Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas’ map is roughly a third of the size of GTA 5’s Los Santos, yet it somehow feels much bigger.
How big a map feels is obviously subjective. Nevertheless, many people have expressed this view since the post-release hype surrounding GTA 5 began to wear off. Google comparisons between the maps of both games and the sentiment is everywhere.
It’s an interesting quirk of perception. How can a map that is significantly smaller feel larger than a map which is, in fact, nearly three times the size? Is it just nostalgia? Or is there some fundamental and learnable difference between the design of both maps?
Having played the original version of San Andreas recently (the original, not the Defective Edition), I can say for certain that San Andreas feels as big as ever. The reasoning behind this effect amounts to a series of smart design decisions that, for whatever reason, Rockstar did not employ in GTA 5.
At a time when many open-world games are far too big for their own good, it may be beneficial to look back at San Andreas and consider how Rockstar achieved the perception of scale within such a compact space, and how they failed to replicate this achievement in GTA 5.
Fog
Rockstar built San Andreas to run on PS2 hardware and to fit onto a DVD. This limited the size of the game Rockstar could make. Nevertheless, they wanted San Andreas to be the biggest game yet. They wanted an entire state.
To do this, they had to fit a massive amount of content into a compact playspace. They achieved this through intelligent use of space, cramming three cities and three countryside regions into an area a third of the size of GTA 5’s island.
But this created a few problems. From a vantage point, the map appears unrealistically dense. It’s also artificially square at its boundaries because it had to fit on the fold-out map that came with the game.
If players were allowed to see these features of the map in-game, it would be immersion-breaking and it would shatter the map’s illusion of size.
To fix this problem, Rockstar opted to shroud most of the map in a suffocating layer of Californian smog.
Fog limits vision. Whether in a city or the countryside, fog prevents the player from seeing how crammed together everything is. Only the local area of the map is visible, thus allowing our imaginations to assume the map beyond the fog is as big as we’d expect it to be.
(As an added benefit, regional differences in the fog’s colour enhance the aesthetic uniqueness of each region.)
The Definitive Edition’s developers, Grove Street Games, failed to understand this. They didn’t realise how essential fog was to San Andreas’ sense of scale.
When they removed the fog from San Andreas’ map, the entire landmass became visible from the top of any tall building or hill. This ruined the illusion of scale Rockstar had worked so hard to nurture. All the regions of San Andreas became visible at a glance and were clearly smaller and closer than our imaginations would’ve had us believe. The lack of fog also made the Definitive Edition’s horrendous pop-in painfully obvious.
A later update attempted to correct this issue by adding some thin white fog. This new fog was certainly more realistic than the original stuff, but it failed to obscure the map enough to maintain San Andreas’ illusion of size.
GTA 5 likewise uses a realistic sort of diffuse white fog, and the result is the same. Mount Chiliad in the far north is visible from the far south. This may be realistic, but it sure does rob every region of the island of any sense of remoteness when you can see from end to end on a clear day, and nothing is left to the imagination.
Multiple Cities
San Andreas’ archipelago has much more visual variety than GTA 5’s island. It contains three cities, ten towns/villages, and three rural regions. GTA 5’s island may be bigger and more detailed, but it cannot match its PS2 predecessor for environmental diversity.
San Andreas’ version of Los Santos contains all the districts you’d expect of a virtual recreation of Los Angeles. The same goes for San Fierro and Las Ventures. GTA 5’s version of Los Santos, by contrast, is so big and so painstakingly that Rockstar was unable to include any other major cities.
This single-city focus enabled Rockstar to create the most authentic version of Los Santos yet, arguably outdoing GTA 4’s Liberty City with its richness of detail. This was obviously Rockstar’s aim, and they did an excellent job. The unfortunate consequence of their obsessive attention to detail, however, was that GTA 5 lacked the urban diversity of San Andreas.
San Andreas’ version of Los Santos may have been smaller, but it nevertheless managed to include all the major districts of not-Los Angeles and did so in a more compact space so that several other urban and rural areas could be included alongside it.
GTA 5’s rural region does share a similar number of biomes with San Andreas, but its visual diversity is vastly reduced. The forest, hills, mountains, and desert are connected without any cities or oceans to separate them and evoke the sense of regional distance that exists within San Andreas.
It’s a subjective preference, but if you ask me, I’d prefer it if Rockstar went back to developing multi-city maps. Even if the cities had to be smaller to make this happen, it would be worth it. It’s disappointing that after almost 20 years, Rockstar has yet to top San Andreas in terms of cities per map and, in fact, hasn’t even tried. Teenage me would have been horrified to hear it.*
THICC GIRTH
San Andrea’s map is unnaturally square. Rockstar did this to fit the map on a square page. GTA 5’s map is long and more natural-looking.
GTA 5’s map looks better from above, from a realism perspective. But its length-wise design also makes travel from one end of the map to the other rather linear. Players must travel up and down to get anywhere, rarely side to side. this creates a feeling of linearity, which is detrimental to the feeling of openness GTA 5’s map is supposed to create.
