GTA Trilogy and rewarding a failure

Thanks for the slap in the face: Here's my credit card

With the hindsight of the final product still glowering in our heads, it seems truly incomprehensible that the wider gaming public cheered on and perpetuated hype for a product so obviously destined for failure as the 'GTA Trilogy : Definitive Edition'. I mean the writing was all over the walls and floors, trailed down the hallway, out the window and tagged up the entire block. We saw the amount of 'care' and 'attention' that Rockstar afforded these games in the notoriously poor mobile ports which, among other things, broke vehicles in a primarily driving-focused series, failed at emulating appropriate physics such as drop gravity on submergible surfaces, and a lot of the times totally missed the small, but always fleshed out, little side mechanics which make the GTA games such a powerhouse of game design perfectionism. We also saw how 2K disliked the community keeping these games alive, what with their lawsuit-first approach to the mod developing side of the fandom. And we'd felt the icy grip of concern wrap about our throats when the original games were pulled off the storefronts in order to force players to purchase the expensive new versions. Expecting greatness after that lead-up feels nothing short of delusional. And yet I don't think even the most cynical fan out there imagined the state these games would arrive in.

I feel it's important to restate just how genuinely, pathetically, awful the definitive edition versions of the games were. The team who made it, who just so happened to be the very same geniuses behind those aforementioned mobile ports, somehow failed to extract the correct sound effects for menu selection, and so just recycled the sound effects from previous games and just hoped we wouldn't notice. The rain effect was so bad that the game became unplayable thanks to the blinding deluge of milk-white drops all over the viewers screen, and that rain refused to layer over static bodies of water for some reason. There were endless examples of signs and shop windows in which classic Rockstar puns had been entirely scrubbed out because whoever upscaled these textures (the community is fairly certain it was an AI) couldn't parse the most in-your-face word-play of the ages. Stability and performance was eye watering, character face models were hideous, physics bugs from the mobile port were still present, and they totally ballsed up the artistic design intent behind the fog in San Andreas. Although to be honest that last one didn't surprise me in the slightest, even when I had hope in this project weeks before launch I already assumed they would screw that up just because of remasters' tendencies to botch basic design intent when it comes to graphical improvements.

The games were a mess, and how were Rockstar punished for forcing (Yes 'forcing', remember they blocked us out of the originals, and if you want them back you have to do it through their prehistoric Rockstar Launcher) these rotten plates of pig's gruel down our throats? Up to 10 million in sales. That's well over half a billion dollars in incoming revenue, discount periods (if there were any) notwithstanding. Strauss Zelnick donned his death-grey suit to attend an investor's call and, I can only assume between hefty puffs of a garishly fat cigar, rave about how the collection has done "Great!" Oh yeah, the game "significantly exceeded" all of their expectations. Rockstar themselves took into account the disaster which was impending for the absolute dump they were preparing to take on their own community, only to poke out on the otherside and go; "Oh, they gave us the money anyway!"

Now in defence of the game, there have been a lot of patches and fixes that have swept the battered framework in order to benefit a potentially playable base experience. Those texture issues have been fixed, performance has been worked on, the rain is bearable, the fog... well, it looks honestly godawful coming from an ostensibly professional studio but at least it's there, some of the character faces who weren't a total lost-cause have been fixed, and the collection is now... a way to play the GTA series. Is it the definitive, like it's title would imply? Not even close, for several reasons, some of which they couldn't have helped even if this remaster was pitch perfect. (As long as Rockstar doesn't care to shell out in order to renew those music licences, these games just won't ever feel the same.) But it's no longer so bad it's laughable, and so the game can sit on Rockstar's shelf of achievements with absolutely no baggage behind it. (Right, that's how it works- No?)

So lets' discuss exactly what it means to reward a failure and how it both paints the community and paves the path for some incredibly bad-faith Rockstar moves going forwards. First of all; Good lord, why do people always buy first and think second? It was the same with Cyberpunk, games that fell far short on their promise but screamed loud enough to drown out any of the genuine misgivings. I'm sure that pre-orders play a small role in that, but the bulk of sales are still being made in-person after the game is released and impressions are out there. People just refuse to do their due diligence and that astounds me! I mean sure, if you're picking up a £10 movie from the store and aren't putting the effort into hearing how good or bad it is beforehand, that makes total sense. You're in it for the mystery and there's hardly anything on the line at all. But a £60 brand new game? That's a lot to blindly put on the line without any idea if the thing will be entertaining, or functional; I guess some people really do be balling out of control, huh.

Now don't think it happens in a vacuum whenever a company gets hundreds of millions of dollars despite a huge screw up, and it makes the gaming community come across as inattentive and easy to bedazzle. Especially in the wake of Cyberpunk, these companies are starting to see how when they've got a real stinker on their hands, their best bet is to blind the world with glitz and glamour, to feed into the power of the hype train and weather the snapback feedback after release in the knowledge that it's never as bad as it all looks. Now the general rule of thumb is that the community makes you pay for the next game that you release, so if this one was a pathetic rip-off then the next game is going to undersell, but when even the rip-off is netting half a billion in sales, that pretty much offsets the tiny contingent of the gaming community who are going to remember to boycott the next game. What is the next game again? GTA VI? Oh, they could throw burning puppies off the Burg Khalifa and still get a profit out of that game; so I guess these companies are indeed backlash immune.

So what does this say? Well to me it says that if a game is beyond repair and delaying is going to cost some profitable release window, it might be more financially viable to go in the other direction and rush a release in order to sacrifice the project for the short term income boost. I mean it's certainly not going to work for everyone nearly as well as it did for Cyberpunk, who spent decidedly too much on marketing, or GTA Trilogy, who piggybacked off the legacy of a legendary game studio; but if I were Ubisoft or EA or Activision, I'd been considering this a viable strategy for clearing games off the slate that prove more troublesome than the tried and tested rinse and repeat yearly jobs everyone seems to love so much. Why bother reinventing and sculpting the perfect wheel when that blocky, half-finished oblong pushes you far enough?

I've no tea leaves to read, no heavy-cover spy to converse with on the topic, but I'd suspect that Rockstar knew exactly the state of the definitive edition before release, knew how it was going to be received and hedged their bets. Which, as it turned out, worked out for them. Say the games were perfect at launch, would that have improved their sales anymore? Maybe a little, I would have bought them, but it's clear that polish ain't nothing but a word to most people out there. Maybe Cyberpunk's example is going to lead to more profitable letdowns like this in the future, and the trust between developer and consumer is going to gently split at the seams and fray in the same direction it always seems to. As the projects get bigger, the humanity grows ever more insignificant; until 'the human element' is nothing but a slider of profits that team leaders take gambles on. Am I playing into hyperbole? Only a little, sadly.