The best moments in games are often when the unexpected happens while exploring an open world, such as the sprawling city of Los Santos in Grand Theft Auto 5. However, those unexpected moments can sometimes come less from GTA series' dynamically spawning cops, and instead from the random hiccups that occur as the game attempts to keep the world running.
One player posted an experience on Reddit, showing what can happen when a bridge in Grand Theft Auto 5 decides it doesn't want to be a path and instead stops a car dead in its tracks. The result is an alarming moment during an otherwise routine drive that is sure to kick any player into gear as they are suddenly sent careening off the highway at high speeds.
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In the video, Reddit user atlogican is accelerating at increasing speeds along a freeway overpass before the bridge decides to eat their car and shoot them toward the ground below. It's a jarring bug that brings the player to a dead stop and wrecks the front end of their car, likely as a result of "crashing" into the concrete that should have been safely under the tires. Fortunately, this didn't happen while the player was racing in GTA 5, but it still put an awkward stop on the mission they had been progressing through.
The player was almost at the end of the bridge as well, so it seems the glitch waited until the last second to attempt to cause the crash. Otherwise, it's possible that if this happened while on a level road, the player may have been sent through the map to collide with the bottom of the Los Santos skybox. At least when the road is what glitches during a given mission, it's less taxing than when an NPC decides to cheat in GTA 5 and ruin an encounter.
The nature of open-world titles like GTA 5 lend themselves to all manor of glitches as its systems need to make thousands of checks per second, leaving each one open to fail in hilarious ways. Usually, this kind of thing stays under the hood, but when it does pop up for a player like atlogican, it can lead to some entertaining situations. As long as it doesn't crop up too often, or hinder progress, players will often find these types of glitches more charming than infuriating.
Grand Theft Auto 5 is available now for PC, PS4, Stadia, and Xbox One, with PS5 and Xbox Series X/S versions in development.