While GTA 6 City of the Week looks at one location in the USA and evaluates it as a possible setting of the next installment in Rockstar Game's popular open-world action adventure franchise every week, Foreign City of the Week, as the name suggests, looks beyond the borders.
Staying close to the USA after last week's foray into Canada, we're going down southeast to the fruit basket of the Americas, the West Indies. These islands, many nations on their own, offer several great candidates for a GTA setting, and we'll be moving through most of them — though not back-to-back for the sake of variety.
Kingston
Now, we say "Kingston" since this article series is called "City" of the Week, but when looking at a good location for a GTA map, the entirety of Jamaica looks pretty promising. The island nation is not too large, and the city of Kingston, its capital, already makes up a good chunk of it.
As the third largest island of the Greater Antilles and fourth largest in the entire Caribbean, Jamaica hits that gold ratio of not forcing the game developers to condense it too much to fit into a map, while still being large enough to offer a varied and interesting landscape. Of course, we're sitting here saying all that years after Ubisoft crammed the entire caribbean, plus a slice of Florida and Central America into a single open-world map in Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag.
That said, GTA as a franchise has always retained settings where almost all locations on the map were accessible via car, even when the maps spread across multiple islands. Taking the whole Caribbean would not work for a GTA game due to the large stretches of open sea between the islands, plus, you know, it has been done before.
Kingston is a city of almost a million, and the largest in the country. As the capital, Kingston is the beating heart of Jamaica in more ways than one, and serves as the true center of commerce, culture and governance. The city, being the capital of an Anglophone nation, is the largest city southward of the USA to be predominantly english-speaking.
Kingston's economy is in stark contrast with the rest of the country. While the capital also maintains a strong stake in tourism, most foreign visitors travel through Kingston to one of the many resort-villages scattered throughout the island instead of staying in the city itself. Kingston is the hub of finances in Jamaica, and the vast majority of financial services and transactions of the whole nation are found and take place in the capital.
Jamaica as a whole is mainly based on mining, agriculture and tourism in terms of economy, with the third accounting for a whole half of the nation's income. The export of agricultural products and resources yields much of the remainder, with financial services having a small slice of the pie.
In terms of geography, Kingston, and by extension Jamaica, are perfect for a GTA map, as we touched on earlier. As an island already, Rockstar would not need to alter Jamaica to a major extent in order to make it into a map, and Kingston being the largest city by a long shot anchors the urban area well. The other settlements throughout the country would serve as secondary locations, and there is enough variety throughout Jamaica to offer an exciting landscape.
