Confirmed: GTA VI will have hurricanes and tropical storms, with a weather system rewritten from scratch

The question had been hanging in the air for years and today it has an official answer: Leonida will suffer hurricanes and tropical storms. Rockstar confirms it in the Game Informer cover story, where it details for the first time how the game’s weather will work. What it hasn’t explained is how often those major events will occur or whether they will play a role in missions.

Owen Shepherd, vice president of art for lighting and rendering, sums it up like this: “we have re-engineered our weather system to make everything much more localized and persistent”. In practice, conditions will be able to differ across the map: a dynamic cloud system will roll across Leonida, shifting from clear winter skies to towering cumulonimbus with lightning on humid summer and autumn afternoons.

Wind is its own system. Gusts will move characters’ hair, stir up debris on rooftops, ripple the water’s surface and bend the swamp grass. When a storm hits, rain will leave rainbows and puddles behind, and wet surfaces will remain visible long after the rain stops, with water running off rooftops.

The whole thing is a direct evolution of Red Dead Redemption 2’s system, pushed to Florida’s climatic extreme. Hurricanes were the big unknown since the cover story was announced; now we know they exist, though Rockstar is keeping the finer details for November 19.