GTA Trilogy

 Wow, everyone saw that coming

To be fair, how are you supposed to go about an announcement so horribly and irrevocably leaked that everyone and their mother was literally taking bets on when your product is going to launch, especially when that isn't part of your typical business model. Bethesda are born and bred on leaks, Ubisoft is made up of 80% holes for leaking purposes but Rockstar? Heck, they usually have that ship locked up tight with exception of a few bigger products that slip through the cracks. They're unexperienced with this level of leakage. They could have gone the Bethesda Fallout 76 route and joked about it, or they could have gone the high path and held off on a reveal until they had some actual gameplay to show; make our time worth it. But nah, they want for a crappy teaser so we can all sit back and go; "Oh, that thing I knew existed does indeed exist. Okay." But let's play their little game for a moment and talk about it.

So the Grand Theft Auto Remastered Trilogy is officially confirmed and heading our way some point before the end of the year in order to respark all of our favourite moments from the 3D era of GTA games our there. Was that worth all the months of cease and desist letters shoved in the faces of fans making mods and graphical updates for the old versions of the game, work that lasted them years upon years to do? I'm going to go ahead and say "No, of course not". Rockstar applied salted-earth procedures upon projects they had no express responsibility to enforce upon for no other reason than to vainly hope it'll funnel aspirants of that content towards their own remasters, remasters that we don't even know the details of so which may end up being wastes of trash anyway. Quite simply, it's a bad way to foster a relationship with their community and just another way that the big wigs over in Rockstar are slipping away from their once lauded position as the 'best in the biz'. Not that they ever supported mods, mind; but going the Nintendo route is a new low.

But such is the price, they say, for the upcoming 20th anniversary of the Grand Theft Auto III license. This is a celebration that the devs want us to partake in so that they can thank us for every singloe year of continued support, that was nice of them. And to this end they've prepared a whole collection for us to buy- wait a second. So the anniversary celebrations are going to be marked by us giving them money? So who's the one that's really going to be doing the celebrating here? Ah well, I guess this isn't in any way out of the ordinary for Rockstar, given that they've pretty much made it their life's goal to keep re-releasing their games far past the point that people want to buy them anymore. I guess in 2031 we can expect 'GTA Remastered Trilogy expanded and enhanced', huh.

And just to be clear, this is by no means the first time since their original release that Rockstar have tried to capitalise on buffing up these games and reselling them. You might remember that Grand Theft Auto San Andreas got an incredibly iffy port to the mobile stores that was coupled with 'graphical improvements' that then made it onto Steam and Xbox by force. These ports were fundamentally flawed in a number of ways, all of which remain unfixed to this day, and if you left Steam to auto update and haven't played your PC copy of San Andreas for several years, log on today and you'll find your legacy copy has been replaced with this inferior clone. That's the same sort of crap that people rallied against Warcraft 3 Reforged for, but I guess people just don't care as much over here. Oh, and Rockstar couldn't be bothered to renew all the music licences back then, so the San Andreas radio stations were gutted too. I wonder if that's going to be reflected with this release too.

As you can see, I'm not really in the mood to be celebrating Rockstar these days, and they don't really deserve the celebrations either. They've been dragging their heels behind them about behaving like civilised members of the industry for years now, and are just dedicating themselves more and more to hitting that 'minimum threshold of activity' to qualify as 'active developers'. Yes, they still put out a masterpiece here and there, between years of gouging and laziness and outright community hostility in this past year, I'd ask what has happened to them but these guys have never really been about joining in with the rest of the world. They are Rockstars, and dance to their own tune, and if that makes them lazy arses now and then, so be it. But at the very least these new remasters might have something special to them.

I won't pretend to be a big GTA III fan, I've played that game extensively in my past but I wouldn't really give it the time of day now. But Grand Theft Auto Vice City, and especially San Andreas, are some of the finest examples of their genre every created. Vice City was a near perfect amalgamation of everything which made the 3D era great and San Andreas was the glue between the 3D and the HD era that took ambition and blew it out of the window. To this day San Andreas might not hold the biggest map in volume, but it feels the biggest just for how much variety and diversity was stuffed in there for people to see. Bringing these back for the modern generations is something to be lauded, even though the very idea of doing so brings these games up to task against other fantastic remasters and reimagings; all of which will undoubtedly make this remaster pale in comparison when these multibillionaire CEO's slap together a mild effort HD job and call it a hard day's work.

At the end of the day what's worse than all of this is the erasure of history, because just as with the old school San Andreas PC version, these copies of the original 3D era GTA games are coming to replace your old version; so if they are inferior in any way, those inequities are going to taint these versions forever. Inequities such as, any music licences that Rockstar (one of the highest yearly earning companies in industry: the most profitable entertainment medium in the world) are too tight-fisted to shell out for. Maybe they'll give us some annoying new auto-jump system that activates without anyone asking it to, or completely destroy right drumstick alternate vehicle functionality. All of these issues are things they have done for their remasters in the past, and given that this collection is due for Mobile platforms as well, they could be baked in order to screw us again.

Although I doubt there's a single person on the planet with the sort of pull or standing to ask any single thing of Grand Theft Auto devs, I have to come out and say that at the very least it would be nice if this was a remaster made with the actual consoles and PC players in mind first, because the last replace job done was abominable. Oh, and "please stop persecuting modders and fans" but I guess that's asking a bit too much, now isn't it?  So happy 20 years everybody, here's hoping Rockstar retains enough dignity to hold another anniversary 20 years from now. Or better yet, here's hoping that 20 years from now Rockstar are gracious enough to actually give us a GTA VI tease. (Wouldn't that make for a nice surprise?)