Santangeli have both let their involvement slip. A PC release is unconfirmed too, though Strauss Zelnick told shareholders the PC platform keeps growing in importance for Take-Two.

There is a harder story running underneath all of this. Rockstar North is in a Scottish employment tribunal over the abrupt firing of 31 staff last year, which the former employees argue was union busting. A verdict is expected in October, a month before the biggest launch in the industry.

Grand Theft Auto 6 releases November 19 on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S.