Rockstar Games' newest addition to its popular "Grand Theft Auto" series will hit store shelves on Sept. 17. As many fans of the previous game installments know, nothing makes pulling off some of the game's more daring adventures like knowing one's lay of the land. In that spirit, a Reddit user leaked an image from the game's official strategy guide, showing the map of the fictional in-game city of Los Santos. Since the leak, many have asked exactly how true-to-life the city of Los Santos is.
A parody on the city of Los Angeles, Los Santos is built to have it all. Gamers can sprint through city blocks, explore the suburbs or even run through the desert or wilderness. The world is meant to be vast and open. In fact, Rockstar has said before that the map is larger than the game worlds of "Grand Theft Auto 4," "Grand Theft Auto San Andteas, and its other open world title set in the wild west "Red Dead Redemption" combined.
When many users took to Reddit to voice their complaints that the map looked far too small, a user who goes by the name of fakeittilyoumakeit, uploaded the below image of the Los Santos Map compared relatively to other major cities, both real and fictional.
The cities used to demonstrate GTA V's scale are: Toronto, Manhattan, San Francisco, London England and the fictional Liberty City, as seen in "Grand Theft Auto 4."
For reference, GTA V's Los Santos is about three times larger than Liberty City and is the same general size as the vast majority of San Francisco, Manhattan and the Greater Toronto Area. Still, all of these real cities fill the same space as Los Santos but are fully developed. Los Santos, on the other hand, is mostly green, and full of open space. While this is meant to give users the chance to explore a variety of different areas, there may be some claim to the idea that the city itself is not large enough. Then again, how much of a city landscape is necessary for a video game versus real life?
Only time will tell if all the mayhem and high stakes promised by Rockstar Games can be contained in the map of Los Santos. Users can purchase the game and see for themselves on Sept. 17.
