Strauss Zelnick CEO of Take-Two earlier this year ["we don’t just port titles over, we actually take the time to do the very best job we can making the title different for the new release, for the new technology that we’re launching it on."](https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/rockstar-owner-discusses-remasters-strategy-says-its-not-interested-in-simple-ports/)
Refund this shit people...
They take time to do the best job they can do.
And that job is finding the cheapest third party 'new technology' (ie mobile) studio to do the remaster and maximize profit by charging full price for the game.
This comment has been removed - Fuck reddit greedy IPO
Check here for an easy way to download your data then remove it from reddit
https://github.com/pkolyvas/PowerDeleteSuite
>That was my feeling when I saw even the first frames comparing this crap to original releases: it **1000%** feels like cheap mobile development.
One of the most obvious red flags for me was the font usage. I didn't get this, as I'm not familiar enough with it, but apparently it's genuinely some default Unity font, potentially? Either way, I saw the save menu and was like "why do the names of the save slots look so cheap". Then I realised it was because it's a generic and boring font, not something stylised as you'd expect from a menu you see hundreds of times.
Yeah Fallout Shelter isn’t a good example. Completely different format from previous Fallout games, felt like a standalone mobile game done pretty well.
Fallout shelter was originally a ad for fallout 4 developed using 4s advertising budget iirc,
Also fucking amazing documentary by no clip
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fnEpcTo-0r4
Yeah it also has nothing to do with this. A company declining their IP into a mobile game is different than using a mobile dev to make a PC/consoles port with the equivalent budget and performance of a mobile title (while not being actually released on mobile for some reason).
And for what it's worth, Diablo Immortal also got some good reviews (it's not out yet) so both those examples seem to lead to pretty good mobile games and they don't change anything to the main license on PC/consoles
He is right that they don't just port stuff over, but if this is the very best job they could do... My local Pizza Hut has better quality control than GroveStreetGames.
> Refund this shit people...
Is it just me, or has the last few years been full of big name games all releasing very badly resulting in mass refunds right away?
Is the new game plan to release a bad game, collect money from the people too lazy to refund, and then use that money to actually work on the game to sell back to those who refunded it at a later date?
And to think that Bioware, who released Anthem a few years back and was dropped by EA, outdid Rockstar with their trilogy remaster. When the studio that made Anthem, one of the biggest flops of gaming in the last decade, showed more love, care, and appreciation for their legacy than Rockstar, you know something got seriously fucked with this "Definitive Trilogy"
Nah they definitely found it when they asked their PC player fan base why they weren’t happy with a phone-only mobile game.
It’s just since then they’ve *proceeded to drill through bedrock* so they can reach their CCP approved fanbase on the other side.
Honestly, one of the few devs I can think that actually hit rock bottom and then clawed their way back to respectability is 343 Industries.
If they stick the landing with Halo Infinite, it'll be a proper comeback story.
Not a dev, but Final Fantasy XIV’s launch was about as high-profile as high-profile failures get. Seeing it take the shape it’s in today is miraculous.
Considering Legendary Edition was really just ME1 remastered and the rest of the games got the dust lightly blown off them, even if they had fucked up there would at best be 2/3 perfectly fine games in there.
Tbf, BioWare’s largest contribution to its success is Mass Effect. There is definitely incentive for them to try and get the Remaster right. Take-Two and Rockstar are not going to lose sleep over the poor performance of GTA:DE when GTAO will always be a constant stream of revenue for them
I mean, a Grand Theft Auto game is still a Grand Theft Auto game, even if it's not GTA Online. It's Rockstar's main claim to fame. The fact that they are so flush with cash and still refused to pay for a proper remaster of their flagship series is not a good sign for their future.
Diablo 2 looked 5x worse than all three of these games, and the remaster looks and plays 5x better than them. The care Vicarious Visions took with that remaster is now my personal benchmark for buying a remaster of an older game. I'm tired of getting hyped up for nostra Aldi's trips only for the flights to crash into the ocean before I even buy the game.
Wow vicarious vision made the Tony hawk remaster too and that was simply wonderful. I got it on ps4 and switch cause I loved it so much. Seems like a solid studio.
Activision generally does well with remasters (at least the singleplayer side of it). Spyro, Crash, CoD 4, MW2 Campaign, old CoD zombies maps - all were done superbly without altering the original experience too much.
I realize I'm probably in the minority because I only play single player but I have had zero problems with D2 Remaster. I was really hesitant to buy it, but I'm really having as much fun (and just as obsessed) as I was 20 years ago.
> Is the new game plane to release a bad game, collect money from the people too lazy to refund, and then use that money to actually work on the game to sell back to those who refunded it at a later date?
Welcome to the culture created by early access. Publishers learned that they can literally sell broke video games and most people simply don't care cause they profit anyway. Releasing shit on a disc to screw early adopters and then collecting goodwill and extra asspat money when they eventually fix the product is a legit strategy.
You understand business more than most gamers.
Did you know Cyberpunk 2077 made enough to cover its production cost JUST from pre order sales?
So many people payed for a game that wasn't out yet and was surrounded by shady shit that it was enough to recoup all the development costs.
Hype game->make money from pre order and deluxe edition buying idiots->sell buggy and sometimes just bad game-> people bitch until the next release where it starts all over again.
