Turning Los Angeles into a playable map
A 1:1 road layout means the game’s streets follow the real city’s geography at roughly the same scale, rather than shrinking Los Angeles into a compact miniature. To build that network, the developers combined two kinds of reference: street-map data supplied the roads’ mapped paths, while commercial satellite imagery offered a view of how the city was arranged on the ground.
That approach can reproduce the shape of a place without making every part of it equally useful to play. A real street grid is built for getting around a city, not for staging dramatic pursuits. Long, regular blocks and predictable intersections may be geographically faithful but leave little room for the rapid changes of direction that make a chase engaging.
When realism gets in the way
The developers’ problem was therefore not simply how to copy the map, but how to make its streets work at high speed. A chase needs routes that create choices and obstacles; a monotonous grid can make driving feel like repeating the same turn. The source fact does not specify which streets or features were changed, so the important distinction is between a real city’s road layout and a game’s designed experience of it.
That tension is what makes a full-scale map an unusual game-making challenge: matching the geography is only the first step. The streets still have to give players a reason to care which way they turn.
