Rockstar did the unthinkable

My Dark Lord, how the mighty do fall!

Ahahaha! I could very easily make this entire blog just me laughing from start to finish at the lunacy of the news we had bestowed upon us not too long ago, and though I spoke about 'Grand Theft Auto The Trilogy: The Definitive Edition' very recently, this freakin' story is moving a mile a minute and I cannot help but stand on the side-lines gawking at it all. Rockstar have come forth with an honest-to-goodness canned PR 'statement' regarding the state of their 'remastered' collection and it reads like the bitter reality-warping perspective of a man recently convicted to death row. My favourite part is the steady and repeated assertation that not only is the state of the game "unexpected", handily rephrasing the concept of 'we didn't do any due diligence of testing the thing we decided to pawn off on you for premium price', and the summation of all issues as "Technical difficulties". That sounds a lot nicer, doesn't it? "Technical Difficulties". We've all had "Technical difficulties" before, and most of the time it isn't even our fault. (Or at least, that's what we tell ourselves) I'd much rather have "Technical difficulties" than a bankrupt creativity propped up by unsubstantiated faith in my own substandard abilities.

But here's the rub, as much as I want to point the finger at Grove Street Games, and their previous products make it really easy to, at the back of my heart I know that even they probably didn't want to put out a product this half assed. Before launch Rockstar's own previous PR work mentioned that this product was two years in the making, and though I go back and forth on this topic like the winds of nature, today I'm feeling like that's just a straight lie. Yep, I'm back to my previous idea that the actual developers were hired around April and just rushed to do an AI upscaling job to stretch around a rough Unreal Engine frame they hastily stuck together in order to meet an unrealistic deadline. That seems like the most likely sequence of events in my mind. (Although none of that excuses the CEO being cringe inducingly antagonistic on Twitter, but there's just another prime reason why no one should ever be on that hell-spawn platform: everything that comes from it is a mistake.)

None of this is the reason why I spent the morning of reading this laughing like a victim of a two hour straight sauna-bath filled with Joker gas. I'm giggling like a lunatic because lo-and-behold, within the space of less than a month, Rockstar, the gaming epitome of the one-mile-long ship, has turned about face. Do you remember how one of the most damning aspects of all this was the way that Rockstar delisted the original games from purchase on any online front, essentially nuking themselves as their only competition? Basically doing a George Lucas and saying "The original doesn't exist, only my creatively bankrupt copy that isn't worthy of the praise heaped upon the originals"? You remember that? Well, good-golly, am I seeing things or is the original trilogy back up for purchase on the Rockstar Games launcher? Well how about that, ladies and gentlemen, I do believe our boys in yellow just did a classic flip-flop manoeuvre!

Read the words of the team writing about this and see how they, in their typically gormless self-characterisation, chime how "we also understand that some of you would still like to have the previous classic versions available for purchase." I love how they phrase that. 'Oh, some of would like to preserve the originals!? Well how droll, who would ever even consider such a thing? Well, I suppose I can relinquish some small boon upon you curious peasant animals out there" The flower of benelovance has considerably wilted over the years, however, because this relisting is only on Rockstar's personal 'we get 100% of the profits' store and not on Steam or any of the console stores. Their canned statement talks about how they want these games to be 'playable' on all platforms, which is why this remaster was needed, but considering that all the platforms these games were pulled from seemed to manage running these game perfectly... well is it any surprise that Rockstar's management consists of pathetic falsehood-spouting-machines in suits?

Unfortunately, none of this means that the team are abandoning their new remasters, they can't because those games sell for £50 and there's no way Rockstar is going back to game which can be purchased in their entirety for a fifth of that. (This all comes down to potential profits, make no mistake about that.) Instead, Rockstar are going to treat this like any other gaming company far past their prime treats their mistakes and turn this into a live service. Patches and hotfixes over the next year to make you think that they're on the ball and hopefully forget the fact that this whole process would be infinitely quicker if they had done this before release. (Hell, I bet they don't even handle the patching themselves and just hoist it off to Grove Street again. They've spectacularly embarrassed themselves and the products they touch time and time again, but I'm sure this time will be their 'time to shine'!)

From this point the question we must ask ourselves is the one imparted by common sense, why should we expect Rockstar's standards of quality to suddenly rise? For the best 8 years Rockstar have made it abundantly clear that all they care about are first party titles and everything else, even addendums to those titles via online modes, can be outsourced to teams they never even communicate with. (Except to maybe fill their feeding troughs every Friday, or however mistreated these studios need to be to put out as low effort as they do) At this point I guess what I'm really asking is what is the minimum bar that Rockstar feels they need to limp over in order to justify pulling the originals off the store front again and spitting in the face of 'game preservation'. I don't believe the company mood has 'changed' any significant degree, just the messaging fuelling it.

If there is one positive that I can pull from all of this, it's that Rockstar haven't gone the distance of dunking Grove Street Games infront of the incoming bus of fan reaction, and if fact this statement even went so far as to half-heartedly defend them. (They didn't even go for the boiler-plate 'this will not be tolerated'. They do like these guys, right?) There's some mild respect inherent for a company willing to stand for it contractors, no matter how embarrassing a product they deliver, although maybe that's just Rockstar trying to cover their own backs because of the disgusting way their legal team have treated the community up until now. They see themselves reflected in the the plucky underdog team over at Grove Street Games, and that's... admirable?

Overall I take the victory of the originals coming back online, small though it is, for it proves that there is a line of overall public revoltion that Rockstar will ultimately listen and respond to. Only if it threatens to totally scrap their carefully crafted image of quality, that is. Committing to cleaning up their 'definitive' mess is certainly going to be a point of celebration for some folk, and probably will be enough to put out the rampant fires that are already built up, but I'm a firm believer of judging actions over promises, and I'm just waiting for Rockstar to wait until they think no one is watching them anymore and then dump this remastered collection like a sack of potatoes. If you really think they're going to potentially put their next big budget industry shaker on hold because of this nonsense, I invite you to come back in a year and compare the patch notes over the months to observe the slow decline of interest topped off with total abandonment. Still, thanks for the old games back Rockstar, for however long that lasts...