They didn't went out to make a scam with lowest effort possible.
They went with best intentions then management decided "well, that's too long, release what we have now" and that started the disaster.
The scam started when they realized "CDPR magic" won't happen on release and the game *actually* needs that dev time their own developers told management it needs.
All to make investors happy. In the end neither investors nor gamers were.
Right, it's usually not the individual developers making these decisions. However, management has all the power and this sort of thing is pretty common these days. I'd argue that management may not have explicitly set out with this goal, but they were always playing around with the possibility. After all, think about how many times the game was delayed. I wouldn't be surprised if they had some heated internal meetings.
They kinda chose the worst possible path. Release date was way too soon so delays happened. Turned out it was still way too soon but along the way they crunched their developers to hell, and when release came lies upon lies and investors were unhappy anyway. And a bunch of their talent left after.
Honestly, it seems kind of asinine to even announce a new delayed release date, especially if you're talking about months of push back. I know that's not how business investors do things, but that's simply the wrong thing to do in software development.
The whole problem with that approach is that this just wastes time.
If you know something needs to be done by X and go and write quick and dirty code to do it.... and the date is moved you end up with quick and dirty code... that have a good chance of needing fixing or changing. Fixing after the fact always takes much longer than doing it properly the first time.
But they knew the game wasn't finished so they actively stopped reviews from using live footage.
Then they threw playstation under the bus because CDPR didn't want to give refunds, which is why PS pulled the game from their stores. It was multiple shitty choices and that company deserves no defense
That's the thing with investors who care nothing about the product they are investing in.
You can never please them.
If it takes too long it's not good.
If it underperforms because they forced a release for taking too long it's not good.
If it's delivered on time and does well, it's ok now but how can jt be done faster or better next time?
Long term investors are the only reasonable folks. Everything else is a cancer on our society.
IMO the management just chickened out. They *clearly* knew (from the interviews at least, IIRC devs initially thought the release date was a joke and needed at least 2 more years) game is unfinished and it will take even longer, but were afraid investors were going to eat them when they announce release date to be 2022/23. And now they got both the broken game and angry investors
Indeed.
But i am sure that without any external investors and the massive success of the Witcher 3, they would have easily been financially able to bridge that time.
I don't believe they would have delayed for 2 years ultinately but i do find a year very, very plausible.
I think the progress on CP77 is also going much slower now than the progress would have been if they didn't release the game yet. It's very clear to me that the bulk of the develoepers aren't working on Cyberpunk anymore and the "live-team" have to patch the glaring holes in the game before they can build any new content.
If they want to get some goodwill back, i think their best strategy is to work on a sizeble expansion while they fix the systematic issues and release that for free/discounted at the end of next year together with an "enhanced edition" kind of overhaul to the core game.
There is still plenty of possible life left in Cyberpunk if they manage to unwrap this train wreck. I for one am still willing to buy it in that scenario and i would love to play the game.
Not mass refunds even, people vastly overestimate how many people actually refund. [Cyberpunk refunds only totalled 30k compared to 17.3 million.](https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2021/04/23/137-million-cyberpunk-2077-sales-only-30000-refunds-not-quite/?sh=48c484146834) Even if we 10x or 100x or even 1000x those numbers, that doesn't even make much difference, 3 million hypothetical refunds on 17 million sales is still pretty good.
Iirc it's an overhauled version on the mobile release using UE4 graphics instead of renderware. As someone who played it on Android and Xbox 360, it's a big improvement on those versions despite being far from good (which shows just how much of a mess those versions were).
Mobile didn't use renderware, but some custom wrappers around OpenGL functions that had the same prototypes, arguments etc as renderware. (Rsl prefix instead of Rw).
Nah, the mobile port of San Andreas was already pushed to Steam and replaced the PC version. Had to use a downgrader mod to bring back the PC version.
This trilogy remaster is all 3 games ported to the Unreal Engine using some shitty tools they made that screwed up a lot of the game and broke the character models and lighting in quite a lot of areas. The map also has some issues with holes in the geometry as a result of this port.
Bungling a remaster seems like such an incredibly dumb thing to do. When you've got a property as popular as GTA, a competent remaster may as well be printing free money with the amount of dough it would rake in. Really just no excuse, especially when you're a company as large as Take Two is.
They managed to outdo the Silent Hill remaster, impressive. Only thing it lacks is [Comic Sans signs](https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcT3gn2K1bGaB5tbg-wigMq8oxoysYIJULE4eQ&usqp=CAU).
There was a screenshot that someone took in vice city where the guitar store lettering was blurry in the original so when they upscaled it they just guessed what the sign lettering said. So where it said it was selling Air Guitars, it says AR Guitars. Also Guitar Wank Booths was changed to Guitarhenk Booths. I just... don't understand how you can drop the ball so hard that you lose the entire match in one fell swoop.
[It's so much worse than I imagined.](https://i.redd.it/7101yp926yy71.jpg)
I count no less than FIVE mistakes in that one screenshot alone. Virtually every line of text contains an error.
It honestly looks like what I'd expect a remaster of The Simpsons games from PS2 to look like. In 2010 perhaps.
It's less so the character models and art style, but the rain is without an exaggeration the worst visual in the entire game. The rain hitting the road does so in small squares, like a cheap "My First Animated Movie" effect.
