GTA The Trilogy/Definitive Edition

[lazygecko]

It's been fascinating watching this trainwreck unfold over the past few days. I don't even know where to start since people have been dissecting so much of this, constantly discovering new embarrassing details. Aside from the usual stuff of the games being riddled with new bugs and technical issues, it seems that a huge swathe of the games' graphical elements have been processed through AI algorithms with little to no human oversight. Text from signs and such appear to have been machine interpreted from the original low resolution textures and come out mistranslated, the character rigs are all wrong ending up deformed with lanky proportions, etc. For the Switch version in particular aside from suffering from things like ridiculously low framerates, also appears to have been mistakenly shipped with script sources and compilers and such right out in the open allowing people to peek inside the game code complete with developer comments. The launcher for the PC version was shut down for extended periods rendering the games unplayable due to their online prerequisite.

 

What makes all of this worse is that prior to release, Take 2 delisted the original games from online storefronts, while simultaneously going scorched earth on the PC modding communities for these games. Seems they've sent a pretty strong message that their "Definitive Edition" should be the only option available to consumers and you should also be expected to shell out a significant amount of money for it, all while they have given every indication of having spent next to no effort at all on such a project.

 

This has also just made me reflect on the general trend of remasters in recent years and how the ones coming from major publishers in particular always seem to have this wide gulf in quality between releases. They're either trash offering a decidedly worse experience than just sticking with the original, or they end up being everything people could have hoped for. Nothing ever seems to be just inbetween. You might get a big blunder like Warcraft 3 Reforged but also a slam dunk like Command & Conquer Remastered, or compare the travesty of the GTA Trilogy to the surprisingly great Tony Hawk Pro Skater 1+2, etc.

[PsychEyeball]

Best thing is you can't even buy the PC version right now because they initially shipped the game with music tracks they no longer have the licensing rights for.

 

I personally want this just because I both want a good laugh and a hearty cry at how Rockstar massacred some of my favorite games of my early adulthood. 

[Wavy]

I've seriously got no words for this.

 

Though, seeing any of these games on a Nintendo console in an official capacity is kinda surreal.

[TheMagicMushroomMan]

The whole thing is hilarious to me. Looking at some of those screenshots and associating them with the series in general cracks me up. It just looks so lazy. And terrifying. It's a modified version of a mobile port of a series that came out when the PS2 was on everyone's Christmas wishlist running on a Nintendo Switch at 480p 22fps, with nightmarish new models, spelling errors, and characters that appear to have been made out of a strange plastic that slowly melted over time, talking to each other through compressed audio in fancy modern Unreal Engine 4 environments with animations from a different engine that was built nearly two decades ago.

 

The game's code even acknowledges that it doesn't work:

 

 

 

 

 

 

The completely unflattering AI-produced character models and spelling errors, blatant unashamed laziness, and inaccuracies in engine behavior and gameplay that were leftover from the mobile versions of the games make this possibly the funniest and most embarrassing failure I've ever seen from a AAA series. I want them to do GTA IV next!

 

Keep in mind that this is also a game that makes you pick between performance and fidelity modes on a PS5.

Edited November 13, 2021 by TheMagicMushroomMan

[Wavy]

5 minutes ago, TheMagicMushroomMan said:

The game's code even acknowledges that it doesn't work:

 

 

Wait, you can view the game code?

[Hawk of The Crystals]

Anytime I see footage of this "Remastered Trilogy", 10 years get taken off of my life-span. But in all seriousness, is rockstar and take2 so high off of GTA online simp-cash that they think this is a good product?

 

This just looks bad and hilarious.

[TheMagicMushroomMan]

1 minute ago, Wavy said:

Wait, you can view the game code?

www.pcgamer.com/amp/dataminers-are-finding-developer-comments-and-unlicensed-songs-in-gta-trilogy-as-rockstar-games-launcher-remains-offline/

[Wavy]

5 minutes ago, TheMagicMushroomMan said:

www.pcgamer.com/amp/dataminers-are-finding-developer-comments-and-unlicensed-songs-in-gta-trilogy-as-rockstar-games-launcher-remains-offline/

Cheers.

