After a super long painful wait with a series of leaks appearing on all over the internet, it’s officially confirmed that Rockstar Games are bringing updated versions of Grand Theft Auto III, Vice City and San Andreas with a release window set sometime this year packaged in one bundle named Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – The Definitive Edition.
The company has opted not to share any gameplay yesterday but Rockstar has shared a 25-second video teaser on Twitter and the Rockstar Newswire with its original artwork with some animation featured across all three games with the infamous ‘Coming Soon’ text at the end. Jokes aside, Rockstar announced the company plans to announce more details “in the coming weeks“. We can assume Rockstar is probably going to share more exciting scoops on GTA III’s anniversary which is coming up on 22 October, so in just a few weeks away.
All three GTA games will bring new visual and gameplay improvements
One of the most key parts of delivering a fully-fledged remasters is that it must deliver visual and gameplay improvements and as well taking into consideration that all three games are nearly 20 years old of age so it’s sure going to need some improvements. With the newswire announcement from yesterday, Rockstar has promised to deliver graphical improvements alongside modern gameplay improvements.
Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – The Definitive Edition will feature across-the-board upgrades including graphical improvements and modern gameplay enhancements for all three titles, while still maintaining the classic look and feel of the originals.
Rockstar Games
As reported by Kotaku in August, it appears the remasters will utilizing Unreal Engine, whilst it wasn’t confirmed officially yesterday it was referenced in the Rockstar Games Launcher earlier this week. It might sound a little bit odd as Rockstar has its own game engine, except it also does make a lot of sense as Rockstar’s newly acquired studio, formerly Ruffian Games, now Rockstar Dundee, are most experienced with Unreal Engine and did ship out multiple titles using Unreal Engine (Crackdown & many other Microsoft games) before Take-Two acquired them in late 2020.
We still don’t have many details on the technical improvements but we can assume we’d hear more in a little as a few weeks. Rockstar is also planning to deliver native ports for PlayStation 5 and the Xbox Series consoles so expect a super nice looking 4K boost at the release.
Releases are planned on a bunch of platforms and one other most requested one… with a cost
Rockstar is planning to ship out the remasters sometime this year for PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, PC and the Nintendo Switch (yep, no Google Stadia release this time). After loads of requests from fans to see more platform support on the Nintendo platform, it’s finally happening after a long decade without a single GTA debuting since the Nintendo DS era.
The company has also announced its planning to bring the GTA Trilogy to iOS and Android devices in the first half of 2022. They haven’t announced any more details upfront on that yet with device requirements although we expect to hear more on that closer to their releases in 2022. Since the older versions of all three titles were based on super old Andriod and iOS frameworks (which had some compatibility issues on newer versions of mobile OSs), all these games will work a lot better with newer devices and especially thanks to the GTA Trilogy running from Unreal Engine which is believed to be very flexible with mobile ports.
Whilst this news may sound exciting, it seems good things come with a slight cost. Starting on October 11th, Rockstar plans to delist the original versions of these titles from digital stores according to a Rockstar Support article from yesterday. If you have previously bought any of these games it can still be downloaded at any given time after the delisting date. Only GTA III, Vice City and San Andreas are only affected and it will be removed from Steam, the PlayStation Store (PS4 & PS3) and across all the mobile app stores starting on the delisting date.
Rockstar promises to keep the remasters to their core classic look
Rockstar plans to deliver new graphical improvements but has also made a promise to keep each game to its core classic look and feel.
This is a great step in the right direction as it would be a little disappointing if Rockstar decided an approach for a different art style that attempts to oversaturate the look of the game akin to some San Andreas mods on PC.
Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – The Definitive Edition will feature across-the-board upgrades including graphical improvements and modern gameplay enhancements for all three titles, while still maintaining the classic look and feel of the originals.
Rockstar Games
GTA 3 Themed Clothing – coming to GTA Online soon
Per the reveal, Rockstar plans to host an event week in the coming weeks for GTA Online with some new awesome GTA 3 themed clothing tees and a new Banchee Classic livery. These will most likely become available on GTA3’s anniversary soon, we’ll keep everyone up to date on our Twitter page when these are out.
What’s next now?
Going forward from now, there’s going to be a lot of news and marketing with the GTA Trilogy since the release seems very close in between the announcement and the actual release. Thus far, the details so far sound super exciting and the reactions to the announcement had put GTA on the trending page for the entire day on Twitter with also the announcement tweet hitting over 100K likes in less than one hour.
There’s a lot more to unpack still, but it’s probably worth keeping your eyes peeled for more details on 22 October for GTA3’s anniversary.