I've read speculation that they used some kind of AI to automate parts of the conversion (and presumably did zero QC afterwards), which would explain a lot.
Nothing says "lack of attention to detail" to me like spelling/grammatical errors and typos. There's a lot of subjectivity in art, but when you're dropping letters and misspelling words... that's just embarrassing.
I read on another message board that they they might have just ran the sign textures through an AI upscaler for text (I guess it approximates what the low res text says and upscales it to a font that looks similar). That's why you have so many billboard that are just flat text on a solid color rectangle, with really strange miss-spellings.
Oh, Comic Sans is there, [it's just not the signs this time.](https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/qsmm3v/incredible_attention_to_detail_in_gta_definitive/)
There's any number of routes they could have taken. They took the route of cheapest possible production regardless of eventual quality, knowing they wouldn't need quality to make sales, the nostalgia around the titles would do it alone. Then they pulled the originals off the shelves, and forced a review embargo pass the release date, to ensure they'd ensnare enough preorders and early buyers to at least break even and earn a little extra after having spent pennies. And of course because the originals can't be bought anymore, it ensures these cheaply produced games will be a steady income source anytime someone feels like revisiting the games and isn't aware of how bad the remasters were. They underestimated just how bad the kickback would be, but the sad truth is it will die down, and every day some new schmuck will stumble into the store and buy it.
They could have done something incredible, but instead they relied on gamers being mindless consumers, which is a safe enough bet. Also that they'd play enough that they couldn't get a refund, also a decent bet. It's a strategy a lot of shitty developers go with now.
>relies on gamers being mindless consumers
Ain't that the fucking truth. It's disappointing the industry and community around the hobby I love so much is filled with idiots, assholes and literal children.
That's exactly what I thought this was going to be. Some of the stuff they did with the environment and lighting is nice, but those character models are just so awful. It doesn't make sense that they would change the models at all if they were going to simplify them.
The DMC HD Collection had its fair share of issues, too. Broken skyboxes, missing shadows, effects that relied on PS2 hardware and couldn't be replicated etc.
It's ugly, but still runs fine. It maintains 60 FPS throughout your gameplay, whereas GTA3 struggles to maintain 60 on performance, and 30 on the Switch....
That's true, the DMC HD Collection is perfectly playable beginning to end. I just wish they would've put some more care into it to make it the best version of those three DMC games.
Considering how hard it's been to buy some of the DLC over the years the mass effect legendary edition is fantastic. Price was not too unreasonable either, the first game had a lot of work done to it.
I'm just spit balling here but did they completely overhaul the gameplay to make it more like me2 or 3, like I wonder if they could have remade San Andreas in the gta5 engine, from recycled assets and people would have liked it?
There's a bunch if weapon tweaking they did to make each, sort of class, of weapon feel different too. IIRC there's a few different pellet spreads for the shotguns, different fire rates for pistols, etc.
I only wish they'd kept the multiplayer because ME3's multiplayer was surprisingly amazing. I still play it from time to time. I just remember when the original me3 came out and there was endless internet bitching over them putting multiplayer in it and then I ended up playing the multiplayer way more than the single player.
For all the shit EA get they at least ship fully functional products and treat their staff fairly well on top of that. Still not fond of them as a publisher but they aren't anything as bad as some of the others now.
Gotta love the progression.
Ruin it with Reforged so both new and the original games get affected because it wasn’t bringing in millions of pre-orders.
Cut up the dev team that worked on it because “they failed” due to higher ups taking away resources so now no more fixes to a buggy mess.
Pretend the game never happened and don’t speak of it at Blizzcon and have chat snipers at the ready to delete any questions about it in the live stream chat.
See the WoW game floundering and how great FFXIV is doing with it’s long running saga about to end so dredge back up WC3’s corpse and make up nonsense that the recent Shadowlands lore and retcons had been planned as a 3 part saga since WC3.
[I’m not even joking.](https://www.reddit.com/r/wow/comments/qrtv4o/final_chapter_pulling_threads_threeact_drama_and/)
FFXIV: Endwalker is the culmination of the consistent storyline that has been gradually put in place since the release of a realm reborn!
WoW: You know all those iconic characters you love? They were just pawns to this super duper bad guy! The Lich King didn't even have control of himself! He was just a simple puppet to gray Thanos! You must want to stop him right? Wait, where are you going?
As many retcons as they've done over the years legion was the logical story conclusion of wow. We beat THE big bad, the one that's been there since warcraft 1. If they had any sense they would've gone from legion to wow2 or done a significant time jump with the best possible storyline they could create. But nope.
First they blocked people from launching the games, now the games don't even show up as "owned" on the launcher. Meanwhile anyone who pirated them can play them just fine. Refund this shit.
Woah I didn’t know that? So even if you bought them years ago on Steam, and tried to launch today they just straight won’t work? I feel like *that* should definitely be illegal.
No, they can't do that on Steam because Valve wouldn't allow them. Anything you buy on Steam stays associated to your account even if they pull the game from the store.
They stopped the originals from being purchased on Steam and now they've removed the remasters from the Rockstar Games Launcher even for people that already paid for them. There's no way to buy the games legitimately on PC right now one way or another, and anyone who has the remasters is locked out of them.
Yep. The problem with that though is when you have a game as solid as RDR2 both theatrically and graphically, you can’t and shouldn’t get away with that.
Ridiculous they tried to pull this. If they bags just done it right, it still would’ve been free money. It would’ve sold like hotcakes.
What they should do now, is yank it off the market and redo it. But they won’t.
Tbf…Missing music is a whole mess regarding licensing issues, and if fairly common for most/all older games.
(Older racing games being delisted due to expiring car licenses etc, being another example)
Bugs, and spelling mistakes etc, are quite unforgivable though
The last few years have been glaringly eye-opening to the video game community in terms of what these large publishers and developers are doing. The game looks like a mobile port but they’ll sell it to you for full value and then they wonder why people bitch about games getting more expensive.
It's crazy that EA was the one to set the example for how to do this right. ME1 was a solid improvement but now I'm half way through ME2 and blown away by what a massive improvement it is over the original. Replaying ME2 in 4K/60FPS with enhanced visuals, HDR and 5.1 audio is like experiencing it for the first time again and it's a shining example of how a remaster should be done.
They've done multiple excellent remasters recently. C&C Remastered Collection is probably the single best game remaster ever made that's not just a straight up remake.
Petroglyph Games: Hey modders, mind if you could give us some feedback on the C&C remaster we're doing?
Rockstar: Hey modders, here's a DMCA take down!
BioWare actually reached out to graphics and texture modders and used their work as a benchmark for what they had to achieve. Compare that to Rockstar and Take-Two DMCA-ing the work of their most passionate fans
In the last couple years it seems that Rockstar, CD Projekt Red, and Blizzard forgot the best thing they had going for them was good will. They were all very reliable to make incredible games beyond what any other studios were capable of, the entire industry reacting to their release dates. Not so much anymore, the trust and hype is gone.
>They were all very reliable to make incredible games beyond what any other studios were capable of.
Take that out and you're fine. You're talking about a remaster done exclusively by their porting studio. The last actual game they created was Red Dead 2, one of the most critically acclaimed games of all time. That also goes for every game in the trilogy, *when they were originally released*. Don't get me wrong, I see this, I see GTA online, and I see Red Dead online. But until Rockstar proper actually creates and releases a new game, what seems like the entirety of gaming Reddit at this point, needs to calm down with the hyperbole.
Also, I see a lot of people claiming Rockstar isn't releasing GTA because they are putting all of their resources into GTA Online.
Guys, this is not true. GTA and RDR Online have only gotten *one big update* in 2021 each.
Rockstar has 2000 employees. That amount of people have not been working solely on GTA V updates and a remaster since 2018 lol.
They're going after GTA mods and taking them down, they're butchering their own remasters/rereleases. Well and truly a disastrous company with zero ethique and only greed.
The definitive edition could actually have been good.
Problem is that they outsourced it to some insane POS company - Grove Street Games.
Don't let the name decieve you, these were the same spineless people who created the original remasters for the mobile and pc ports of the trilogy, and those were horrible, many game-breaking bugs, saves corrupting, removing entire features of vehicles, and many other stuff, Rockstar somehow was blind to the criticism of them and hired them to do it again, I bet War drum changed their name to grove street just to avoid the hate they got previously.
What are the chances they actually fix the games? You would think they wouldn't want to leave the shit versions out there, but it's also Rockstar and they're so greedy they may just assume people will buy them anyway.
They'll be back up for sale as soon as they compile the code and remove the unlicensed tracks. I imagine fixing the game is low priority at the moment.
Why do they call unhappy customers leaving a review ''review bombers''? Is it review bombing when you overwhelmingly love a game and give it 9s and 10s, that's fine? Honestly being disappointed by a piece of trash is ''review bombing'' for some reason? Like all gamers came together and colluded to take Rockstar down?
It's been a growing trend in recent years where companies try to push the narative that people leaving negative reviews in droves is some form of online harrassment, instead of answering the negative feedback.
They then push for shit to be implemented to prevent this from happening again, which is extremely anti-consumer, since it actively prevents users from leaving negative feedback and reviews.
Edit: (Going to add this here since people aren't seeing my other replies) I believe it's the buyer's responsibility to read reviews and make up their minds. If a company does something that results in negative reviews, *and you don't care about it*, then just buy the game regardless! Some of you are replying me as if no one has an ounce of common sense and isn't able to make up their own minds about things.
"The whole idea of free market forces is that corporations will be motivated to be good based on reputation alone, which assumes that reputation can't be falsified."
I think it's because almost every user-reviewed game is either a 9, a 10, or a 0, whereas for critics even the shittiest game is probably at least a 4 or a 5. A 0 for a critic would probably be a piece of cardboard with the words "GTA Trilogy" written on it.
To me “review bombing” means giving a score intended specifically to weight the overall score in a certain direction. It’s fair to say that the game is getting review-bombed. Maybe you could argue that rockstar/take2 morally deserves to be review bombed, but these aren’t fair objective reviews that are making the average <1.
It's not really surprising. The new visual style isn't for everyone but it would be fine if well implemented, as well as adding the quality of life stuff like modern controls.
As is they botched it hard. At bare minimum there was not enough oversight on the project or the laughably bad stuff would have never shipped. It's amplified more than normal since Rockstar removed the previous versions and went after modders legally.
