Dan Houser, co-founder of Rockstar and co-writer of Grand Theft Auto 5, has said the immense size of Los Santos was necessary to accommodate flying. Last week Houser was quoted as saying that GTA 5's world is bigger than Red Dead Redemption, San Andreas and GTA 4 combined. Now Houser has told The Guardian that players will be doing a lot of flying in GTA 5 so it was important to the studio that there's plenty of airspace. "We wanted to make a big place, as much as anything, to allow you to fly," he said. "A lot of the decisions, we're talking about them here on a philosophical level, but they're also practical decisions, too: we're making a game. You have to understand the medium. "On an obvious level we wanted somewhere big so you can fly properly - we have a lot of missions that involve flying, in helicopters or whatever, it was logical. Also, Jet skis work better around LA than they would in New York. "We're using the environment to let us have toys we couldn't have had otherwise," Houser added. "And equally, we're using the story and environment to introduce missions that can be more extreme. In some ways we wanted the game to have a larger-than-life Hollywood feel; the stories we heard in LA, we wanted to capture them in the game. If the place isn't informing what we're doing, we're not using it correctly." Source - CVG
