The Grand Theft Auto series has long since surpassed the status of regular games. It is parts such as GTA 3, Vice City and San Andreas that have a huge impact on the game culture as such. They stood at the birth of modern city events with an open world and basically sandbox freedom of what you can do. And even though the current driving force of the series is still the fifth part (which is already quite over) and its online component. However, when you say GTA, there are still a lot of players, and in fact non-players, coming up with terms like Vice City or San Andreas.
These games also accompanied me during my acquaintance with elementary school games. We went to Troika and Vice City with friends at a chosen one who had a computer at home, and I was able to play San Andreas in 2005 on my family PC at home. At the time, these games were quite ahead: the troika was a total rebirth of the series, Vice City was a stylish extension of perhaps everything the troika had bitten, and San Andreas was essentially a megalomaniac project for which Rockstar crowned this era of PlayStation games. 2.
A lot of time has passed since then. GTA 3 celebrates 20 years this year, Vice City 19 years and San Andreas 17 years. Today, we who grew up with them remember these games as titles that shaped our passion for open worlds with hilarious stories and lots of action. However, with the advent of the Definitive Edition of this trilogy, I began to have some doubts before the release as to whether mere nostalgia would suffice. Especially after there were a number of quite unsuccessful attempts to feed on player nostalgia: let’s remember, for example, trapas s Warcraft 3: Reforged.
In addition, Rockstar managed to fog as much as possible until the release date. Remasters were produced for him by the Grove Street Games studio, which is behind even their mobile versions. Basically, only one trailer was released (and only on the day of the series’ release), and the authors did not release any world media or streamers or youtubers into the game in advance. If something really stinks about the game’s upcoming release date, that’s the way it is. And the fears turned out to be justified.
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So we jumped into the collection of games together with the rest of the world on the day of release. We tried all the titles on an ongoing basis, and at first glance it is clear that although the original versions themselves are several years old, they are basically unified in the collection: they have the same game menus, they control the same and the level of visual improvements zoom in. We chose the version on the PlayStation 5 and that’s how our impressions come from. The games come separately, they don’t have to run a common launcher to choose from them, as Nintendo did with its recent collection of 3D Super Mario games.
At first glance, all three titles can attract quite significant visual changes. The light and reflections have been completely modernized, the textures have much more detail, as well as the character models are now more detailed. Games really look much more modern, you can’t deny that. And in the game worlds, you can enjoy far more at once, although the overall design, which is still dominated by square houses with flat textures or awkward animations of pedestrians on the street, still does not deny it.
This is also the first problem you realize shortly after the games start: they are still at the core of the 2001-2004 games. In collisions, cars bounce off each other like pedestrians, pedestrians walk in a circle, a policeman chasing a robber gets stuck by a lamp and runs on the spot. The dialogues, especially in the trio and Vice City, are a bit short and the story doesn’t really captivate you. The games added checkpoints to the missions, but only somewhere. Sometimes you have to return to the very beginning of the mission due to a small mistake. And so on.
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Game character models are not very good
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However, this is not the main criticism. So the games simply looked like before and we didn’t mind, because we really enjoyed it. But what bothers us are the problems that come with the new Definitive versions. And that there really aren’t many of them. Plus, we’re not really alone when Rockstar realizes his mistakes and even the game withdrawn from sale on PC platform.
Let’s start with what struck us first: appalling optimization. The PlayStation 5 is really no sharpener and can run a lot of modern 4K games at 60 frames per second, while others can handle ray-tracing in high definition. But here, for ornate versions of PlayStation 2 games, for some reason, the player still has to choose between a 4K resolution at 30 FPS or a lower resolution at 60 FPS. And in both cases, the game can still twitch, quite often and visibly. So please don’t really like that.
The problems with the frame rate are then allegedly even worse on the Nintendo Switch, where players report falls as low as 15 FPS. PC players with modern RTX 3080 Ti graphics cards also complain about poor optimization. Will an early patch fix it? Maybe yes. Should the game have come out in such a state at all? Definitely not.
