Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy - The Definitive Editions (Leaked) - PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, Switch, PC, Mobile Devices

[Ryannumber1gamer]

If you've been keeping up with gaming news over the last few months, you might've seen that a leaked Grand Theft Auto remastered collection was being slated across the internet. Evidence has been mounting over the last while about the new editions of this game, with the most recent news of which being the most damning.

Last week, the trilogy was rated in Korea. Furthermore, in a very recent new update to the Rockstar Games Launcher, multiple assets in relation to the remastered trilogy was datamined - confirming it's existence once and for all:

With what we know about the remasters in general, they're supposedly more than a regular remaster (like the previous GTA ports), but not a full remake. They're being ported over to Unreal Engine, and will contain graphical changes and enhancements, with a mix of old and new graphics, according to the original leak. Unlike previous ports which were done by other companies, this one is supposedly being made by Rockstar Dundee in-house as well.

[StaticMania]

Coming to Switch?

Pipe dreams come true?

[Teoskaven]

Gotta love the naming. If Rockastar doesn't give a shit anymore about GTA I and II, why not renaming III to something else at this point? That's like if we only got the second part of one of Mega Man Legacy Collections and got that named like it was the only one.

[Soniman]

The worst kept secret has finally been revealed 

 

[Ryannumber1gamer]

The bad news is Rockstar is delisting the original versions from all storefronts.

 

[Soniman]

Aren't nearly all those versions bad anyway? If so I can understand and it'd probably do good to have some consistency of this truly is the "definitive" version.

[Ryannumber1gamer]

29 minutes ago, Soniman said:

Aren't nearly all those versions bad anyway? If so I can understand and it'd probably do good to have some consistency of this truly is the "definitive" version.

The PC versions have mods that fix them up, and the PS4 versions currently available are 1:1 to the original versions, barring removed music tracks.

[Jango]

Well... Rumours are that these new re-releases are in production since 2017 by Rockstar Dundee (yep) and they're using Unreal Engine, so it's hardly a straight port. Just need a video to see if this is true or not xD 

Man, I came close to buying SA last month on PSN. Good thing I didn't. It's my favorite game of all time and I hope this new release honors it. Never played VC or III, so I'm also looking forward to those.

[Ryannumber1gamer]

https://old.reddit.com/r/PS5/comments/q8rcym/gta_trilogy_has_highres_textures_increased_draw/

Some of the updates have been listed, the controls are closer to GTAV now, and there’s increased draw distance and texture work.

[Jango]

If that's true, I'm torn. While GTA V's controls is easily the best in the series, I'm gonna miss the stupid shit you can do in the original trilogy, like standing on top of moving cars and trains without falling.

But if these improvements mean better aim, cover, shooting and a weapon's wheel, all of my YES. 

 

[Jango]

Eh... This looks better than I expected and WORSE than I expected at the same time. I really don't know.

 

 

[Ryannumber1gamer]

San Andreas Definitive will be available for Game Pass subscribers from November 11th onwards. 3 Definitive is coming to PS Now on December 7th.

Given the structure, I wouldn't be surprised if Vice City Definitive becomes a Game Trial game on Switch.

[Blue Blood]

7 hours ago, Jango said:

Eh... This looks better than I expected and WORSE than I expected at the same time. I really don't know.

It kind of looks like Rockstar hired this man, but he wasn't able to achieve everything in his artistic vision. 

Everything is a bit too shiny and the smoothed character models don't look good. But the environments look alright. I think I'll get this when it's discounted. Never really played the GTA games too much, but I did play the single player campaign of GTAV from start to finish and loved that. 

[Jango]

I agree that the environments, vehicles and lightning looks pretty alright. The materials and textures in some clothes and hair also looks very nice. I think I'm just not feeling these character models TBH. 

But hey, if it's gonna play like GTA V with all the gameplay improvements that happened over the years, like weapon and radio wheel, better aiming/shooting and driving, I'm happy. Tho', I might not get it at launch since I have a weird sensation that this will be a buggy fest. I can't explain, I just feel. Maybe I'm just paranoid. I absolutely LOVE GTA SA, probably the game I've played most during my teenage years. If they fuck up one pixel, I'm gonna feel it double.

