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In Steam’s autumn sale, I picked up the Definitive Editions of Grand Theft Auto 3, Vice City, and San Andreas. They’re a lot better now, and a very decent way to play the game. I was expecting aspects of these games to have aged poorly, and with GTA 3 and Vice City, that’s certainly the case – I’m looking at you, long and conspicuously barebones middle chapter of Vice City. Yet when I booted up San Andreas, well, it felt like coming home again – and unlike CJ, the remaster managed to not eff anything up too badly. It’s a game that’s stood the test of time and despite being a little creaky with age here and there (especially in the face of GTA 6 looking as glossy as it does) it remains a fresh and fun experience with a huge variety of missions and regions ornamenting its map.
The headline of San Andreas’ world design was, of course, the three cities: Los Santos, San Fierro, and Las Venturas. While all of these were interesting and unique, my heart belongs to the countryside. Maybe it’s because I’m a country boy from Wiltshire, or maybe it’s just the aesthetic of the American backcountry, but my favorite memories of San Andreas all revolve around the wide (actually pretty tiny, by modern standards) open spaces between the game’s cities. Whether watching someone wander off the peak of Mount Chiliad to their doom, trucking across the desert, or getting spooked by ghost planes: it has it all.
Here we go again...?
Neither of the two subsequent mainline GTA games have lived up to San Andreas’ map. Unsurprisingly, GTA 5 came the closest, not being entirely based around an urban area and while free roaming, I tend to spend a lot more time up around the Alamo Sea than down in Los Santos. While we’ve yet to see what Grand Theft Auto 6’s map is going to look like, it seems likely that it will take a roughly similar approach, with one large central city and some more rural areas to explore. Florida, in real life, is rich with varied landscapes, from the swamps to the cities and the tropical Keys of Kokomo fame. I want that variety in GTA 6. I want to have missions that have you blasting around the Everglades on airboats or hijacking trucks on the Seven Mile Bridge.
Weirdly, there’s already a game that does this to a certain extent: the incredibly Marmite Mafia 3. I love this game, but I totally understand why someone might not. Despite its flaws, the game takes its Louisiana setting and runs with it, giving you ample missions in swamps and, with the DLC Faster Baby! a small town to explore and a racist sheriff for you to dispose of. This adds untold variety to the game, helping it become one of my personal favorites. If GTA 6 is essentially the same as 5, where most missions take place in the city while the countryside offers some very nice window dressing, it’ll still not measure up to its 20-year-old stablemate.
It’s understandable that GTA, a series all about organised crime, takes place in urban areas. Think of the great crime TV shows and movies, and it’ll be the same. But The Sopranos had the Pine Barrens, an iconic and central space in the show’s canon – if a TV show can do that, why can’t one of the premier video game series?
There’s so much mileage to be gained in the apocalyptically vast stretches of open country that make up vast swathes of America. I’m not asking for the American equivalent of GTA: Sandford, Gloucestershire, however entertaining that would be. I just want the freedom that we’ve already experienced once in this series, where rural areas were both a place to lay low and to conduct deals, or carry out armed robberies with an unhinged Catalina.
The thing about the regions of San Andreas’ map is that while each area looks different, each area lends itself and its aesthetics to their specific missions, too. San Fierro missions, for example, focus on cars in a way that missions in the other cities don’t. This is perfectly suited to San Fierro, a region that’s full of huge gradients that lend themself to unintentional stunts and ridiculous car chases. Consider San Francisco, the real-world equivalent, and the legendary car chase in Bullitt.
In Los Santos, the emphasis is on gang warfare and police corruption, based on Los Angeles’ real-world reputation of the early 1990s (and soundtracked by some of the best hip-hop tracks of all time). While in Las Venturas, the centerpiece revolves around a heist at a mob casino. The countryside? Well, that’s all about helping out a fried hippie called The Truth and involves missions like Body Harvest, where you steal a combine harvester, or the string of low-stakes robberies you pull with the aforementioned Catalina.
That is, I think, the nub of it all. For all of San Andreas’ varieties, they weren’t just coats of paint on the same old missions. Each region had its own specific missions that lend itself to the areas’ place in the popular consciousness. If we head out to the Keys in GTA 6, we should be out on the water for key missions, in the swamps – we need to get grimy like we did in Red Dead Redemption 2’s Lemoyne. After releasing one of the best games of all time in RDR2, I can only hope that GTA 6 will measure up to its forebears and give me a new favorite GTA map.
GTA 6 wishlist – everything we want from the next instalment of Grand Theft Auto