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Bugs are sometimes funny, sometimes rather sad
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However, poor optimization is just the tip of the iceberg. Especially in GTA 3 (but also San Andreas) there is a very unpleasantly processed animation of the rain, which is far too disturbing that it hurts the eyes. San Andreas has a big problem with the game being too dark and you have to move the image contrast slider to the minimum in the settings, but that’s not the case. Trojka and Vice City suddenly act with their renewed visual side almost like an animator instead of the original quite realistically conceived visuals. The character models are more detailed, but still ugly, and in some cases anatomically completely wrong. Bugs and bugs just buy together and buy and buy and buy.
The authors further modernized both controls and elements such as the minimap. Weapons now have a new round menu where they are clearer and more accessible. The camera is freer, navigation now drives you better, the game saves itself automatically. These are all elements that have undoubtedly benefited the old games in this way.
But then you realize that you might prefer to play older versions, for example, just because you will find far more songs on the game radio. While this is logical, Rockstar’s finance department calculated that renewing the licenses might not be very beneficial, but that immediately one of the main nostalgic aspects disappears. The fact that people managed to extract old songs from the game code anyway is completely incomprehensible, so they are actually there, only the authors simply forbade them to play them.
The great attraction of the old trilogy for many of us was also just a simple rampage in the game world with the help of cheats. Unfortunately, many of them have disappeared in the new versions (invisible and flying cars, immortality, faster time, for example), but at the same time many of them are still there: you summon a tank, a pile of weapons, money and you go to become the rulers of chaos in the game world.
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Many people are also interested in how the news behaves in terms of control, for example when flying or shooting. These were aspects that didn’t suit us very well in the original games, and Definitive Edition obviously tried to improve them, only the result is still so uncertain. Flying on a gamepad seemed subjectively okay to me, for example, a mission in Vice City with a small remote-controlled helicopter and dropping bombs from it was far less suffering than before. Speaking of those legendary annoying missions, such as the one in San Andreas, where you chase the train with your partner Big Smok, is also quite manageable and I managed to overcome it for the first time.
In any case, the skirmishes are still a weak point of the whole trilogy. On PlayStation, the game forces you to have relatively aggressive autofocus, but a lot of weapons have a really short range and sometimes you don’t even find enemies due to strange texture collisions, even if they peek out from behind the car and so on. Shooting while driving is also often a big coincidence if you hit or not. Again, this is not a critique of the Definitive Edition, as it once was.
We didn’t even want that much from Rockstar, the Grove Street Games. Although there were claims on the Internet months before the release that the news would be completely redesigned into GTA V, as Rockstar would paint a remake of the first Mafia, many of us just wanted exactly what the real idea behind Definitive Edition was: old games improved so as to retain their classic character, but in modernized graphics adapted to current hardware. Instead, we got a weird quick sourdough, in addition to the full price.
At the same time, after last year’s embarrassment with the hurried Cyberpunk, it could be expected that the game studios can take care of the release of the games so that such a situation does not recur. Instead, we have another game “fail” where one platform can’t play the game at all and on others people share memes and videos with countless bugs, ugly models and weak optimizations. And they’re asking for a refund.
Legendary scene. Unfortunately, the game is basically too dark
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What’s the way out? First and foremost, there must be a quick patch that fixes the worst bugs: in particular, titles need to be optimized so that performance on current-generation consoles is not as appalling and getting rid of the most ugly backlogs, such as annoying rain animations or completely messy models of some game characters. . And especially to return dissatisfied players, because in this respect Rockstar manages the situation even worse than the CD Project with Cyberpunk last year. Ideally, he could return old versions to stores, because downloading them is just another sub-belt for his gaming community.
However, so as not to offend the game completely: in performance mode and with manual contrast adjustment, for example, San Andreas can be played, and in fact you can sometimes go back to 2004 and ride nostalgia for a while. I have similar feelings for Vice City and the troika, but in terms of modern game design and especially working with the story, San Andreas is probably the best. A lot of cheats also work, so you can just have fun in games.
Anyway, given the status of the Definitive Edition and the upcoming “next-gen” version of GTA V, and probably also the remaster of the fourth part, I’m suddenly much more concerned about the future of Rockstar’s production. Rockstar should really take the current situation to heart and ensure that it does not happen again. Feel free to postpone everything that is being prepared for a year or more. Another sloppy game could push him into the excavated grave of the current remasters very easily.
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