 

The code comments in the GTA trilogy reminds me of this video going through code comments of Valve developers losing their sanity:

 

Edited November 13, 2021 by Wavy

[Caffeine Freak]

Did they have to pay to use Morgan Freeman's likeness?

Edited November 13, 2021 by Caffeine Freak

[7Mahonin]

This is one of those never buying sort of things for me because I’m fortunate to own these games on PC and PS2 already in their original form. While it would be great if people didn’t bother buying this until Rockstar fixes it - it’s Rockstar. They could replace all three games with a pile of feces and people would still throw their money at it.

[The_SloVinator]

Rockstar makes Bethesda look like a saint. Now that I think about it, I used to shit on Bethesda for selling buggy & glitchy games & make their consumers to do the work on fixing them. (rightfully so, I mean games should come out with as few bugs as possible but hey, that's never gonna happen anymore) But at least Bethesda lets their community screw around with modding & make cool stuff for other people.

(Although that payed-mods fiasco was hilarious)

 

Rockstar/Take Two on the other hand, from what I've gathered so far:

- Shut down GTA modding scene

- Took down the originals from the online stores

- Made their "Definitive edition" of the games

- With all the years of experience with game design, they couldn't even make a proper remaster.

 

Not gonna lie, I love seeing brands shooting themselves in the foot with this kind of mentality & toxic behavior towards fans. Never have I wished ill will upon a gaming company, though but this whole thing sounds like mad corporates that think the modding scene is ruining gaming or something like that, which some of their fanboys have expressed that online. Big shocker...

 

Forcing GTA fans to buy "Definitive edition" seems very fishy. It's almost like Rockstar realized how bad their Definitive edition is, so they don't want fans to go buy classics on the stores but force them to pay more money for less on the plate (or rather poorer presentation).

 

Thankfully I still have the classics on Steam & I could always buy the old collection for PC physical & apply some patches to it.

 

Edited November 13, 2021 by The_SloVinator

[Caffeine Freak]

14 minutes ago, The_SloVinator said:

Forcing GTA fans to buy "Definitive edition" seems very fishy. It's almost like Rockstar realized how bad their Definitive edition is, so they don't want fans to go buy classics on the stores but force them to pay more money for less on the plate (or rather poorer presentation).

 

Also didn't want them choosing the obviously superior modded version over the "Definitive edition".

 

 

[The_SloVinator]

7 minutes ago, Caffeine Freak said:

 

Also didn't want them choosing the obviously superior modded version over the "Definitive edition".

 

 

Holy mother of God...

[Sergeant_Mark_IV]

Dear Rockstar, rain does not look like this. Not even milk, not even horse cum, not even quicksilver can be this bright white in a pitch black night.
I know its a vital part of your sexual fetishes to overwork your employees but please let them go outside once in a while and let them see how real rain looks like, so they can try to realistically reproduce it in the game.

[Azuris]

They have exchanged the Engine, so technically said, this is even a Remake.

 

I am pretty sure they had made a Tool to port as much as possible to the Unreal Engine and only took Hand manually on the Major Stuff, leading to having much Stuff being Victim of the Automation.

 

Those Games are huge, exchangin the Engine and redo Stuff isn't something cheap, as it costs Time and it seems they wanted to make it in a cost efficent Way.

 

I bet they got the Unreal Engine for a nice Price by having GTA 5 for free on the Epic Store (with the nice side effect that they got more People for GTA online paying there for Stuff).

 

Sad for People that wanted a fresh Paintwork on the Games, 60 Bucks aren't cheap for such a old Game.

Even Activision Blizzard wasn't willing to charge more for Diablo 2.

[famicommander]

I was ready to crap on them for not including Liberty City Stories and Vice City Stories, the PSP/PS2 games that ran on a stripped down version of the same engine as the trilogy.

 

Little did I know they would utterly fail to port even the base PS2 trilogy.

 

Utterly pathetic.

