Rockstar Games has released a huge update for Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy - Definitive Edition, introducing numerous bug fixes, performance improvements, graphical tweaks, stability updates, and more.
Now live, the patch rolls out improvements across all three games in the trilogy - GTA 3, Vice City, and San Andreas - and includes over 100 fixes in total. The update is intended to resolve or improve the many performance, technical, and graphical bugs that littered the game at launch.
The long list of patch notes on Rockstar’s support site show GTA 3 has received fixes for some of its faulty textures, improved collision detection for several objects and areas of the map, changes to progression issues, and tweaks to miscellaneous bugs - such as traffic light no longer permanently displaying green.
The improvements for Vice City also focus on faulty textures and collisions, as well as several bugs and audio glitches. A lot of fixes have been made, with the patch for Vice City alone taking up over 8GB of storage.
San Andreas, meanwhile, has received patches to several faulty camera viewpoints, mission bugs, cinematic glitches, and a massive host of assorted problems that crop up in its minute-to-minute gameplay. The patch notes even list an improvement to the high fade haircut (which presumably is the hairstyle that protagonist CJ is rocking), which should please fans who were disappointed with his new look in the remaster.
The GTA Trilogy wasn’t received warmly by fans when it released last November. Many players and critics took issue with the litany of performance and graphical bugs that all but ruined their experience of the game, while others were disappointed in its radical change of art style, as well as the major alterations made to classic character models.
That didn’t stop the game selling amazingly well, though. The GTA Trilogy is estimated to have cleared around 10 million copies since it released last November.
Analysis: is the GTA Trilogy finally worth playing?
It didn’t take long for the GTA Trilogy to be widely derided by fans of the series. As players’ disappointment continued to bubble, Rockstar offered those who’d bought the remastered trilogy a free pick of another game from their catalog, access to the original versions of the games, and later apologized for releasing the remastered games in such a sorry state.
Usually, when a remastered title fails to live up to the heights of the original, fans have a simple solution to their disappointment: put the remaster behind them, and play the original games instead. Even that wasn’t an option for players, with Rockstar temporarily removing the original versions of GTA 3, Vice City and San Andreas from digital storefronts following the remastered trilogy’s release.
But now the first wave of bug fixes has been rolled out, is it worth picking up the GTA Trilogy to play the games in HD, rather than digging out your old PS2 discs? It’s certainly more appealing than it used to be. Players report many of the most egregious graphical problems and gameplay bugs have been ironed out, and all three games run at higher, smoother framerates. You’ll at least be able to enjoy the games for what they are, rather than having to wrestle with them between constant glitches.
If Rockstar continues to roll out patches of this size and caliber, it might just flip the fortunes of the GTA Trilogy.
You can pick up a copy of the game now.
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