This variety is one of San Andreas’ strong points, although the story does lose some steam here. The warm haze of Los Santos is replaced by a cold, blue-tinged colour palette, rain, and fog, and CJ gets involved with the Triads, street racing, and buying property. When CJ eventually reaches San Fierro, the look, feel, and tone of the game changes dramatically. If you want to explore the map with a little more visual fidelity, a mod that transplants the entirety of San Andreas into GTA IV is available, although the clash of modern lighting and old school geometry is a little jarring to look at. But this removes that illusion of size, especially when you can see all three cities from one high vantage point. San Andreas is a highly moddable game, and it’s possible to massively expand the draw distance in the PC version. When you’re riding through the desert west of Las Venturas, or the rugged rural expanse of Red County, you feel totally disconnected from civilisation, which adds to its sense of scale. The countryside and desert in San Andreas seem genuinely barren and remote, while the rural areas in Grand Theft Auto 5 never feel totally isolated from the busier parts of the map.
There’s also a noticeable drop in fidelity once you leave Los Santos, with San Fierro, and especially Las Venturas, feeling a little sparse and lifeless compared to the smaller cities from the previous 3D-era games.īut it feels massive, which I think is a combination of that draw distance obscuring the view ahead, and also the sheer amount of relatively empty space on the map. The game’s draw distance is incredibly short, with a huge amount of pop-in, which was presumably the only way they could get the thing running on the hardware of the time. Playing San Andreas today, there’s a sense Rockstar bit off more than it could chew.
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