[snapshot]

lol i love their response

 

[Azuris]

1 hour ago, sluggard said:

lol i love their response

 

 

[lazygecko]

I probably wouldn't be so quick to place blame on the dev studio since it's highly likely they were barely given any resources or support at all with a tight deadline. Ultimately the buck stops with the publisher and they're the ones who signed off on this thinking it was okay to release and sell at full price.

[Endless]

1 hour ago, lazygecko said:

I probably wouldn't be so quick to place blame on the dev studio since it's highly likely they were barely given any resources or support at all with a tight deadline. Ultimately the buck stops with the publisher and they're the ones who signed off on this thinking it was okay to release and sell at full price.

The studio that made the remasters has a history of doing shitty, half-baked jobs with little care at all. All they did before this was Mobile ports.

 

Here's a copy paste of what they managed to do with these so called remasters:

- Cars don't get dirty anymore.

- Everyone looks like they took a bath in anal lube, they are so shiny and cartoonish. Sometimes characters have two skin tones at the same time.

- The dancing mission, like the lowrider one and the one at the beach have weird delays so you have to smash the button a little late to get the perfect score, if you hit perfectly it will say that you missed. I don't know how they broke this, but they did. Prepare to fail a lot of dates that involves dancing.

- We only got one phase of the moon at all times.

- CJ swims way slower for some reason

- The sounds were heavily compressed and they all sound like shit, like a flute being played by Shrek's asshole.

- They changed the water texture and you can literally see the textures loading in front of you while swimming on flying a plane above the water.

- If you drive a car too fast on the countryside the game starts to show a graphical corruption at the edges of the screen.

- They increased the draw distance fog to 200% - you can't see anything when you are above a building or something high.

- The minimap takes forever to load.

- The flying school lessons are completely broken and sometimes they crash the game, so you have to hold the button to skip the cutscenes otherwise the game freezes.

- You can't cycle your bike at regular speeds, because the touch controls can't detected how strong you are pressing a key so you always cycle your bike at max speed.

- They absolutely destroyed the gym minigames. They straight up don't fucking work. Just search for them on Youtube, they are ridiculous.

- The game now has a autoclimp feature so CJ climbs anything that you touch, even accidentaly. It really screws you over in some missions.

- The burglary side missions are completely broken and you get stuck inside the houses.

- The vehicles don't have special animations anymore, like the bed of the garbage truck or the forks of the forklift, nope, they don't work anymore, it's not like we need them for missions, right? /s

- Everyone has broken facial expressions. CJ doesn't open his eyes most of the time. Tempeny has a broken lip and Pulasky has a sore eye.

- You don't lose your weapons if you die anymore. So this made all the girlfriends in the game pointless because you only got this perk after dating one specific girlfriend, Katie.

- You can't take pictures anymore.

- The game has less civilians around because they don't know how to optimize a game.

- They basically removed all vegetation from the game, you can cleary see that desert is empty and dull now.

 

Plus, Rockstar is just a bunch of lazy-ass milkers that never bother fixing shit. This remaster was just a poor excuse for a quick buck. Try playing GTA IV as an example of how much they care about their games. You can't. The game is nearly impossible to access by normal means.

[Azuris]

1 hour ago, lazygecko said:

I probably wouldn't be so quick to place blame on the dev studio since it's highly likely they were barely given any resources or support at all with a tight deadline. Ultimately the buck stops with the publisher and they're the ones who signed off on this thinking it was okay to release and sell at full price.

 

In that Case you are right.
It happens with every Developer that grows to big, the upper Positions got new Personal that isn't from a creative Scene, more just a typical Manager with its classical Tricks to "save" and produce Money.
The easiest Thing you can save Money without wasting any Thinking into it is the Human Ressource.
Cut Personal, keep the Work Time straight and the Deadlines short.

 

That "Strategy" does bring up you Wins and Sales Revenue, for a certain Time, but it kills you Quality and the Value of your Products and with it your Company in long Terms.
Activision Blizzard is the very best Example to showcase it.

 

So yes, in other Eyes, they really had some ingenious People porting the whole Stuff into a new Engine.
But they did not polish it and overwork it enought to be a fully grown final Product, probably caused by Desicions of the Management.