[Soniman]

Honestly the ps2 era game have always kinda looked like shit but the games were always so fun with great music, dialogue and voice work it didn't really matter characters still had PS1 shovel hands and fucked up faces, so I think this mostly looks just fine. I'll probably pick it up come release 

[Jango]

On 10/22/2021 at 6:11 PM, Jango said:

I might not get it at launch since I have a weird sensation that this will be a buggy fest. I can't explain, I just feel. Maybe I'm just paranoid.

I'm not paranoid. The game is indeed busted right now. The Definitive Edition was based on the mobile / PS3 / 360 ports, which introduced many new glitches and weird shit. So basically, ALL of those glitches are back. It's the same situation we dealt with Sonic Adventure DX, every re-release was based on a port instead of the original game. It's a port of a port of a port.

Not to mention the increased draw distance that let's you see the WHOLE San Andreas map from the tallest building in LS, which makes the game look like Fortnite /smh

[Sonicka]

I can't decide about these.

The QOL improvements are neat for sure. However on the graphical side it's just another one of those with visual improvements of the double edged sword variety. So, just like the HD'fied Zelda's and Sonic's before it, you can boost and bloom the visuals all you want - but it can impacts the way the game was visually designed around the hardware limitations of the day. 

I mean, you can only shine a polygon so much.

The rain mapping is also flat out terrible with the pattern repeating every few squares - I don't care if they are trying to keep in with the aesthetic of the PS2 game with some of these older design choices... it just takes away more than it gives. The same goes for the draw distance - you've essentially given the player a behind the scenes boundary breaking view of the map which was never intended to be viewed in this way. 

It's a bizarre product that rockstar have released here, because whilst I'm sure the intentions were good... the result is uncanny. 

[Tornado]

Vice City and 3 look atrocious. The weather effects are awful, the lighting engine makes everything look like you dipped it in clearcoat, and there are a bunch of glitches with the car models (which themselves aren't using the improved models from the Xbox version as a base, so you get a super high resolution... flat image for the engine bays and wheels). The character models across all 3 games look like shit. Vice City is the badly censored version (even beyond the playlist being gutted), too; so "definitive version" my ass.

3 is so cartoony and bright that it looks like a completely different game. They practically reshaded it so it looks like the beta images of the game that floated around magazines in early 2001.

San Andreas looks better in comparison, but it's based on the awful mobile port so we already know it's trash regardless and "in comparison" is a pretty low bar to clear anyway.


None of the shooting looks like it was improved at all in Vice City or 3; just an interface overhaul and a weapon wheel (for a game that had instant weapon switching, so who gives a fuck).





All told they took a bunch of dated games that nonetheless had defined (and distinct from each other) art styles and turned them into the same cheap knockoffs of The Sims 4 but with guns that Rockstar clearly didn't spend much money on. Hopefully modders will be able to do something to save them on PC, if they are really (San Andreas in particular) based on the awful mobile ports. They're bad to the extent that it seemed like they were in an active competition with TPC to shit out the worse rerelease of a game of the year.

 

 

tl;dr:

 

 

 

On 10/8/2021 at 11:25 AM, Soniman said:

Aren't nearly all those versions bad anyway? If so I can understand and it'd probably do good to have some consistency of this truly is the "definitive" version.

For San Andreas the PS2 version is pretty much the best. PC and original Xbox versions (in particular the former) of that are kinda sloppy in spots, with some broken graphical effects, missing graphical features and odd bugs even though it is enhanced a fair bit elsewhere; almost as if they built the ports off of an earlier version of the PS2 version; but it really could arguably go either way between PS2 and Xbox (which is why people were so mad when it was added to backwards compatibility on Xbone by replacing it with the awful mobile port). You can fix the PC version and make it easily be the best but it takes a fair bit of effort to find all the things to do so.


Vice City is definitely best in the PC version and it basically was from the day it launched, since it had most of the improvements of the later (original) Xbox version plus a couple of bug fixes; but also remained the uncensored and full soundtrack experience all the way up to when the game was yanked off Steam a few weeks ago. You can also run it with that reverse engineered source port that Rockstar forced off of Github and is currently suing the creators over and get a better camera and the full map loaded into memory at startup and some other big QoL improvements.


