GTA V Map...Soooooo, is this really all there is?

[GiantRaven]

To all of you guys saying that San Andreas' map is bigger than Los Santos, have a look at this:
http://gamerant.com/grand-theft-auto-5-map-comparisons/
If you are too lazy to see, the site shows a map comparison between GTA V and GTA: San Andreas. San Andreas' map fits in the city of Los Santos alone, even excluding the coast and the airport.

That looks like absolute bollocks. It doesn't take approximately four times as long to drive from top to bottom of GTA V compared to San Andreas. There is no way that Mount Chiliad alone is as big as San Andreas. The airport isn't the size of a single city, and other ridiculous size-related suggestions.

I don't understand how they could have come to that conclusion. They could've at least shown some of how they worked it out.

 

[anthonyrj]

I'm honestly not sure what you're talking about. Maybe it's subjective, but this seems to be the biggest map by a large margin. Not only do you have the city, but smaller communities dotting the rest of the map. The wilderness is filled with canyons and gulleys and mountains to climb, farms to ransack, a forest to hunt deer, an ocean to explore, etc. My biggest complaint about this (and all GTA titles) is that with all the size and the NPC's populating the world and the buildings, etc it all seems like a big set piece because you can't really interact with the world in a meaningful way. Why can't I go inside the homes or office buildings or factories, or have interesting conversations with the NPC's? The world is so perfectly created that it begs to be interacted with.

 

[shootthebandit]

I dont see why people are complaining the map is huge and more importantly vibrant and beautiful. Theres a river that goes from the alamo sea out west into the ocean through a big valley. taking a boat down stream is absolutely beautiful. The emptiness of the top 2/3s of the map is a welcome contrast to the business of Los Santos which in its own right is pretty damn big. Because there is a ring road it makes navigation very easy and fast

the problem is not the size of the map but the size of the campaign. 69 missions seems a bit weak if you ask me considering at least 10 of them are simply just stealing a vehicle

 

[omega 616]

snip

It smacks of laziness, that's why. They build a good sized city and smack a large back yard on it, filled with trees, hills and mountains. Sure, it's pretty to drive through but it's a gta game and not playing a sight seeing tour.

The only person who takes any advantage of the rolling hills and forest is Trevor, with his hunting side business.

You then complain about there only being 69 missions? Maybe if there was more city than sight seeing opportunities there would be more missions.

 

[GiantRaven]

San Andreas felt big once upon a time, but go back and play it - it's small. Hell, buy it on Steam and increase the draw distance - you can see Las Venturas and San Fierro from Los Santos. It's not as far away as it felt when we originally played it on PS2.

I have no trouble believing GTA V's San Andreas is bigger - it might not take as long to travel, likely because the cars are faster and the traffic easier to maneuver through.

Sure the San Andreas map may be smaller than the GTA V map, but roughly 6 to 8 times smaller? Completely ridiculous.

Looking at that Neogaf thread that the image came from, these seem to be a much fairer scale of size:

Spoiler

Los Santos being roughly the same size as IV's Liberty City (also about the same as all three SA cities) and V's landmass being as wide as San Andreas whilst being roughly twice as tall seems a more appropriate scale from what I've seen in-game.

I can actually see where all three maps would fit in as well with this scale, whilst still making sense. I wasn't really fathoming that beforehand.

 

[shootthebandit]

snip

It smacks of laziness, that's why. They build a good sized city and smack a large back yard on it, filled with trees, hills and mountains. Sure, it's pretty to drive through but it's a gta game and not playing a sight seeing tour.

The only person who takes any advantage of the rolling hills and forest is Trevor, with his hunting side business.

You then complain about there only being 69 missions? Maybe if there was more city than sight seeing opportunities there would be more missions.

The city has plenty big buildings and landmarks that could be used as a heist. There was also so many opertunities to parody other heist movies. Why not have a pawn shop that martins gang had hid 1mil in. You then have a getaway through the los santos viaduct (a parody of drive). They couldve had a heist inside the chicken factory, it is very similar to that of the chicken factory in breaking bad. They couldve had some fun with that.

I can safely say there is plenty in the map to get well in excess of 100 missions. they should really count all the heist set up and heist as one mission, im not giving to much away here but the last heist has 3 different set up missions where you find 3 identical cars and you are given the location and all you do is drive them to a lock up (no heat or anything). The one thing that was wrong with GTAIV was that there was too much city. Los santos could be a little bigger but you get to a point when you go so big that it starts to repeat itself which was the problem with liberty city.

 

[llpalm08]

I really don't see what all the moaning is about with the lack of San Fierro and Las Venturas, Rockstar said 2 years ago just after the first trailer that it is a re-imagining of Southern California and it is set in Los Santos and the surrounding countryside so I can't see why you were expecting it to be the whole state of San Andreas when they said it wasn't going to be 2 years ago. If the game had the other 2 cities of San Andreas then it would need to have at least another disk worth of content that you would have to download to the console. This game is good enough to be a next gen game because it is literally pushing the 360 & PS3 to the absolute limit to be able to run this game and just the addition of the 2 other cities would cause a big problem with loading and draw distances because the game wont load quickly enough as it is if they made it load just from one storage device which is the reason you have to download half the game to the console to play it, otherwise they would have just done what they did with La Noire and had you switch disk after you've done half the game. There is so much to do in this that I am surprised at how well the game runs and I can see that the next gen GTA's will be massive in detail, things to do, range of cars and size of the map.

 

[mrhertz]

Liberty city gave me the biggest feel that I was on a big map.

All I can understand about this is that GTA V has multiple levels of map. The subways, and the whole sea terrain. In the end it REALLY doesn't look bigger, in fact it feels smaller than GTA 4 for me.

But all in all a map doesn't need to be large to be good. Saints Row 3 map isn't big, but the game has so many things to do, that you really don't care about the size.

I was expecting more buildings you could get in, more curious places to visit, and a live city with repairs here and there, problems happening, and all sort of things that real happens in a real city.

In the end im not feeling that my experience on GTA 5 is miles away from GTA 4. The main difference now is that they got the story of a single character, split it by 3, and we have multiple perspectives right now, which is good.

But why cant we get characters together to complete a mission? Why can't I use Trevor to help Michael on his mission? In about 3 or 4 times that i can remember, I could use them as a team. Most of the time it looks like GTA 4 with different characters.

By allowing us to put all characters in the same scene would let us be creative to complete missions in a way we can't do now. Who played the last mission on Mass Effect 2 knows exactly what im talking about... but these were just offtopic lines.

......

I'm having GTA 5 as a new GTA game. But i'm not feeling good or even counting the fact that it's big... not because of a small city and a huge portion of nothing.

 

[aozgolo]

I think many people are neglecting Rockstar's Capacity for making expansive DLC content. They may not be as well known for it but they've done pretty well so far with adding substantial DLC worth purchasing. With their latest venture it wouldn't surprise me at all if they either offer more content for existing areas or expand the map size to include additional cities.

 

[rocketsheeptv]

The map is a lot more empty than i would have hoped, but overall this game is one of the most amazing games i have ever played.
Also Los santos itself is about the same size as the entire gta san andraes map.. so its not really that bad,, but i wish the country side had more stuff in it.

 

[Thr33X]

Wow...it seems that not even GTA is exempt from the nitpicking of the internet gaming community. You people are truly insatiable.

 

[noura]

I actually set up a small test to compare the maps of GTA IV and GTA V, because in my opinion GTA IV just felt so much more unbelievably massive.

In order to get an accurate scaling of both maps I set up way points down long highways (In GTA V I chose to travel the west-most highway that goes up from LS through Chumash up to Paleto Bay; In GTA IV it was a bit more difficult but I chose the east-most avenue that travels through Algonquin, where Niko's safehouse is).

I calculated the distances each of drives took (In GTA V it's easy because it tells you how many miles you have until you reach your destination, in GTA IV I had to check the game stats and compare the "Distance Traveled" number before and after the drive).

I grabbed images off google of both maps and highlighted a line along each route in both maps in an image editing program. I "stretched" out the line and that was my scale. I simply extended the line and multiplied the miles driven by the amount I extended the line by.

According to my findings Liberty City is about 7 Square miles while Los Santos and it's surrounding area is around 30 Sq Mi.

Not including water space, LC is 5.65 Sq Miles and Los Santos is 26.55 Sq Mi.

So yes, it is completely imaginable for GTA V's map to be as big as the maps of GTA:SA, GTA IV, and RDR combined.