Why do open-world games seem to spawn vehicles based on what the character is driving? [closed]

Question

There are numerous open-world games that all seem to exhibit similar vehicle spawn behavior: namely, whatever vehicle your character is driving noticeably influences the types of vehicles that spawn dynamically around you.

I recall experiencing this phenomenon myself in the GTA series, Crackdown, Just Cause 2, and similar games. It seems like there are enough different titles, technologies, and publishers involved that it wouldn't just be a quirk of a single open-world engine.

This might just be selective perception at work, but I have also seen this mentioned in enough vehicle collecting guides to feel confident there might be something to it.

Is this just a result of a common memory-management/caching game design problem? Or it was, and now developers purposely replicate it out of tradition? Or am I just crazy?

Answer

Both in GTA IV and Just Cause 2 this was related to the fact that consoles (reference platforms for devs) have memory limitations, therefore the number of vehicle models stored memory is also limited.

Gaming PCs nowadays have more memory but in the PC porting developers usually do not care much about it and they implement the same behavior.

I personally don't like it too because it gives me a feeling of "artefact". The only good point is that if you need a certain type of vehicle you know the areas where it spawns.

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