Former GTA 3, Vice City, and San Andreas dev explains vehicle limitations on PS2

The vehicle limitations on PS2 for GTA 3, Vice City, and San Andreas led to a really weird but well-known issue with the games, and former Rockstar developer Obbe Vermeij explains why this happened.

We've all had that moment when we found a rare car spawning in traffic in any of the 3D Universe Grand Theft Auto games after hours of gameplay. However, the moment you get in the vehicle and start driving, nearly every car in traffic gets replaced with the supposedly rare vehicle that you picked up.

So here's what really happened, and how the devs had to work with the vehicle limitations on PS2 for the older GTA titles.

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Vehicle limitations on PS2 led to the same cars spawning in traffic

Obbe Vermeij has once again come forward with yet another explanation for a mechanic found in many of the older GTA titles. The former technical director at Rockstar North explained in an X post how the developers of GTA 3, Vice City, and San Andreas had to reduce the number of used vehicle models to eight because of the memory limitations on the Sony PlayStation 2.

What this means is that when you're driving in one of these games, you can only encounter eight different vehicle models in traffic. Vermeij then explains how these models were replaced:

"My code would occasionally pick a car model to be phased out. Once there were none left on the map, this model would be removed and a new model could be loaded. The code would pick a model that was appropriate for the area (sports cars in business district, old cars in run-down areas, etc.)."

However, there were a few instances when vehicle limitations on PS2 would start to show up. For instance, when the player has a high wanted level, some of these eight models get replaced by police/law enforcement vehicles. Meanwhile, some missions will spawn specific vehicle models that don't fit with the regular traffic of the region.

These vehicle limitations on PS2 also explain why some cars will disappear or get replaced when you look away even for a second. The funniest drawback, as mentioned before, is when you have the same car spawn in traffic for every NPC around you. Vermeij explained why this happened:

"At times there would only be 1 or 2 cars models available for ambient traffic. This lack of variation was particularly noticeable if the player was driving the one car that had to be used."

This limitation is also why garages in these GTA games would remove the cars inside them once the door has been closed, the former technical director stated. Although the PC version of GTA 3, Vice City, and San Andreas doesn't have the same memory limitations as the PS2, it seems that this mechanic persisted in all versions.

Surprisingly, this bizarre phenomenon is found in Grand Theft Auto 4 as well, even though the game wasn't made for the PS2. Vermeij explains:

"Yes, same with IV. Maybe the number of vehicle models was a bit higher, but there was a similar limit."

In fact, there's a mod for GTA 4 that aims to fix this issue, as the entire traffic can get replaced with taxis.