If Grand Theft Auto 5 is anything like its predecessors, then the city of Los Santos will be the heart and soul of the game, much as Liberty City was at the center of GTA 4.
For those not in the know, Los Santos is based upon the real-world city of Los Angeles. Although the game takes some of its cues from GTA: San Andreas, the city of Los Santos has been altered significantly—geographically, at least—from its predecessor. Whereas the previous title encompassed the whole of San Andreas (California), Los Santos (Los Angeles) and the cities of San Fierro (San Francisco) and Las Venturas (Las Vegas), the Los Santos of GTA 5 is significantly larger than its predecessor, and it's scaled to be almost as big as its real-world counterpart.
It goes without saying that Los Santos is designed to contain a whole lot of character and keep players interested for dozens, if not hundreds of hours in GTA 5, as they take on the roles of the game's three main characters and explore their stories within the city. Players can expect to visit locations analogous to their counterparts in the real world, like Mulholland Drive, Hollywood, and South Central LA.
To that end, fans of the GTA series have taken a lot of effort to map out Los Santos—even without the help of Rockstar Games and in the absence of official maps. They've managed to piece together maps of Los Santos based on screenshots, and they've even obsessed over the game's locations and compared them to their counterparts in Los Angeles.
Today, a fan of the series on the GTA forums named gtamodeller has put together a 3D map of Los Santos which contains the city alone, which he based on screenshots and trailers of the game. He says the full map will be "much bigger".
Here it is below:
And here's how he came up with it:
