When Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – Final Edition launched last year, it was a disaster. Three of the most beloved video games of all time have officially been re-released on modern hardware and don’t just look like crap, but also run like it. Things that were so bad, in fact, that Rockstar had to give fans some free games just to make up for it.
Subsequent patches have attempted to address some of those issues, but for this check all over among the games of Digital foundry showthere is still one great number of work left to do here.
First good news: rain is now mostly normal, because it will be available after 15 bug fixes and a layer of haze added post-launch giving the game world a proper sense of scale as you’re flying around. Edits have also been made to some of the most severe typos on the leaderboard, and major problems caused by mission structure and collisions have been largely fixed. Most important, games simply run much smoother now, especially in Performance Mode, which keeps things pretty much locked at 60fps.
Now for the bad news. A lot of things look bad in these games that will never fixed, because these are the ports of the phone game, and there’s just so much you can add when carrying a game designed to run on iPhone via system like PS5 or modern PC. These are the things like the overall look and feel of the characters — perfectly in line with the low-resolution CRT TVs of the time, but strangely different in HD settings — as well as the ambient lighting effects ( like murky, golden sunset) custom to Town and San Andreas has been deleted.
And while some signs have been fixed, there are still many others with typos, either because Rockstar neglected to do localization work or hand over most of the work to the upgraded AI (also unresolved issues with wall textures and building signs). You can see examples of all of this in action in Digital Foundry’s video below:
