A member of a fan mapping project compared the world scale of Grand Theft Auto VI using the Version 16 player-reconstructed map, based on trailers, screenshots, and leaked materials. While open-world area size is no longer the sole measure of content, this reconstructed map can still accommodate the settings of Rockstar's four previous titles with room to spare.
The areas included in the comparison are Vice City from the 2002 title Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, Liberty City from Grand Theft Auto IV, Los Santos and Blaine County from Grand Theft Auto V, and the complete world of Red Dead Redemption 2. After overlaying these four regions onto the map of Leonida, there is still remaining space around them.
The runway at Vice City Airport also provides a more specific reference. Enthusiasts estimate its length to be approximately 1,700 meters, whereas the corresponding runway in Grand Theft Auto V is less than 940 meters, and runways in earlier entries in the series are about half that length again. Based on these figures, the scale of the new game's runway is closer to that of real-world airports.
There was also a rumor circulating in the community that "it takes 13 minutes to fly across the entire map," but this figure does not align with the dimensions of the reconstructed map. If the two farthest points are approximately 14 kilometers apart, a 13-minute flight would imply a jet fighter speed of only about 64 km/h; even at half the real-world speed, roughly 965 km/h, crossing the entire distance would take just over fifty seconds.
Another piece of data circulating in the community concerns character animations: Red Dead Redemption 2 has approximately 300,000 character animations, Grand Theft Auto VI is reportedly twice that number, while Grand Theft Auto V has around 50,000. Unlike the sparsely populated Wild West setting, the new title must simultaneously present urban crowds, northern forests, swamps, and small towns.
Crossing Los Santos and its surrounding areas in Grand Theft Auto V on foot takes about an hour, with random encounters arranged in its wilderness regions; remote areas in Red Dead Redemption 2 also feature nighttime encounters. The map used for this comparison is not the official final version, so the geographical layout in the released game may still differ from player reconstructions.