How big did the State of San Andreas feel to you as you were playing?

[VOIDACID8000]

If the estimate that the map is 12.7 square miles (3.5 miles each side) is accurate, that means that real-life Compton alone is larger than all three cities combined.

 

But to me it always felt way bigger than that, it felt incredibly vast, and there would be no way I would have believed that all the cities, suburbs, mountains and desert could fit into just 12.7 square miles. The format of the map really did make a lot of players believe it was huge, despite that you could drive from one city to the other within a couple minutes. How big did it feel to you when you first played it?

Edited November 6, 2016 by VOIDACID8000

[MrAlexVercetti]

it felt huge, dude, at 1st i didnt know what is where, untill i started to play SA more often and finally felt i got used to it and now ik what is where but still its really big. lol ive never played SA so often like now.. but still VC is my fave just SA has way more to give than VC

Edited November 7, 2016 by MrAlexVercetti

[lil weasel]

To me it is comfortably sized.

Real life has little to do with games' compressed time and sizes.

 

Area and time compression is in most games and modelling, such as HO model railroads Six Feet was considered a Mile (often referred to as a "smile" short-mile).

[Algonquin Assassin]

The poor draw distance is what made it feel huge to me. Mt Chilliad felt like it was another world away from Los Santos when it was really not that far.

 

That and I think the placing of winding roads and the towns scattered in between made it feel pretty big.

[executive_heists]

when i was watching its trailer i think it big.after watching it i decided to buy it after finished it storyline it was like very small if compared to the map.LS To LV by highway just like only 2 miles its very big if you only travel by walking or cyling or any old-school transport

Edited November 9, 2016 by executive_heists

[Snesgamer83]

I remember it feeling pretty huge at the time. I mean, for the first time in a GTA game you could essentially take a long road trip through the countryside - that was certainly something.

 

Though I definitely may be remembering it through some pretty rose-tinted glasses. I'm in the middle of a playthrough of Vice City right now - San Andreas is next on the table. Looking forward big time to getting a fresh perspective on it again after all these years.

[Rhoda]

The poor draw distance is what made it feel huge to me. Mt Chilliad felt like it was another world away from Los Santos when it was really not that far.

There's a fascinating picture I saw a while back which removed all the fog/cloud layers from the map and showed just how close Chiliad was to Los Santos. It made the map much smaller and added fresh perspective, displaying how important these effects are when it comes to making a smaller map appear larger. I'll see if I can dig it up.

 

EDIT: Golly, I've found it.

[~Tiger~]

I think that the perception of size was due to freedom of movement.

 

Take for example Driver 3 (Driv3r) which was around at about the same time. The 3 cities (Miami, Nice and Istanbul) allowed movement in a restricted space, often quite linear. It had to be that way.

 

GTA SA however allowed far greater degree of travel (once the whole map was unlocked) so that the illusion of larger map size was experienced when in fact this was not the case.

[dacoolkidgamer]

Yeah the map does feel really big, it takes a while to explore the huge map. But yeah Rockstar spent a lot of time and money developing the game.

Edited November 12, 2016 by dacoolkidgamer

[GamesBoy316]

The map always feels big to me. Even right now, I still feel like there's a few spots on the map that I didn't fully discover yet.

[Femme Fatale]

It felt huge for me, I thought no one would ever make a map bigger than that, I was proven wrong...

[Mr_Human_Guy]

Its kinda funny thinking back to how big it felt to me as a kid, like, although it's so small compared to games released today, yet the varied and unique enviroments and all of the myths surrounding the game sort of helped create an illusion of being in a giant world. You know?

[Rhoda]

The stark contrasts between environments contributes to how vast the map feels. Cynics might say now "oh, it's always been small" but this was hot on the heels of Vice City, which had a pathetically puny map by comparison. If you stand in the city, you see nothing but buildings unless you're higher up. At this point, you'll steal glimpses of the desert, countryside or neighbouring cities shrouded in clouds and fog deliberately placed to hide how close they are. You only really feel the map shrink when you're in a plane and you can cover the entire length in a couple of minutes.

[Aerosmithfan999]

The state of San Andreas still feels quite big to me. It's especially a remarkable map for its time.

[Raj The Rager]

The terrible drawn distance fooled me when I was kid.

[DetectivePhelps]

It feels big to me. Man I just love this game.

[GTAUrbanCamping]

In comparison to other maps, it felt the biggest. If it had graphics we have now, itd be my favorite.

[gtafaninwest]

I always felt the state was big, with more counties that are unseen in the game.

[Osho]

It felt very big, especially, when I realised just how small VC was in comparison. That's how I used to judge the size of SA overall as a game.

It still feels big on foot and even when driving from one end of the map to other.

