That is a great read:
Obviously a big part of this game is the sheer scale. As anyone who has ever driven I-5 knows, though, the scale of California can also be sort of, well, flat and boring. How do you manage the challenge of expressing the scale of the state while still keeping the game consistently interesting?
AG: An awful lot of work is the answer to that. In terms of raw man-hours, this has been way in excess of any project we’ve done at Rockstar before. From the outset, we wanted to ensure that not only was the world big but that it was absolutely packed with character and life. It’s levels of magnitude above Grand Theft Auto IV in terms of what we’ve done on the environment side. I know there are bigger games out there geographically, but I don’t think there are in terms of content. I want to stress that not only is this world huge but it’s absolutely handcrafted. Every little bit of this world has had a large number of extremely talented artists pore over it. There’s always something to discover, something weird or interesting to see or interact with. It’s absolutely not a massive, empty world. We’ve considered the placement of every tree. We’ve simply not copied buildings around the map or procedurally generated the terrain to pad it out. It’s all handcrafted, all unique, and we’ve gone over it all again and again and again to make sure there’s enough layering of detail that I don’t think many people will ever see everything we’ve put into the world. That in itself, though, means that most people will have different experiences.