San Andreas is nearly 20 years old now and it's still standing the test of time as an undisputed masterpiece. However in time the norm for how we expect our games to play has changed which has left San Andreas behind. Luckily this game has the undying support of it's tremendous modding community who are spending their precious time to refine this masterpiece at the best of their abilities. And the mods I'm going to mention are proof of that. These mods are going to enhance your experience whether you are playing for the first time or the 500th time. Let's delve deeper into the mods.
1. Let me patch you up
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It's no surprise that the PC port of San Andreas being a product of the early 2000's has some issues compared to the PS2 original. Like some places being completely isolated or background scenery being wrong in cutscenes. Fortunately people over the years have fixed these shortcomings through mods. They improve your experience massively because the vanilla version of San Andreas has some devastating bugs that can harm your experience. One of the most prominent one being CJ swimming slower due to high FPS.
To fix all of these bugs the most recommended fixpack is the essentials pack from MixMods. Essentials pack is an assortment of mods that fixes most of the bugs in the vanilla version and allows you to enjoy the game in higher FPS. Also has widescreen fixes as a bonus. You can pretty much say this fixes everything.
San Andreas is prone to sometimes crashing. It's not as bad as Fallout New Vegas but it can happen. Mainly due to streaming or it's a issue with a mod. But mostly fixing the streaming fixes the issue most of the time. The following mod can fix that by nearly streaming most of San Andreas to your RAM.
People who have played San Andreas before will know that after a workout session in the gym. CJ will magically grow muscles after exiting the interior. The following mod will make that change immediate.
2. Make me Pretty
San Andreas has aged since 2004. It may look rough for people who are used to the visuals of modern games. These mods below are intended to polish those shortcomings but still keep the original visuals
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San Andreas's sky is really beautiful for the time it was made. But it is a bit old now. Real Skybox is a great mod that changes the skybox drastically. Not so much that it feels out of place but just enough that it feels it belongs in the artstyle in the game and gives the game some much needed atmosphere.
This mod brings back the atmosphere from the PS2 version which for some unknown reason went missing while the game was being ported to PC. This mod also includes different ports from the different versions of San Andreas as well as the stories games. Either way this mod brings the much needed orange atmosphere of the game.
3. Satisfaction Guaranteed!
This section of the mods bring some quality of life feature that can bring the game to modern standards.
GTA 4 added a very good feature where can zoom out the radar with a press of a button which carried over to GTA 5. This mod has a good place in the game. Allowing for efficient routing when in a pursuit, chase or mission.
If San Andreas gets a proper remake this feature is a must. When browsing clothes in your wardrobe or a store CJ has to walk in and out of the changing room everytime he has to change a item. Him entering the changing room to change a watch may break immersion but it can be excused due to the limitations of the PS2 which sadly carried over to all future platforms which can load in models in a whiff. This mod fixes that so him changing the clothes is immediate. More like GTA 5. Making it faster than GTA 4.
San Andreas has an awesome soundtrack. Appropriate tracks for every situation. So this mod might make helpful changes for controlling the radio. You can control the volume of the radio. So you can adjust the volume while your being chased or in pursuit on the fly.
MixSets is a must have QoL mod for San Andreas. You can tweak various things in San Andreas through this mod. This is not a mod per se but a collection of mod which you can enable or disable through the ini file supplied. Like setting so cars don't catch fire when flipped. It has some options enabled by default. But you can tweak some options which suits your needs.
The Instant Load mod might not appeal to some people. But i'm going to still put it out there so anyone who is interested tries it out. This mod makes it so the game loads the most recent save file without going through menus. If you launched a new game without saving it will start a new game after you launch the game. This might be helpful for people who want a seamless experience.
Aggressive Peds are something that Rockstar for some reason added on the PC version which never got into any other version of the game. It was not even a thing in the original PS2 version. It is a pretty annoying feature where every ped by no exception if you hit their car once will come after you and circle around your car or ram you if you are driving it. This mod removes that. But some people might prefer that feature so to each their own.
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Those who have played this game countless times before will know that the peds in the game do not have variety at all. If you have seen em' once you have seen em' all. So that's why we're using this mod to have some variety. This does not guarantee you will see different color of the same ped every time. It will just add five more variants of one ped. Which is still better than having only one. This mod uses PedFuncs as a base. So you will need that to use this mod. This mod includes an upscaled version if you want higher res textures for your beloved pedestrians. I recommend downloading the original or upscaled version.
The interiors in San Andreas are for some reason very weirdly programmed. For some reason you can only sprint in certain parts of the interior. Like many people will know that you can only sprint in CJ's kitchen but not in CJ's lounge. This mod fixes that so you can sprint in any interior no matter where you are sprinting.
The games that released after San Andreas like the Liberty City Stories or Vice City Stories had a huge quality of life feature that was sprinting with any type of weapon. This was a huge improvement. This is something that carried over from GTA 3 which only had sprinting with one handed weapons. And San Andreas is massively held back by those limitations. Luckily those don't apply anymore due to the modding community. With this next mod you can sprint with any weapon anywhere(if you have the previous mod installed). By default sprinting with minigun is disabled in this mod. But it includes a preset so you can sprint with that too.
This is a pretty small QoL mod. Many people might not know but San Andreas has an in-game calendar which starts from October and keeps going. It doesn't matter in anything but since it has that thing it is a novelty to have it that shown through this mod. If you don't care about the date just ignore this mod.
The games before GTA 4 didn't have any reload button so you can only reload if you run out of ammo in the current clip. Or just unequipping and equipping that weapon again. This mod adds that immersion so you can reload your current weapon. Even the minigun which doesn't have a reload animation.
The throwable weapons in San Andreas when thrown go statically which looks a little off. This might be totally pointless to some people but this mod fixes that for those people. Now the weapon spins dynamically when thrown not bounce like a grenade like in Half-Life 1.
GTA 4 added a pretty good feature where the radar flashes when you have a wanted level. So if you are not aware can know that you have a wanted level. This mod brings that for San Andreas.
Modern games have made a little feature where if you shoot a throwable projectile it will blow up. Like a shooting sticky bomb in GTA 5 will make that explode. This mod brings that for San Andreas so the satchel charge can explode without using the remote for it. Beware if you blow it up too close to another it might set up a chain reaction.