I don't think that the draw distance really makes much of a difference here. Sure, visually it does break the illusion of size, but when I'm exploring the map simply on foot and even on wheels, the feeling still remains unchanged for me, quite simply because the draw distance doesn't change the travelling time it takes to explore the map which SA manages to make a nice impression of the map being bigger than its predecessor Vice City!

[universetwisters]

It felt F*CKIN HUGE until I started modding and finally realized how small it was.

 

I guess it's just nostalgia.

Edited December 8, 2016 by universetwisters

[Official General]

I felt HUGE to me when I first played it, and it still does 12 years later. The sheer variety of 3 different big cities, many small towns, and settlements, and different natural terrain greatly validates this feeling. Even when playing it very recently, driving from one end of the map to the other just felt like forever, going by in-game journey time standards. There is no other map in the GTA series that made me feel that I was taking very long journeys from one location to another as I explored it. There are many parts of the map I've never even touched yet. SA's map for me is my favourite map and it's still technically the best map in the series, not counting graphical qualities and details.

 

All this talk of draw distances and map comparisons to V's map means nothing to me, none of that takes away the feeling of SA's map being huge and vast.

Edited December 8, 2016 by Official General

[VOIDACID8000]

Funnily, in San Andreas the downtown Los Santos was not even visible from Santa Maria Beach while in GTA 5, despite supposedly having a 5 times larger city, all the buildings of Downtown LS are closely visible from Del Perro Beach. Definitely makes a difference in perception.

[PalominoFreak]

When i first played this game the map felt gigantic. You actually had to scroll around the map to have a clear view. In GTA Vicecity the map was so small, you saw everything once you opened the map.

 

But if you look at a 3D model today you will realize that the map is pretty small actually but highly detailed which makes it look big.

[GTA-Biker]

GTA SA map felt huge to me,as big as GTA 5 map feels nowdays.In fact,it still feels very big.I guess that's because of a good map layout combined with draw distance.For comparison,while GTA 5 map is actually much larger,it doesn't feel that way because the map isn't as well made (only one city, only three towns, simple highway that just circles around the map, forests and the desert feel tiny and crowded with man-made objects, most of the countryside is filled with mountains...) and because you can see across the whole map if you get high enough in an aircraft.

[Official General]

GTA SA map felt huge to me,as big as GTA 5 map feels nowdays.In fact,it still feels very big.I guess that's because of a good map layout combined with draw distance.For comparison,while GTA 5 map is actually much larger,it doesn't feel that way because the map isn't as well made (only one city, only three towns, simple highway that just circles around the map, forests and the desert feel tiny and crowded with man-made objects, most of the countryside is filled with mountains...) and because you can see across the whole map if you get high enough in an aircraft.

 

Yeah I totally agree.

 

It's very strange, because I played and finished SA again just before playing through V a second time, and the truth is to me, SA's map still feels much bigger than V's map. Even though we all know it's not, it's still feels that way to me.

[Kingbing]

While not bigger, it certainly felt more varied than the gta 5 map. Deserts, forests, small towns.

[The Time Ranger]

Yeah it still feels big, it was a masterstroke in map design, three unique cities which have to be reached by traversing the dense and varied countryside broken up nicely by small towns. An enjoyable map with lots to explore with no space wasted. Looking forward to there being (hopefully) a map of similar quality in the next Gta.

[Mister Pink]

It felt huge and is still quite sizable in terms but it's mostly down to map diversity and genius map layout and trickery. I much prefer it than any other map. Not only was it big in the sense that it had multiple cities it was the first time we had swimming and sea to explore, the first time we had multiple cities, the first time we had a huge mountain, the first time we had countryside and the first time we had planes to fly with such verticality, parachuting and all that and the first time we had highways. It was a big map in more ways than one.

 

Also, I find some people unfairly compare map size to other games 10 years after. No, lets compare it to games of 2004. There's feck-all other open-world games of this style and scope other than other GTA's, really.

Edited January 3, 2017 by Mister Pink

[Alexander]

To me it felt huge because of how much it feels unused. Like wasted space.

[Dingleman]

Trickery to make a world "feel" big really is a dying art. The way they perfectly balanced vehicle speeds, draw distance, road layouts, time and scenery really made the game feel massive, yet somehow still fast paced. Going back now, the game is really neither of those things, it was all about the feel of it.

I remember in 2005 driving across the LV deserts during the game daytime, arriving at SF at sunset and feeling like a whole day had really passed when really only 5 minutes had. It was a lot easier to lose yourself in these games because even though they felt alive and breathing, they weren't trying to portray reality too closely. It was its own world, and that in itself made it more intriguing to me. If I wanted to explore a realistic world all I had to do was walk out a door.

.....But then again, being an impressionable kid more than likely helped.

Edited January 9, 2017 by Dingleman