I Grew Up in Miami, and GTA 6's Vice City Is Almost Too Accurate

The much-anticipated, surprisingly controversial Grand Theft Auto 6 "extended look" just dropped on Netflix, and while I may not completely agree with the marketing philosophy, I did wind up logging on to the platform and watching it. Taking the 27 minutes of in-engine GTA 6 footage at face value, I have to say I'm quite impressed.

Something that especially blew me away, even though I expected nothing less, is Grand Theft Auto 6's incredible fidelity and attention to detail. It appears that Rockstar has very much picked up the gauntlet it threw down with the insanely realistic Red Dead Redemption 2. It's graphically stunning, but that's not what surprises me. What surprises me is just how true-to-life Vice City, Rockstar's analog to Miami, seems to be. As someone who holds the city very dear to his heart, and who lived there for several years, I'm struck by how authentic this virtual rendition looks and feels.

Rockstar hasn't visited Vice City since 2002's Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, whose rudimentary sixth-generation graphics make it quaint by modern standards. Rockstar's more recent metropolitan area, Grand Theft Auto 5's Los Santos, is a fairly accurate representation of Los Angeles, its own real-world counterpart, but I admit I was slightly worried about how the developer would handle Miami. It would have been relatively easy for Rockstar to just make GTA 6's Vice City a quirkier, crazier version of Los Santos, differentiated by little more than some Cuban influences and caricatures like "Florida Man."

چوونەژوورەوە
بۆ ئەوەی ئیدیعای شوێنی خۆت بکەیت لەسەر لیدەربۆرد!

چوونەژوورەوە
بۆ ئەوەی ئیدیعای شوێنی خۆت بکەیت لەسەر لیدەربۆرد!

Miami is a very specific kind of town, markedly different from other coastal cities in the United States. It's not really anything like LA, but I've seen countless movies and TV shows that, perhaps unwittingly, seem to imply this. This could very well be a result of the practicalities associated with shooting movies and TV shows. Showbusiness is most often conducted in LA, which is apparently close enough to Miami for a lot of people. At any rate, based on what I've seen so far, it seems like GTA 6 has gotten Miami right on a deep, specific level.

Vice City certainly has the Miami look down pat: the pastel-colored stucco buildings of the game's downtown areas, the squat, juicy palm trees that differ from the West Coast's more lithe and delicate plants, the uniform rows of single-story houses in the nearby suburbs... all feel strikingly true to life. But what really sells me on Vice City as a heightened version of Miami is how it seems to engulf your other senses. The booming Cuban music that permeates every city block, the liveliness and constant movement of some of Earth's Greatest Partiers, and the overwhelming humidity, communicated by some impressively sweaty-looking GTA 6 NPCs, are just as much a part of Miami as its Spanish-inspired architecture or picturesque coastline.

One of the first things I think of when I think of Florida is how heavy and dense its air is. This might sound crazy, and I have no way to empirically prove it, but Rockstar seems to have somehow captured this very specific sensation through GTA 6's visuals.

سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://gamerant.com/gta-6-vice-city-miami-accuracy/