San Andreas’ map looks more artificial and video-gamey from above. But it also opens up more directions for long-distance travel. The map is designed non-linearly, so players don’t frequently travel up and down the same roads, as they do in GTA 5. This increases player choice and the map’s impression of expansiveness, fulfilling two of the main goals of an open-world game.
Winding Roads
In real life, urban planners make highways as straight as possible. The straighter the road, the shorter the travel time. Straight roads take you directly to where you want to go without detours, enabling you to maintain the highest legal speed for the longest time.
The design needs behind San Andreas’ highways were different. Rockstar didn’t want their roads to be straight. Straight roads reduce travel times, and short travel times would make San Andreas feel small.
To inflate San Andreas’ perceived size, Rockstar needed journeys between cities to take longer, and that meant their highways had to be anything but straight.
San Andreas’ highway network rarely provides a straight route from one city to another. All the highways, except the one connecting Los Santos and Las Venturas, follow an indirect course, skirting the edges of the map and snaking between hills, farmland, and mountains. The country roads that branch off the highways twist and bend even more severely than the highways, elongating journeys even further.
In addition to making journeys longer, bendy roads make drives between cities more engaging. Constant twists and turns force players to focus. Players must monitor their speed and follow the ever-changing direction of the road. The indirectness of the official routes may even tempt players to risk damaging or destroying their vehicles by driving off-road through difficult terrain.
One of the biggest reasons GTA 5’s island feels so small is that the highway provides efficient access to every major location on the map. The ringroad curves gently from Los Santos in the south to Paleto Bay in the north, after which it turns south and dives in a practically straight line past Sandy Shores and back down into Los Santos.
This makes GTA 5’s island far easier and quicker to traverse than San Andreas’ archipelago. GTA 5 may be almost three times bigger, but it doesn’t feel that way when crossing from one end to the other requires practically no engagement of the brain whatsoever.
Physical Obstructions
Physical obstructions obscure vision: buildings hide how big cities really are, and natural features such as trees, hills, and mountains hide how big rural areas really are.
Varying terrain elevation is something San Andreas uses to great effect. San Andreas’ rural areas are filled with forests, hills, mountains, and man-made structures.
This instils certain areas of the map with the appearance of remoteness. Even when fog is turned off, as in the Definitive Edition, these environmental features often limit the player’s vision to their immediate vicinity.
Since modern games run on technology capable of much longer draw distances, it is admittedly tricky for modern games to justify fog as thick and close as that in San Andreas. Using the terrain to obscure parts of the map from view can, if done well, do just as good of a job as fog can.
GTA 5 uses this technique to a minimal extent. A mountain range divides Los Santos from the northern countryside. Several mountains also divide the outer edges of the island from the Alamo Sea and the surrounding country.
Unfortunately, most of the countryside, which is found in the central northern region, is flat from top to bottom. All the mountains are situated around this region, shifted neatly out of the way so players rarely notice them. One glance at the horizon in the north will thus give you a clear view of almost all the countryside on the GTA 5 island.
Originally, GTA 5’s island was supposed to achieve the appearance of remoteness using lots of trees. Early promotional images show trees dotting the hills, many of which were removed before the game’s release. Check out this video for a recreation of what Rockstar’s original intentions may have been with trees in the north of GTA 5’s island – it really does make a huge difference!
Most of these trees had to be removed due to the technical limitations of the PS3 and Xbox 360. The result was the oft-complained about barren state of GTA 5’s countryside. Without trees, line of sight is rarely broken, and you never appear far from anywhere.
The Countryside as Transitional Space
Cities are dense, busy, and contain most of San Andreas’s missions, shops, vehicles, and properties. The countrysides are comparatively sparse. Given the option between one of the three cities and one of the three countrysides, most players would choose one of the cities. The cities simply have more to offer.
That doesn’t mean the countrysides are pointless. Rather, the sparseness of San Andreas’ rural areas provides essential contrast during cross-country journies.
An endless sprawl of urban development can get monotonous. The relatively open countryside, with all its trees, hills, and sand, is relieving to the senses and adds the spice of variety to the map’s aesthetic offerings.
But San Andreas doesn’t just staple countryside to a dense urban area, as GTA 5 does; it positions its rural regions as transitional spaces between the map’s urban centres. Players must therefore pass through borderlands of country to get from one city to another. In doing so, San Andreas integrates the countryside regions naturally into the game without having them feel like less valuable appendages players have little reason to venture into, as the country is in GTA 5.
San Andreas enables players to enjoy the contrast between rural and urban spaces. Driving through the country nurses an appreciation for the lights and bustle of urbanity when you see it rising like an oasis on the horizon; likewise, spending time in the city nurses an appreciation for the peace and beauty of the country when you finally leave the noise and claustrophobia of the city behind.
GTA 5 fails to provoke the same degree of effect.
