GTA Vice City Stories vs. GTA 4 map size: Which game has the bigger map?

The GTA games get bigger with every entry in the franchise, not only in sales and popularity but also in size.

As better hardware becomes more common, Rockstar Games can make its open worlds bigger and denser with each entry in the series.

This article compares the map sizes of two highly celebrated entries in the franchise, GTA Vice City Stories and GTA 4, and finds out which game has a bigger map.

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Assessing the maps of the two GTA titles

The actual measurements of the game maps are tricky to determine, but a member of GTAForums, named KeWiS, has done a phenomenal job in determining the size of the maps in the series.

He has divided the maps into three areas — water area, land area, and total area.

The GTA Vice City Stories map (Image via GTAWiki.com)

Starting with GTA Vice City Stories, the map has a land area of 5.62 square kilometers and a water area of 3.5 square kilometers. By adding these two, readers know that the total map size of GTA Vice City Stories is 9.11 square kilometers.

The size of the map is not great by today's standards, but GTA Vice City Stories was released in 2006, which is very impressive for the time.

The map of Vice City Stories is big, but it also has a lot of wasted space, with Washington beach taking up a considerable chunk of the land area along with Escobar International Airport.

GTA 4's map (image via GTAWiki.com)

GTA 4's map is drastically bigger than the Vice City Stories map. Taking advantage of the new hardware at the time (Xbox 360 and PS3), Rockstar created a larger and denser version of Liberty City.

The game map has a land area of 8.06 square kilometers and a water area of 8.08 square kilometers, making the total area 16.14 square kilometers.

GTA 4's map is almost double the size of Vice City Stories and is also one of the biggest maps in the entire franchise, only beaten by 2004's Grand Theft Auto San Andreas and 2013's Grand Theft Auto 5, which has the most enormous map in the whole GTA series.