Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy Definitive Edition

Oh, that sweet turn of the millennium, when several game legends were born every year, when genres, series and rules were established, from which we still live as players. And a sweet time when Rockstar didn’t have a decade-long development cycle and wasn’t afraid to experiment, so in addition to the royal GTA, there could be experiments like the Red Dead Revolver (taken from Capcom) or Bully, known domestically as Canis Canem Edit.

Today, however, we will talk exclusively about the three episodes of the GTA series that reigned over the second PlayStation and that were at the birth of the urban events genre as we know it today. I have an inner relationship with each of them: The trio is disappointed that my home PC failed to run this hot seed, because of Vice City, I was in the eighth grade of elementary school two weeks after school (and then it was a problem, I’m telling you!) and San Andreas significantly accelerated my acquisition of that magical black box from Sony.

There are tens of millions of similar stories in the world, and it is all the more understandable that Rockstar decided to make money on nostalgic feelings. On the contrary, the burning pile of feces that we got instead of a decent remaster is completely incomprehensible.

Worrying clues

A minimalist PR campaign, which showed almost nothing from the game before the release, could have been a slightly warning finger. Another indication could be the fact that the media did not get to the game in advance. But both could be swept away with the wave that he was a Rockstar and he was doing his own thing. Well, this time the reasons were obviously a little different.

Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – Definitive Edition installs three separate “enhanced” games on your console – GTA III, GTA: Vice City and GTA: San Andreas. Of course, for the first time, I couldn’t jump other than into the neon-lit eighty middle episode, my most beloved episode, which once aroused my love for the decade I was born at.

And the nostalgia is in full swing! Already in the intro, I was surprised that the authors did not even replace the footage of the game with innovated graphics, but no, that’s just a detail, and soon I’ll be driving through the streets of the city and finding out where the money and drugs belonging to the Italians have gone. mafii.

And it’s in p …

When Tommy and I arrived at the beach promenade after the introductory race, looking at the neon signs at the hotels, I still thought that it had turned out quite well and that I was looking forward to recalling the nuances of the story, the great dubbing of Ray Liotta and hell mission with a helicopter on a construction site. But then it dawned on me, Vice City showed its new face and all the joy left me.

First of all, the developers at Grove Street Games, who are responsible for the complete remaster, have stood halfway in terms of visual editing. The result is a strange cypress of ancient models, on which a kind of innovated cartoon stylization is grafted, but at the same time it is as if there are several levels of graphics quality in the game, which are incredibly mutually beating.

As a result, while such a protagonist does not look completely horrible, virtually all other story characters are significantly worse off. And when you look at ordinary pedestrians, horror begins to take over. Get ready for strange, twisted creatures with pre-flood animations, both during normal walking and during any activities.

The same goes for all other parts. It doesn’t make much sense to comment on them individually, because they share the vast majority of problems, including absolutely appalling optimization. This is paradoxically the most noticeable in the oldest GTA III, which even the PlayStation 5 cannot start cleanly and without framedrops. I am all the more sorry that I was looking forward to finally enjoying this part, which had escaped me for so many years, without any problems. Well, I’ll keep waiting.

The ingenuity of the development team is completely unheard of, the whole trilogy is riddled with bugs and graphic errors at the amateur level. For all of them, we can mention, for example, the effect of rain, which both looks visually disgusting and, of course, does not respect shelters, but the most ridiculous is that the game cannot render it over water, so driving in the rain around the port of San Fierro looks tragic.

Internet forums have already overwhelmed dozens and hundreds of funny pictures of everything that makes the trilogy wrong, and one would laugh if they didn’t want $ 60 for this gossip. The state of the “final edition” is all the more sad because, compared to the work of the modders, the developers at Grove Street Games come out as broken dogs. The even more unflattering light on Rockstar and Take-Two publishing house is shed by their hostile approach to the Modder community and the popular distribution of pre-litigation calls.

Even GTA remasters offer a double setup option for the new generation of consoles, as is traditional, but the graphical difference is hard to find, so it’s better to rely on Performance mode targeting 60 FPS. It is a shame that games often cannot stand on them.

Something good

The new jacket is not the only thing the Definitive Edition brings, and it is fair to admit that some improvements in the quality of player’s life are very welcome. These include, for example, automatic saving at the beginning of missions, so you do not have to travel to the client in the event of a potential failure.

A nice novelty is also the implementation of the weapon wheel, not unlike the one from GTA 5, but I was most pleased with the innovated control scheme, which, unlike the version for PS2, counts on the second analog. When I once bought the Vice City port on the PS4 and found that instead of today’s standard camera control, I could switch the view out of my own eyes with a single lever, I never got used to playing.

But a remastered collection is still useless. The developers have done nothing, nothing at all, to bring this legend closer to today’s players. Yes, the original games are still very good, at least for those of us who experienced them at the time of the greatest glory, but that’s not the fault of the Definitive Edition. On the contrary, in addition to a few small improvements, it successfully tries to sabotage the trilogy’s reputation.

Famous games simply can’t be approached for good and with the conviction that fans will eat everything the developers put in front of them, because a good name will solve half the worries and the other will be stuck with nostalgia. For games as old as these three GTAs, in my opinion, there is no other way than the Take-Two they chose for last year’s final edition of the Mafia (by the way, it’s really remarkable how flexible the “Definitive Edition” can be). This is a good example of how to pass a famous game to a young audience, similarly to the vast majority of games from Bluepoint Games, for example, the phenomenal Shadow of the Colossus.

Just not like that

In my view, the argument that more care would be too demanding in three open-world games is odd. On the one hand, the “open worlds” of the old trilogy are already cute from today’s point of view (seriously, open the Vice City map and laugh at what it looks like in one GTA V district), on the other hand, the release of three games at once is actually useless. If the Grove Street Games really took proper care of the trio themselves and, for example, released the same well-restored Vice City in a year, I would have no problem paying a fair price for each individual part. They don’t even deserve a broken sin for what they’ve done now.

Other small details illustrate the colossal trouble of the GTA trilogy, such as the re-presence of the infamous sexual mini-game, for which Rockstar once got into a lot of trouble, so that the developers can now confidently repeat it (fortunately this time it was enough to download the game in time) on a PC from digital sales), or perhaps the absence of some licensed songs (a total of about 20 are missing), which were still found in the game data.

Grove Street Games, under the supervision of Rockstar and Take-Two, simply sent a cheap (for production, not for sale!) Scumbag to the market, which is not really for anyone at all. I’m curious if something will happen in the coming weeks and months, but this launch is more embarrassing in my view than last year’s CD RED tragedy. And I just hope that if anyone ever remasters the first Red Dead Redemption, it won’t be these artists again.

Don’t buy it. Don’t even buy it at a discount, this just doesn’t deserve your time, you’d better get the original version, which you may grind your teeth at due to some outdated mechanisms, but it will be due to the relentless passage of time, not because of the developer scholarship. This is how angry I was last at Remake XIII. Yuck!