Like in San Andreas, GTA 5’s Los Santos offers everything the countryside does in a more concentrated area: cars, shops, activities, etc. The countryside has the aesthetic quality of openness and natural beauty to contrast with the density and noise of the city.
It fails to encourage an appreciation for both, however, because the countryside is not a transitional space between two important urban areas. Rather, it is an appendage to the only significant urban centre in the game, Los Santos. Sandy Shores in the centre and Paleto Bay in the north are tiny and unimportant compared to the enormous city of Los Santos. Even if we were to acknowledge them, San Andreas still has it beat at ten towns/villages.
Rather than serving as a transitional space, GTA 5’s countryside serves as a back garden for the black hole that is Los Santos. The countryside is not a place you travel through to get to some other place on the horizon. Instead, the countryside is where you drive to do a mission or collect a plane from the airport, only to turn around and go back to the city.
This prevents players from developing the sense of having completed a long journey. No matter how far they travel, they will never get anywhere as important as the city they left. There is nothing as important as Los Santos on the northern horizon. They must inevitably turn back, which is a rather underwhelming way to end a cross-country journey.
Look at any GTA Online lobby to see this environmental imbalance in action. The majority of every lobby stays in the city. People rarely venture into the countryside unless they have to. When they do go into the countryside, there’s nowhere to go but back the way they came. For this reason, people stay in the city even if they like the space and beauty of the country. In the context of a video game about cars and criminals, the city simply has more to offer.
Tying Regions to Chapters
San Andreas’ story can be divided into 6 chapters. Each chapter takes place in a new region. The first in Los Santos, the second in the countryside regions to the west and north of Los Santos, the third in San Fierro, the fourth in the desert, the fifth in Las Venturas, and the sixth in Los Santos again.
This method of mission distribution gives players the time and experience needed to become familiar with each new area of the map one at a time. After becoming familiar with each new area, the story moves CJ on to another area and the learning process is repeated. By the end of chapter 5, players will have learned the entire map by heart, one region at a time.
This process strengthens players’ perception of map size by slowly revealing its true extent and biome diversity. The map is introduced region-by-region, allowing the player can thoroughly explore one region before moving on to the next. Players can thus retain a sense of wonder and curiosity about what the rest of the map looks like for several chapters.
This can easily make the map seem huge as full knowledge of its dimensions is held off for most of the story. As soon as you see every region, you become aware of its limits and thus of its smallness.
The longer players are kept curious about what the rest of the map looks like, the larger and more interesting the map will become in their imagination.
GTA 5 denies the player this sense of curiosity by revealing its full extent in two chapters, barely three hours into the game.
The first chapter takes you across the city of Los Santos, from the beach to the low-income neighbourhoods to the high-income neighbourhoods to the city centre and to the industrial area. By the time you finish the first chapter, you’ve been to just about every district of the city.
Chapter 2 takes you north to the desert, the farmlands, the area north of the lake just below the mountain, around Mount Chiliad in a plane, and finally, through the mountains to the city. After that, the missions tread familiar ground.
The last significant places to hold any curiosity, if you strictly follow the missions, are Paleto Bay hidden in the far north and the woodland valley below the military base – but these are like crumbs compared to the curiosity that San Fierro, the desert, and Las Venturas hold beyond chapter 2 in San Andreas.
Even if GTA 5’s missions were distributed in such a way to reveal the map more slowly for players who stick to the missions, the map itself is not well designed for slow reveals. The map is a single island, an anomaly in the GTA series. Every area of the map blurs together. There are no clear boundaries apart from the mountain range between Los Santos and the countryside, resulting in transitions from one area to the other happening without players’ really thinking about it and thus not noticing the significance of the distances they are travelling.
The wide-ranging mission distribution taking the player across the map too quickly only makes this issue worse, killing any potential for building curiosity about what the map contains. GTA 5 simply can’t instil a sense of scale as grand as San Andreas can, no matter how slowly it is revealed through missions.
A lot of important-looking locations in GTA 5 aren’t even used. The military base, the prison, the lighthouse, and many aesthetically unique neighbourhoods. Some areas are only used as set pieces to be driven through for a single mission. GTA 5 is filled with locations that had a massive amount of work put into them but which are never used or used only briefly.
The Future of GTA Map Design
San Andreas is the best GTA map Rockstar has ever made. It’s big in terms of both size and ambition; it contains an impressive diversity of architecture and landscape types; and as we’ve talked about, it manages to pack all this content into a compact space yet retain its sense of immense size thanks to many ingenious design techniques and the skilful implementation of those techniques.
GTA 5 is less tightly designed. It’s certainly bigger and more detailed, but those details are spread rather inefficiently across a map that did not need to be as big as it was. As a result, it feels smaller than the game Rockstar made 11 years prior for the PS2.
GTA 6 should ideally take more inspiration from San Andreas than GTA 5. A combination of San Andreas-style map design with modern Rockstar’s budget, manpower, development time, and attention to detail could easily be awe-inspiring and set a new impossible standard for open-world map designs.