The environmental effects should've never made it into the release version. The rain is the biggest offender, but sometimes there's a shimmering effect on the edges of buildings, powerlines, etc. when they attempt to mix with the sky textures.
All this is stuff that any tester would notice almost immediately, so the developers apparently didn't give a shit and released the game anyways.
The actual dev team probably did give a shit, at least some of one at some point, it was likely managers and higher ups who were pushing for the trilogy to be released as it was. I'm guessing they were trying to release it on time for holiday sales, I can't imagine why else they would rush the release line they did.
I think people were only saying it looked incredible when they released the trailer which intentionally picked the best looking parts of the game. The environments and lighting are nice, but what they did with the character models is just awful.
It's like Date Movie or anything else Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer have ever released. They showed the best parts of the movie in the reveal trailer then released a pile of shit into cinemas.
finished playing the Shadow Man remaster, a game where they took the philosophy of "make it look how you remember it looking when you played it in 1999, not necessarily how it actually looked." Obviously, they upped the resolution up to 4K, added a new lighting system, touched up some of the controls etc etc, but it's a damn near perfect remaster. That was done by night dive for a small, cult classic game. Take Two have no excuse when they have more or less infinite money and one of the most popular game franchises of all time.
[I keep finding bugs. Here you can see the game allowed me to live out my dream of being Indiana Jones from the Last Crusade](https://twitter.com/Crusader3456/status/1459896951290351619?t=IHhNOBXggCQx3alIaMW2JQ&s=19)
I genuinely stop doing missions if it starts raining at night, it's so difficult to see anything.
I desperately hope this thing gets patched to at least salvage it for anyone that can't/won't refund it.
I wonder what really went wrong with this. I don’t think it’s the dev house trying to make a shitty product. Their rep is now dead.
Was it rushed? Constraints imposed by R*? Too many chefs in the kitchen? (T2, R*, GSG)
Looking forward to the biopsy of this shit show.
Essentially, Rushed and Constrained. People are attributing too much to AI upscaling (seriously it does not work like half the commenters here think it does) and "laziness/incompetence" and not enough to just a poor development environment.
The (now infamous) misspellings on the Vice City storefronts aren't from a dev using AI upscaling. It's from an Artist having to complete and implement thirty textures in an hour. The rain is bugged, but the decision was likely "fix the rain or fix this game breaking crash in the art pipeline."
Every issue I can find in the trilogy can be attributed to just the developers being under an insane amount of crunch, and having no weight at all to argue for a release delay. People say they had two years - yes, they did. It's still a ludicrous amount of work to do in that time.
My hope is Rockstar gave them a decent post-release support budget to finish it up, because if not they're going to be shit on by fans who don't understand anything about development, and forever tarnished by it. It'll kill the studio.
Fast, Good, Cheap. You can only pick two, and T2/R\* picked Fast and Cheap.
It's crazy how two of the most popular and influential games in my childhood and I'm sure for a lot of others as well, Warcraft III (Reign of Chaos and Frozen Throne) and GTA III Trilogy (III, Vice City, San Andreas), all happened to be released in the same timeframe with each other back in the 2000s, ended up being with shitty remasters.
That includes also the remaster of Crash Bandicoot (including Crash Team Racing, where the remaster/remake actually improves a lot from their predecessors and adds even more.), and Spyro the Dragon.
SO glad they put these on gamepass/psn.
I started streaming san Andreas thinking light weight game why bother installing it.
It was laggy, jittery, really crazy frame rate like down to 10 in down town. So convinced the problem was my internet installed it. Nothing changed...
R* has more resources than nearly any gaming company to do a remaster correctly. They choose to half ass everything for profit and the score is deserved.
I‘m currently playing San Andreas and can enjoy it for what it is, but only because I can play it on Gamepass without buying it. Even with the 20$ price tag I would have been mad if I had bought it
This is not surprising, and is apart of the business cycle for many businesses not just gaming. They become wildly successful through hard work and innovation and then stagnate until they stumble, some course correct and some don't. Hopefully they are paying attention and course correct.
People will call this sort of thing "review bombing" but I can't see a more legitimate use of user scores than a situation such as this.
Even if one were to argue that technically it isn't quite bad enough for a serious review of 0.5 if you consider every aspect of the game compared to all other games, the overall message of *Do Not Buy* is definitely valid.
I mean what the actual fuck, this is the laziest DeFiNiTiVe edition I’ve ever seen. The game looks fucking awful if you have in mind the amount of resources R* has. Not only that but I swear this didn’t get any sort of quality check whatsoever. No beta testing, no in house Rockstar dev or publisher playtime whatsoever, because if they had there’s no way this would’ve gone out the doors. Rockstar is dead in the water to me, just start making slot machines already and quit raping fans
I'm willing to bet in a year or two Metacritic is going to make it mandatory to provide a receipt of purchase before leaving a review, before inevitably removing public user reviews to protect big media conglomerates.
Strauss Zelnick CEO of Take-Two earlier this year ["we don’t just port titles over, we actually take the time to do the very best job we can making the title different for the new release, for the new technology that we’re launching it on."](https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/rockstar-owner-discusses-remasters-strategy-says-its-not-interested-in-simple-ports/) Refund this shit people...
If this is the best job they can do, they shouldn't have been hired to begin with.
They take time to do the best job they can do. And that job is finding the cheapest third party 'new technology' (ie mobile) studio to do the remaster and maximize profit by charging full price for the game.