3 is arguably best with the original Xbox version, since it and Vice City had a bunch of graphical enhancements on top of the ones that that the PC version got (the cars in particular were much higher quality and fucking better looking than the ones in this version) and 3 never went under the knife like Vice City did; but the PC version with the decompilation would probably be just as good since 3 since it has a lot of QoL improvements just like the source port of Vice City did.

 

 

 

It was also trivial to mod the Xbox assets into the PC version of III and Vice City; and both of them controlled much better than the console versions ever did.

[Soniman]

Oh well if theyre just based on the worse versions of the game then I can easily pass on this then, what a colossal waste of time to actively use those versions instead of any other less glitchy port. I really didnt mind the graphics but this being essentially a DX esque hackjob torpedo'd my intrest, guess thats another $60 im saving this year along with BDSP, I swear so many half assed ports this year.

[Jango]

18 hours ago, Son-icka said:

The QOL improvements are neat for sure

Here's the thing. There isn't any. Man, apparently not even an auto save feature was implemented. You still have to walk to CJ's house or whatever to save the game. 

The result is just laughable. Go for a walk on Resetera or Reddit and take your own conclusions. They were so lazy, that they used an AI to upscale some texture, which lead to a lot of typos:

Also this:

There's shit everywhere. And this is FULL PRICE, 60 bucks. Both R* and Activision are greed as fuck and we know that, but at least the later had a struck of decency to sell their remasters at 40 bucks, all while looking waaaaay better and more polished than this. It also helps that unlike R*, they didn't hired a cheap mobile studio to do the job...

Man, I'm not the kind of person who tells others how and where to spend their money, but as a friend, I have to say: don't get this at full price, amigo.

Thank fuck I didn't pre-ordered. This looked fishy from the moment they announced it.

[Ryannumber1gamer]

14 minutes ago, Jango said:

Here's the thing. There isn't any. Man, apparently not even an auto save feature was implemented. You still have to walk to CJ's house or whatever to save the game. 

Entirely incorrect. From what I've played of GTA 3 alone, the game has autosaves for every single mission in the trilogy, as well as checkpoints implemented mid-mission so you don't have to restart from scratch every time. The game also has a much improved weapon and radio wheel, far better shooting, general driving polish, and GPS routes for getting to objectives/locations (Like GTA IV and GTA V), and a number of other such features.

The Definitive Editions have more than enough legitimate issues between general visual style, textures, graphics, and performance, but it's not lacking on quality of life changes, and general improvements to gameplay.

[Jango]

11 hours ago, Ryannumber1gamer said:

Entirely incorrect. From what I've played of GTA 3 alone, the game has autosaves for every single mission in the trilogy, as well as checkpoints implemented mid-mission so you don't have to restart from scratch every time. The game also has a much improved weapon and radio wheel, far better shooting, general driving polish, and GPS routes for getting to objectives/locations (Like GTA IV and GTA V), and a number of other such features.

The Definitive Editions have more than enough legitimate issues between general visual style, textures, graphics, and performance, but it's not lacking on quality of life changes, and general improvements to gameplay.

My mistake, apparently both options are still available.

Still... 60 bucks for a weapon wheel and a shitton of visual mess and glitches, R* is crazy. They literally made billions with GTAV and GTAO just to end up hiring a mobile studio to port their 3 most legendary titles? Nah, chief.

 

[MetKey]

They really delisted the original versions from Steam in favor of this huh

[Jango]

1 hour ago, MetKey said:

They really delisted the original versions from Steam in favor of this huh

This is what R* Games has become now. Not only removing the originals, but also pursuing the modding community and even sueing some of them. That's just the lowest level. They've gotten as bad as Activision and EA. 

[PaddyFancy]

Breaks my heart to a certain extent how this is going. I feel like I'd be committing a travesty if I spent money on this. I like to get it so I can play these games on the go because they could still be fun. I might convince myself to buy this on Switch physically if I find it second-hand somewhere. I'm almost certain that won't take long before I see one on the shelves of CEX. At least Rockstar won't get my cash this way.

What really bothers me I feel Rockstar Games is going on a sharp downward trajectory from this point. It was already looking shakey when a lot of big names from Rockstar Games/North departed between GTA V/RDR 2. I don't trust them to make something good now. Way to destroy my loyality Rockstar.