 Initial work on Grand Theft Auto V involved designing the open world space ; preliminary models of the world were constructed during the game 's pre @-@ production phase . The open world of the game is the fictional U.S. state of San Andreas , which includes the city of Los Santos . San Andreas was also used as the setting of Grand Theft Auto : San Andreas ( 2004 ) , which included three cities separated by open countryside . The team thought that the ambition of including three cities in Grand Theft Auto : San Andreas was too great and that the game did not emulate the cities as well as they had hoped . Los Angeles was used as the model for Los Santos in both games ; Houser felt that " to do a proper version of L.A. ... the game has to give you a sense of that sprawl — if not completely replicate it " , and that dividing the budget and manpower between multiple cities would have detracted from capturing " what L.A. is " . Garbut said that in the PlayStation 2 era , the team did not have the technical capabilities to capture Los Angeles properly , resulting in the San Andreas rendition of Los Santos feeling like a " backdrop or a game level with pedestrians randomly milling about " . The team disregarded San Andreas as a departure point for Grand Theft Auto V because they had moved on to a new generation of consoles and wanted to build the city from scratch . According to Garbut , with the move to the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 hardware , " our processes and the fidelity of the world [ had ] evolved so much from San Andreas " that using it as a model would have been redundant . The team focused their efforts on one city instead of three and were able to produce Los Santos in higher quality and at greater scale than in the previous game . 
