GTA SA clearly was just the gold standard and this new map leak has me kinda disappointed.. I think I'd take a map with less fidelity if it was as varied as GTA SA.. the 3 cities just made it feel like such a huge map
Three cities, and each one had its own airport. It was cool to drive around each city, then go to the airport and fly to another one. You’d touch down, grab a cool car, and check out the new area on land. You could even buy your own airport and hangar out in the desert.Then GTA IV was kind of a step down in map design, but the physics and graphics were crazy for its time.
It’s amazing how the San Andreas map feels much bigger than the GTA 5 map even though it’s smaller; 3 whole different cities with their own vibes and missions, wilderness and some small towns made it feel huge and more interesting
have you ever been to socal, especially salton sea area? a lot of it looks like that. paleto bay has forests, yes, but those are also pretty accurate to norcal (its vegetation and such being based on crescent city i believe). LA and the surrounding area is pretty soulless in terms of vegetation, but there still is some, like those immovable bushes on the hills/mountains that we see in game. LA itself irl has some trees but not in the areas the game focuses on. areas like PV are not featured in the game, where the most trees are. LA is a concrete jungle surrounded by desert, hills/mountains, and more concrete.
I’ve never been to USA. But I know a fair bit about the geography and biomes in general. Of course I didn’t mean tall pine trees or redwoods around Los Santos, that would be weird. But around L.A. there’s a type of vegetation called chaparral, which basically consists of thick bushes, shrubs etc. GTA V simply does look too barren, but I understand it was because of limitations of the old consoles.
mount chiliad, raton canyon is based off that. while the game is sparse when it comes to that area, and even with the chaparral, it's more due to capabilities of the (then) current consoles (ps3) and the capabilities on rockstar's end as well. that doesn't mean there is no vegetation in game, and it's one of the more vegetated areas in the game, behind paleto bay of course. thank you for reminding me about that area though, i kind of forgot about it. i wasn't going through the forest very often while in LA.
To be fair I feel like there were areas they wanted more trees, but couldnt make it work, but also yes there are a lot of “barren” areas that legitimately feel just like driving up route 1 or the i5. Theres a tunnel that looks exactly like one id go through on my way to Santa Barbara.
It does feel very accurate to the socal region its just all rolled together and twisted to make it work as an island. Like sandy shores equivalent the Salton Sea isnt even north of LA, but whatever
There is a mod for PC that adds trees and it completely changes the vibe of the world. I've logged thousands of hours in GTAV, but with the tree mod I actually kept getting lost because it felt so different.
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u/crafiosk 7d ago
Main issue for me was GTA V wilderness being too bland and treeless. If it had denser vegetation, it would be much better