Rockstar: What have you done?

 Look how they massacred my boy(s)

And this, right here, is the exact reason why I don't have faith in anyone. It doesn't matter how talented you are, how much you've proven yourself in the past, how numerous your checks and balances, you will always disappoint. Rockstar have been far from perfect developers over the past 8 years, what with the way they've sold off and bastardised their audience in order to make themselves one of the highest paid studios in the world. (At least they put that money back into the games they make, unlike EA... or rather, they usually do) But if there's one thing some people believed they could rely on with Rockstar, one line they thought would never be crossed, it's the quality-of-control containment parameters. They have to make a quality title because they're Rockstar and that's who they are. But whoops, Grand Theft Auto Definitive Edition happened; sucks to be us.

To be clear, I'm not going to sit here and pretend I wasn't at least a little wooed by the honeyed words and fabricated 'improvements'. I was taken away by the fact that this rerelease of old games was going to have more of a kick to it than just being a HD collection, there would instead be brand new models, a sparkling new engine and new controls. I mean, can you blame me for being caught off guard by all that? And in that bluster, as Rockstar no doubt planned, I waved away and forgave things such as 'is the artistic integrity of the originals being respected?' and 'Will this game make a suitable replacement for the old classics?'. And I did so because; "this is Rockstar, working on a Rockstar product to sell in specific celebration for the anniversary of their blockbuster series. How much would you have to despise your own self worth and the worth of your fans to screw that up"?

I have a theory. I think that this time last year, The Definitive Trilogy didn't exist. Which isn't to say it wasn't made yet, of course it wasn't, but rather that this idea wasn't even a twinkle in Rockstar's eye back when they were gearing up for Christmas break. In fact, I suspect that around about April, maybe sooner, someone pointed out to a head guy in the office that this year is technically an anniversary year for the Grand Theft Auto brand, and a few moments of brief panic were eventually overpowered with a money-sign-eyes moment. They could take advantage of such a date for some easy sales and he would get a huge bonus for proposing such an idea! But they didn't have time to actually sit down, drum, together a team and actually make the thing, and so instead Rockstar sought to contract out to other studios. Maybe only parts of the project was contracted out, but I think that was definitely a factor here. (And I imagine at least one of these contractors had a poorer English localisation team than Rockstar was led to believe.) All of that is supposition, but I look forward to contrasting and comparing with the real story once the inevitable investigative report drops.

But I've drummed this up long enough and if you don't know already I'm sure that you're dying to wring it out of me; what is actually the deal with the Grand Theft Auto Definitive Edition collection and why am I busy engraving it's tombstone? Well, as it turns out Rockstar have a steaming pile of unfinished garbage to offer us with a deluge of visual problems, a total lack of optimisation on the Switch, brain dead artistic choices, and spelling errors. So many spelling errors. I'd advise you go and look up some of these problems as soon as you can, whilst Rockstar deploy feverishly to fix all that can be fixed and cross their fingers about everything which is beyond repair. And as I go over these issues, keep ever present in mind that Rockstar have done all they can to kill the legacy versions of these games on digital platforms, and went around murdering mod projects for those games for extra spite points. This was what we got out of the end of all this hassle. Aren't we blessed?

So we've got brand new textures on all the buildings in the game, great, except that so many of them contain elementary spelling mistakes or mistranslations that feel as though they've been made by a company who, as I implied, don't speak English. These executables launched with so much data left in the files that they were apparently immediately cracked by the community causing Rockstar to withdraw the PC versions of the game within 1 day. (Although the Nintendo Switch version proved to be fruitful enough for people who want a look at behind-the-scenes source stuff.) Frame rate issues may be most prevalent on the Switch, but there are next gen console owners reporting inconsistent frame caps for a 'remaster' of 20 year old games. And these are just the mistakes that can probably be fixed. (I'm not sure about the spelling errors, Rockstar might just be lazy and leave that.)

The character models that people tore into and made fun of all the way back during the original trailer are, in actuality, much worse than anyone could grasp at the time. Essentially, these faces weren't given a modicum of attention by the team, to the point where most faces lack fundamental emotion in the very few important scenes where they're needed. (Such as in SA when CJ returns home and is instantly wrought with memories of his recently dead mother) Other characters, such as Denise, look worse than background NPCs, with faces scrunched up and squashed flat. Look online and you'll find innumerable examples of a company who just did not care. Reece, the barber shop owner, showing no signs of his age. Several female NPCs with shrunk-down heads and huge bodies like actual gorillas. Cross eyed face models. It's an embarrassment to these old games.

There are several issues with character skeletons too, with scenes glitching out and contorting characters in strange ways, animations playing out bizarrely and the engine mutilating the odd NPC as they spawn in. One of the calling cards of the remaster, the increased draw distance, was performed without any due diligence to the artistic direction of the original, so now you can hop in a helicopter and fly high enough to see the entire continent of San Andreas on a single screen. (Which was never supposed to be possible, hence it looks unnatural and awful) Those new rain effects have been called out to be some of the worst looking rain ever, milky white and far too heavy on screen. And in much lesser complaints, the lazy ass developers stole the San Andreas menu navigation sound effect and put it in all three of the games. They all had separate sounds in the original three, you could have kept up that much.

At the end of the day; yes, you can just put your foot down and say "this isn't Rockstar, it's a crappy mobile developer contractor who delivered a pathetic product and now Rockstar is going to fix their mess. Rockstar are the good guys of this story!." As several people already are already saying. Put let me tell you why that doesn't track. First of all, Rockstar are the owners of the franchise and it's their express job to ensure the content they put out is worthy of their brand. Secondly, Rockstar have removed access to the original games in order to force people into playing these pathetically crap remasters, removing their own buffer space. And finally, Rockstar attacked their own modding community for months in what is now looking like an active attempt to suppress any and all comparisons between what a multibillionaire company can create against the fruits of an unpaid fan. (Which didn't work, obviously, the Internet is forever.) At some level Rockstar knew they were grifting their audience, and maybe they thought of themselves as too big for these issues to effect them. But consumers have hit back, they've branded this game with scores worse then 1, and though I'll bet this will still be a financial success for them, this little stunt of theirs will have forever frayed that trust relationship with the community, and I suspect we'll see the consequences of that come around to bite them in the long run. (And by that time, they'll have deserved it.)