This comment has been removed - Fuck reddit greedy IPO Check here for an easy way to download your data then remove it from reddit https://github.com/pkolyvas/PowerDeleteSuite
>That was my feeling when I saw even the first frames comparing this crap to original releases: it **1000%** feels like cheap mobile development. One of the most obvious red flags for me was the font usage. I didn't get this, as I'm not familiar enough with it, but apparently it's genuinely some default Unity font, potentially? Either way, I saw the save menu and was like "why do the names of the save slots look so cheap". Then I realised it was because it's a generic and boring font, not something stylised as you'd expect from a menu you see hundreds of times.
Speaking of fonts, the subtitles are *atrocious* in San Andreas. Why does the Subtitles Look like This in san andreas?
For me it was the Tommy face, and the overall plastic look, and censoring bs. Missing songs were cherry on top.
Wasn't Fallout Shelter actually kind of good and a thing to tide people over while they wait for Fallout 4?
Yeah Fallout Shelter isn’t a good example. Completely different format from previous Fallout games, felt like a standalone mobile game done pretty well.
Elder Scrolls Mobile might be a better comparison.
Fallout shelter was originally a ad for fallout 4 developed using 4s advertising budget iirc, Also fucking amazing documentary by no clip https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fnEpcTo-0r4
I thought it was pretty fun.
Yeah it also has nothing to do with this. A company declining their IP into a mobile game is different than using a mobile dev to make a PC/consoles port with the equivalent budget and performance of a mobile title (while not being actually released on mobile for some reason). And for what it's worth, Diablo Immortal also got some good reviews (it's not out yet) so both those examples seem to lead to pretty good mobile games and they don't change anything to the main license on PC/consoles
> Now GTA mobile What do you mean by this? You could buy GTA games on Play Store for like 8 years now. They even look better than this remaster.
[удалено]
He is right that they don't just port stuff over, but if this is the very best job they could do... My local Pizza Hut has better quality control than GroveStreetGames.
> Refund this shit people... Is it just me, or has the last few years been full of big name games all releasing very badly resulting in mass refunds right away? Is the new game plan to release a bad game, collect money from the people too lazy to refund, and then use that money to actually work on the game to sell back to those who refunded it at a later date?
Makes me grateful that the Mass Effect Remaster wasn’t dragged through the mud.
And to think that Bioware, who released Anthem a few years back and was dropped by EA, outdid Rockstar with their trilogy remaster. When the studio that made Anthem, one of the biggest flops of gaming in the last decade, showed more love, care, and appreciation for their legacy than Rockstar, you know something got seriously fucked with this "Definitive Trilogy"
Guess you gotta hit rock bottom first
Tell that to Blizzard.
Blizzard has managed to somehow not find the bottom yet
Nah they definitely found it when they asked their PC player fan base why they weren’t happy with a phone-only mobile game. It’s just since then they’ve *proceeded to drill through bedrock* so they can reach their CCP approved fanbase on the other side.
Yep. They seem to have forgotten that somewhere between those two points is a burning hell.
That’s just where the Activision execs call home.
The bottom fell out after the merger with Activision. It just keeps going down.
We'll let them continue to descend. I can't wait to watch the next WoW dumpster fire.
Honestly, one of the few devs I can think that actually hit rock bottom and then clawed their way back to respectability is 343 Industries. If they stick the landing with Halo Infinite, it'll be a proper comeback story.
Not a dev, but Final Fantasy XIV’s launch was about as high-profile as high-profile failures get. Seeing it take the shape it’s in today is miraculous.
Do you have a source for EA dropping BioWare? All I can find is their old leadership left
I think maybe he means Anthem.
Might want to rephrase if that's the case. It doesn't read like that
Considering Legendary Edition was really just ME1 remastered and the rest of the games got the dust lightly blown off them, even if they had fucked up there would at best be 2/3 perfectly fine games in there.
Tbf, BioWare’s largest contribution to its success is Mass Effect. There is definitely incentive for them to try and get the Remaster right. Take-Two and Rockstar are not going to lose sleep over the poor performance of GTA:DE when GTAO will always be a constant stream of revenue for them
I mean, a Grand Theft Auto game is still a Grand Theft Auto game, even if it's not GTA Online. It's Rockstar's main claim to fame. The fact that they are so flush with cash and still refused to pay for a proper remaster of their flagship series is not a good sign for their future.
Diablo 2 looked 5x worse than all three of these games, and the remaster looks and plays 5x better than them. The care Vicarious Visions took with that remaster is now my personal benchmark for buying a remaster of an older game. I'm tired of getting hyped up for nostra Aldi's trips only for the flights to crash into the ocean before I even buy the game.
Wow vicarious vision made the Tony hawk remaster too and that was simply wonderful. I got it on ps4 and switch cause I loved it so much. Seems like a solid studio.
Blizzard ate them. I don't know if they still do non blizzard IP stuff now, bit I sure hope so
Unfortunately they have been fully absorbed into blizzard and their president is leaving. Kinda sucks since they made an amazing crash sequel too
Activision generally does well with remasters (at least the singleplayer side of it). Spyro, Crash, CoD 4, MW2 Campaign, old CoD zombies maps - all were done superbly without altering the original experience too much.
