Since mid-2022, RockstarINTEL reported on various rumors of the release of Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – The Definitive Edition for Steam, a popular platform for digital PC games. Today’s debut of the GTA Trilogy on the platform was met with disappointment from fans who had expected a substantial patch to address bugs and core issues with all three titles.
Over the past year, the company has not made a big effort to improve the games and adequately address issues which is not in line with Rockstar Games’ reputation for producing polished titles across their portfolio.
Despite the release of a substantial patch for the GTA Trilogy in March 2022, which included a number of fixes the games still had a huge number of unresolved issues, and fans were dissatisfied with the lack of progress in improving the games. After this following patch shipped out, the company went silent with fans and was not communicating any further on the issues.
Currently, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City still has problems with collisions and spelling errors on signage assets. Additionally, San Andreas is plagued by various issues, such as unfinished parts of the map with missing textures, animation errors with characters’ heads stretching in certain cutscenes and audio encoding issues with radio stations which causes certain radios to display a horrible low-frequency sound.
Rockstar must act and do more, it’s not acceptable. You’re ignoring us.
Following the negative reception of the remastered titles’ launch, Rockstar Games promised to make efforts to fix the issues and improve the games shortly after release. However, a year later, it appears that the company has not fulfilled their promise. While some patches have been released in early 2022, it is not considered good enough. Given that the titles sold over 10 million units, and were sold at $60 at launch, the lack of support from the company is both surprising and disappointing.
We’d like to thank everyone for their patience and understanding while we work through these updates to ensure these games meet everyone’s justifiably high standards.
Rockstar Games
It is evident that Rockstar is attempting to overlook the unsuccessful launch, but they bear full responsibility for it. They made the decision to entrust a small developer to remaster three major legacy titles on modern platforms, and it came with consequences. It is perplexing that such a large corporation, with great resources, did not allocate the task to Rockstar Dundee who had prior experience with Unreal Engine 4 before Take-Two Interactive acquired the company in 2020.
Grove Street Games, a small company with only 10-15 employees was not really prepared to handle the task of remastering three game titles. According to CEO Thomas Williamson, they only had a short two years to complete the project with very limited staff. They did receive some help from Rockstar Games’ QA team, but the project ultimately needed a larger team of in-house developers from Rockstar. The executives at Rockstar and Take-Two overlooked the handling of these remasters and should have been properly allocated to a much larger-sized team.
Before 2022 ended, Grove Street Games made a cool redemption arc with the arrival of a complete rework of Ark Survival for Nintendo Switch which was heavily applauded by Digital Foundry and other major media outlets
It’s not acceptable for Rockstar Games to release the GTA Trilogy on Steam without addressing the issues with their in-house studios. Even with discounted prices, the games are not worth the $30 price tag. They’re hardly alone worth $5 each, the games need some serious tuning and looking at.
Given the increasing public backlash over the release and poor handling of the games, Epic Games should not release the GTA Trilogy on the Epic Games Store until Rockstar releases a patch that addresses some of the major issues. Many PC players have reported performance problems with the latest NVIDIA RTX cards, and it is clear that optimization needs a greater focus, especially on mobile devices if Rockstar plans to release the titles on the iOS App Store and Google Play in 2023.
Rockstar should not profit from these games as they have not addressed the feedback from their fans who purchased the games. It is disappointing for loyal Rockstar fans to see the GTA Trilogy being ignored, and the company needs to take more responsibility and show that they are listening to its customers. The release of the collection today was a display of incompetence and a lack of understanding of their fans’ needs and expectations.
This is disappointing.
