Hurricanes and Storms: The Impressive New Weather System in GTA 6
According to Owen Shepherd, Rockstar's Vice President of Art for Lighting and Rendering, the team has completely rebuilt the weather system to make it much more localized and persistent, achieving a scale never before seen in the franchise.
Check out the main highlights of the newly confirmed weather and storm mechanics:
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Hurricanes and Tropical Storms
The game will feature the extreme weather phenomena that are a trademark of Florida. During these powerful storms, players will face torrential rain, heavy winds, thunder, and lightning, with water realistically running off roofs and utility poles along the streets.
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Localized and Dynamic Weather
The new system features fully dynamic volumetric clouds, allowing you to actually see storms moving across the map. It will be perfectly possible to stand in a dry, sunny area while watching heavy rain fall in the distance in another region of Leonida.
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New Wind System
The wind will affect the open world in incredibly immersive ways. The game will feature different patterns of air currents, such as sea breezes after sunset and thermal updrafts. In practice, wind gusts will blow hair and debris around, create ripples on the water's surface, and bend the tall grass in the swamps.
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Persistent Visual Impact
Rain will leave real marks on the environment even after the storm has passed. Lasting puddles will remain on the roads indicating the exact path of the storm, and rainbows can form depending on the precise sunlight and humidity conditions.
This impressive attention to detail reinforces Rockstar's goal of creating a much more reactive open world. Nature in Leonida won't just serve as a static backdrop, but rather as an active, unpredictable, and shifting force during Jason and Lucia's daily routines and explorations.
Stay tuned to our website for more updates and full coverage as soon as new information about GTA 6 emerges!
Context
The weather details come from Game Informer's 14-page GTA VI cover story, published September 29. In it, Owen Shepherd, Rockstar's vice president of art for lighting and rendering, said the team “re-engineered” the weather system to make it “much more localized and persistent”. The same piece describes a Leonida map twice the size of Grand Theft Auto V's, split into six regions including Vice City, the Leonida Keys and the Everglades-inspired Grassrivers.
Storms are an obvious fit for a game modeled on Florida, and fans had long read old Rockstar job listings about large-scale destruction as a hint. Rockstar has now confirmed hurricanes, but not what they do to play.
What we know
- Rockstar confirmed tropical storms and hurricanes, with heavy clouds, strong winds, thunder, lightning and heavy rain.
- Weather is localized: players can stand in sunshine while a storm hits another part of the map.
- Wet surfaces and puddles linger after the rain has moved on, and rainbows can form in the right light.
- The wind system accounts for offshore breezes after sunset, rising warm air and buildings that block gusts, moving hair, debris, water and swamp grass.
What we don't know yet
- Rockstar has not said how often hurricanes happen, or whether they are random or tied to missions.
- There is no word on whether storms cause flooding or damage property.
- Whether weather changes driving or water physics, as a 2023 report claimed, has not been officially confirmed.
VICEVERSA's take
Localized weather is the most important change here, more than the hurricanes. A storm you can watch rolling in, and puddles that tell you where it went, turn weather from a filter over the screen into part of the geography. On a map this large, that should make long drives and boat trips feel less uniform, and it plays to Rockstar's strength in lighting, which is exactly Shepherd's department.
The hurricanes deserve more caution. Rockstar chose its words carefully: storms bring wind, rain and dense atmosphere, and nobody has said they flatten buildings or flood streets. Given how much a full hurricane would disrupt traffic and missions, we would expect them to be rare or scripted rather than something that can strike at any hour, though that is our reading, not Rockstar's. The detail worth checking at launch on November 19 is whether rain changes how cars handle and how people on the street react. That is the point where a visual system becomes a gameplay one.
Mike Pagani, editor