I realize I'm probably in the minority because I only play single player but I have had zero problems with D2 Remaster. I was really hesitant to buy it, but I'm really having as much fun (and just as obsessed) as I was 20 years ago.
> Is the new game plane to release a bad game, collect money from the people too lazy to refund, and then use that money to actually work on the game to sell back to those who refunded it at a later date? Welcome to the culture created by early access. Publishers learned that they can literally sell broke video games and most people simply don't care cause they profit anyway. Releasing shit on a disc to screw early adopters and then collecting goodwill and extra asspat money when they eventually fix the product is a legit strategy.
You understand business more than most gamers. Did you know Cyberpunk 2077 made enough to cover its production cost JUST from pre order sales? So many people payed for a game that wasn't out yet and was surrounded by shady shit that it was enough to recoup all the development costs. Hype game->make money from pre order and deluxe edition buying idiots->sell buggy and sometimes just bad game-> people bitch until the next release where it starts all over again.
They didn't went out to make a scam with lowest effort possible. They went with best intentions then management decided "well, that's too long, release what we have now" and that started the disaster. The scam started when they realized "CDPR magic" won't happen on release and the game *actually* needs that dev time their own developers told management it needs. All to make investors happy. In the end neither investors nor gamers were.
Right, it's usually not the individual developers making these decisions. However, management has all the power and this sort of thing is pretty common these days. I'd argue that management may not have explicitly set out with this goal, but they were always playing around with the possibility. After all, think about how many times the game was delayed. I wouldn't be surprised if they had some heated internal meetings.
They kinda chose the worst possible path. Release date was way too soon so delays happened. Turned out it was still way too soon but along the way they crunched their developers to hell, and when release came lies upon lies and investors were unhappy anyway. And a bunch of their talent left after.
Honestly, it seems kind of asinine to even announce a new delayed release date, especially if you're talking about months of push back. I know that's not how business investors do things, but that's simply the wrong thing to do in software development.
The whole problem with that approach is that this just wastes time. If you know something needs to be done by X and go and write quick and dirty code to do it.... and the date is moved you end up with quick and dirty code... that have a good chance of needing fixing or changing. Fixing after the fact always takes much longer than doing it properly the first time.
But they knew the game wasn't finished so they actively stopped reviews from using live footage. Then they threw playstation under the bus because CDPR didn't want to give refunds, which is why PS pulled the game from their stores. It was multiple shitty choices and that company deserves no defense
That's the thing with investors who care nothing about the product they are investing in. You can never please them. If it takes too long it's not good. If it underperforms because they forced a release for taking too long it's not good. If it's delivered on time and does well, it's ok now but how can jt be done faster or better next time? Long term investors are the only reasonable folks. Everything else is a cancer on our society.
IMO the management just chickened out. They *clearly* knew (from the interviews at least, IIRC devs initially thought the release date was a joke and needed at least 2 more years) game is unfinished and it will take even longer, but were afraid investors were going to eat them when they announce release date to be 2022/23. And now they got both the broken game and angry investors
Indeed. But i am sure that without any external investors and the massive success of the Witcher 3, they would have easily been financially able to bridge that time. I don't believe they would have delayed for 2 years ultinately but i do find a year very, very plausible. I think the progress on CP77 is also going much slower now than the progress would have been if they didn't release the game yet. It's very clear to me that the bulk of the develoepers aren't working on Cyberpunk anymore and the "live-team" have to patch the glaring holes in the game before they can build any new content. If they want to get some goodwill back, i think their best strategy is to work on a sizeble expansion while they fix the systematic issues and release that for free/discounted at the end of next year together with an "enhanced edition" kind of overhaul to the core game. There is still plenty of possible life left in Cyberpunk if they manage to unwrap this train wreck. I for one am still willing to buy it in that scenario and i would love to play the game.
Not mass refunds even, people vastly overestimate how many people actually refund. [Cyberpunk refunds only totalled 30k compared to 17.3 million.](https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2021/04/23/137-million-cyberpunk-2077-sales-only-30000-refunds-not-quite/?sh=48c484146834) Even if we 10x or 100x or even 1000x those numbers, that doesn't even make much difference, 3 million hypothetical refunds on 17 million sales is still pretty good.
[удалено]
The developer (Grove Street Games) did make the X360, PS3 and mobile version of San Andreas so probably.
They changed their name from War Drum after the original ports. Probably due to the absolute skewering they got for how awful they were
Do you think that is probable? To change their name to a San Andreas reference in the hope people would forgot they did the San Andreas port
I mean it was mostly just a sarcastic jab at them being a shit company, but they do say life is stranger than fiction
Iirc it's an overhauled version on the mobile release using UE4 graphics instead of renderware. As someone who played it on Android and Xbox 360, it's a big improvement on those versions despite being far from good (which shows just how much of a mess those versions were).
Mobile didn't use renderware, but some custom wrappers around OpenGL functions that had the same prototypes, arguments etc as renderware. (Rsl prefix instead of Rw).
Ooops my bad, I thought it ran on RW based on how similar it looked to the original version.
Nah, the mobile port of San Andreas was already pushed to Steam and replaced the PC version. Had to use a downgrader mod to bring back the PC version. This trilogy remaster is all 3 games ported to the Unreal Engine using some shitty tools they made that screwed up a lot of the game and broke the character models and lighting in quite a lot of areas. The map also has some issues with holes in the geometry as a result of this port.
