initial work on "grand theft auto v" constituted the open world creation, where preliminary models were constructed in-engine during pre-production. the game's setting is the fictional us state of san andreas and city of los santos, based on southern california and los angeles respectively. san andreas was first used as "" setting, which featured three cities separated by open countryside. the team thought that the ambition of including three cities in "san andreas" was too high, as it did not emulate the cities as well as they had hoped. houser felt that "to do a proper version of l.a. ... the game has to give you a sense of that sprawlif not completely replicate it", and that dividing the budget and workforce between multiple cities would have detracted from capturing "what l.a. is". garbut said that playstation 2 era technology lacked the technical capabilities to capture los angeles adequately, such that "san andreas" rendition of los santos looked 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's focus on one city instead of three meant that they could produce los santos in higher quality and at a grander scale than in the previous game.