GTA 3 dev explains why we couldn't fly in Liberty City

Former GTA 3 dev Obbe Vermeij has now revealed why players couldn't fly properly in Liberty City, and why the vehicles in the game were slower than that of its sequels. Being the first 3D game in the series, Grand Theft Auto 3 was severely limited in its features in comparison to its successors. The early jump to 3D also proved challenging as Rockstar had to make sure the open-world environment would work in the PS2.

This meant that there were some sacrifices in terms of how much freedom players would get in the game. Vermeij has detailed the reasoning behind why vehicles were intentionally made slow, which also reveals why the planes wouldn't work that well.

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GTA 3 dev reveals why vehicles were slower in Liberty City

Former Rockstar North technical director Obbe Vermeij, who revealed several details about GTA San Andreas and other past titles, has come up with some new behind-the-scenes facts about the 3D Universe Grand Theft Auto games. According to the former GTA 3 dev, in order to get the game to run on the PlayStation 2, he and his colleague Adam Fowler had to devise workarounds. He explained:

"There was no way we could fit the whole map of gta3 in PS2 memory. Streaming involves loading models from the DVD as the player moves around. This was the hardest technical challenge during the development of gta3 and was coded by Adam Fowler."

GTA 3 was ahead of its time for many reasons, and the size of the open-world map was quite impressive back in the day. It also proved challenging to include the whole map in real-time, as the texture streaming on the PS2 wasn't fast enough to load everything. The GTA 3 dev explained:

"The closer models physically are on the DVD, the faster they are loaded. This is because the DVD needs to accelerate/decelerate as the head moves to a different track."

This is where Adam Fowler, another technical director at Rockstar North at the time, comes in. In addition to duplicating commonly used files, he attempted to arrange the models that were close together in the Liberty City map to also be close together on the DVD.

Despite the most efficient placement, however, the streaming wasn't fast enough. Players could still see the building LODs and even the roads would go missing.

This is why, Vermeij explains, the player character was slowed down. They even changed the road layout in Portland to slow the player down further, as this area had the worst texture streaming issues. The GTA 3 dev then reveals:

"In other problem areas, we increased the drag (air resistance) on the vehicles 5% or so. Hardly noticeable but it helped. The streaming issues were the main reason we couldn’t let the player fly in gta3 (other than with the dodo)."

Vermeij explained that the streaming issues were made worse in older versions of the PS2 and in older DVDs. This issue is not present in GTA Vice City, which came with several improvements.

This game has better compression of textures and models, and the LOD version of buildings won't pop up unless you're flying. The issue isn't present in San Andreas either, which came much later and technology had improved a lot by then.

However, this game had its share of weird quirks and bugs. The former GTA 3 dev had earlier revealed the reasons behind the random plane crashes in GTA San Andreas. Before that, he had revealed the tricks he pulled off to make the mirrors work in the game.

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