After awhile the cars really starting piling up. I was pretty happy with myself, and equally perplexed no one could figure out how to fix the problem. Every once and awhile a few people would come by and look at the situation and then leave.
Ok, 2 things happened next that are pretty awesome.
1. I looked into both directions of the traffic jam to see how many cars would actually get stuck in this line of mass confusion. When I looked in the one direction and then back to the opposite direction I noticed less cars piled up then had been there before. Also, one of the cars I parked in the middle of the street was gone. When I looked back down the other direction again about half of the cars there had dissapeared. The game was ‚fixing‘ the situation when I wasn’t looking.
Which is sort of how quantum physics works at it’s base level. The act of you looking at something literally changes it’s properties. GTA 5 was using quantum physics-ish mechanics to fix the ‚error‘ I had caused.
Awesome. But also cheap. Where did those cars go?
2. I saw part of how the game accomplished this. A lady came over to investigate the scene again, but this time she jumped into one of the cars I had parked to block the road. She backed up and took off. It wasn’t her car, but she had to (like something out of the Truman Show) help fix the situation. Even if she had to resort to stealing to do it.
I have tried this in many open world games and it usually goes about the same way. Video games don’t like traffic jams.