[Sergeant_Mark_IV]

Jesus fucking christ, all they needed to deliver was the base game with widescreen/ultrawide support, just slightly better textures and models, increased view distance. Maybe go a bit further and improving the combat to fit modern standards better. They didn't need to change the entire fucking engine.

Nobody asked for any of this shit! How can they fuck it so bad? This is a worse mess than Cyberpunk.

Edited November 13, 2021 by Sergeant_Mark_IV

[scalliano]

This whole fiasco is one of the biggest adverts for piracy I've ever witnessed, especially with the whole R* launcher going tits-up.

 

I was planning on grabbing this physical for PS4 next month, don't think I'll bother now.

Edited November 13, 2021 by scalliano

[ReaperAA]

27 minutes ago, Sergeant_Mark_IV said:

Jesus fucking christ, all they needed to deliver was the base game with widescreen/ultrawide support, just slightly better textures and models, increased view distance. Maybe go a bit further and improving the combat to fit modern standards better. They didn't need to change the entire fucking engine.

Nobody asked for any of this shit! How can they fuck it so bad? This is a worse mess than Cyberpunk.

 

Holy Sh*t!!!! The ratings are looking as bad as Warcraft 3 Reforged (or is this even worse?).

[LavaWave]

Just gave it a shot yesterday, only tried San Andreas, I've met with bugs like falling through the map and random crashes, uninstalled it the same day, I still prefer the originals (Vice City and San Andreas, not a fan of III) with the SilentPatch and they work great, I don't recommend the GTA Trilogy DE until rockstar patch it up, it feels like a beta version at this rate.

 

Quote

Seems they've sent a pretty strong message that their "Definitive Edition" should be the only option available to consumers and you should also be expected to shell out a significant amount of money for it, all while they have given every indication of having spent next to no effort at all on such a project.

 

And because of that, people who want to play the originals over this half-assed crap will just pirate them.

Edited November 13, 2021 by LavaWave

[thiccyosh]

Can't wait for Crowbcat to make a video about this carefully handcrafted mistake.

[lazygecko]

20 minutes ago, ReaperAA said:

 

Holy Sh*t!!!! The ratings are looking as bad as Warcraft 3 Reforged (or is this even worse?).

This is magnitudes worse than Reforged. Blizzard vastly overpromised very early on and then underdelivered as the project shrunk in scope. No expectations like that were set for this, so people were at best counting on marginally improved versions of the originals that would at least function as intended.

[omx32x]

when the teaser first came out i though "man this is gonna be shit" because every time rockstar re releases a game they fuck up

 

when i saw the trailer i though the models looked ugly but the city looked good so i didnt expect much but man this is way worse then i though it would be

[omx32x]

8 hours ago, PsychEyeball said:

Best thing is you can't even buy the PC version right now because they initially shipped the game with music tracks they no longer have the licensing rights for.

 

I personally want this just because I both want a good laugh and a hearty cry at how Rockstar massacred some of my favorite games of my early adulthood. 

its funny that you cant play a single player game due to drm but the game has already been cracked so the only ones suffering are the people who paid for it

 

drm is fraud on full priced games less then 5% of games with it get it removed later

 

i remenber when ff15 was coming to pc it had drm but before it released square put a demo of the game on pc but thing is the demo had EVERYTHING the full game was there just not accessible so because of that ff15 on pc was cracked before the game had even released making drm useless

[lazygecko]

13 minutes ago, omalefico32x said:

when the teaser first came out i though "man this is gonna be shit" because every time rockstar re releases a game they fuck up

 

when i saw the trailer i though the models looked ugly but the city looked good so i didnt expect much but man this is way worse then i though it would be

 

The first warning sign for me was noticing missing foliage like shrubs and bushes when they did the before/after comparisons in the pre-release trailer. I was wondering why the hell they would cut that stuff for an "upgrade". Oh, and people also quickly took note that they had actually used footage from the PC versions with low graphics settings in the trailer to make the originals artificially look worse than they really were.