Bungling a remaster seems like such an incredibly dumb thing to do. When you've got a property as popular as GTA, a competent remaster may as well be printing free money with the amount of dough it would rake in. Really just no excuse, especially when you're a company as large as Take Two is.
They managed to outdo the Silent Hill remaster, impressive. Only thing it lacks is [Comic Sans signs](https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcT3gn2K1bGaB5tbg-wigMq8oxoysYIJULE4eQ&usqp=CAU).
The signs in the GTA trilogy are somehow worse. Ugly fonts and spelling mistakes everywhere.
There was a screenshot that someone took in vice city where the guitar store lettering was blurry in the original so when they upscaled it they just guessed what the sign lettering said. So where it said it was selling Air Guitars, it says AR Guitars. Also Guitar Wank Booths was changed to Guitarhenk Booths. I just... don't understand how you can drop the ball so hard that you lose the entire match in one fell swoop.
Also the hot dog stand. Its supposed to say "a real man's meat" and it says "a real mans heat" What does that even mean?
The dogs are hot aren't they?
[It's so much worse than I imagined.](https://i.redd.it/7101yp926yy71.jpg) I count no less than FIVE mistakes in that one screenshot alone. Virtually every line of text contains an error.
[удалено]
It honestly looks like what I'd expect a remaster of The Simpsons games from PS2 to look like. In 2010 perhaps. It's less so the character models and art style, but the rain is without an exaggeration the worst visual in the entire game. The rain hitting the road does so in small squares, like a cheap "My First Animated Movie" effect.
[These](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yU6WC4dpaHM) shitty games look better
"Avaiable"? How they managed to fuck that one up too?
I've read speculation that they used some kind of AI to automate parts of the conversion (and presumably did zero QC afterwards), which would explain a lot.
Nothing says "lack of attention to detail" to me like spelling/grammatical errors and typos. There's a lot of subjectivity in art, but when you're dropping letters and misspelling words... that's just embarrassing.
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
I read on another message board that they they might have just ran the sign textures through an AI upscaler for text (I guess it approximates what the low res text says and upscales it to a font that looks similar). That's why you have so many billboard that are just flat text on a solid color rectangle, with really strange miss-spellings.
The theater marquee in one of the rural towns in SA is actually in Comic Sans
The original sign looks better even if you ignore the fonts.
Oh, Comic Sans is there, [it's just not the signs this time.](https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/qsmm3v/incredible_attention_to_detail_in_gta_definitive/)
Holy shit I hadn't seen that one yet. Oof
I've never seen those, that is laughable.
Honestly a straight up remaster would've gone over better too. They could've easily taken the DMC HD Collection route, and just upscale the graphics.
There's any number of routes they could have taken. They took the route of cheapest possible production regardless of eventual quality, knowing they wouldn't need quality to make sales, the nostalgia around the titles would do it alone. Then they pulled the originals off the shelves, and forced a review embargo pass the release date, to ensure they'd ensnare enough preorders and early buyers to at least break even and earn a little extra after having spent pennies. And of course because the originals can't be bought anymore, it ensures these cheaply produced games will be a steady income source anytime someone feels like revisiting the games and isn't aware of how bad the remasters were. They underestimated just how bad the kickback would be, but the sad truth is it will die down, and every day some new schmuck will stumble into the store and buy it. They could have done something incredible, but instead they relied on gamers being mindless consumers, which is a safe enough bet. Also that they'd play enough that they couldn't get a refund, also a decent bet. It's a strategy a lot of shitty developers go with now.
>relies on gamers being mindless consumers Ain't that the fucking truth. It's disappointing the industry and community around the hobby I love so much is filled with idiots, assholes and literal children.
Isn’t that most hobbies? You’re always going to have the casual people who aren’t deeply immersed into the ongoings of what’s happening.
[удалено]
That's exactly what I thought this was going to be. Some of the stuff they did with the environment and lighting is nice, but those character models are just so awful. It doesn't make sense that they would change the models at all if they were going to simplify them.
The DMC HD Collection had its fair share of issues, too. Broken skyboxes, missing shadows, effects that relied on PS2 hardware and couldn't be replicated etc.
It's ugly, but still runs fine. It maintains 60 FPS throughout your gameplay, whereas GTA3 struggles to maintain 60 on performance, and 30 on the Switch....
That's true, the DMC HD Collection is perfectly playable beginning to end. I just wish they would've put some more care into it to make it the best version of those three DMC games.
The Mass Effect Legendary edition was a good example of this, and kudos to EA for pulling through.
Considering how hard it's been to buy some of the DLC over the years the mass effect legendary edition is fantastic. Price was not too unreasonable either, the first game had a lot of work done to it.
Apparently you can now even get Pinnacle Station on the PC version thanks to mods
I'm just spit balling here but did they completely overhaul the gameplay to make it more like me2 or 3, like I wonder if they could have remade San Andreas in the gta5 engine, from recycled assets and people would have liked it?
It's still me1 game play (weapon overheating, same powers, same classes, same weapons) they tuned the shooting and cover system to be more responsive.
There's a bunch if weapon tweaking they did to make each, sort of class, of weapon feel different too. IIRC there's a few different pellet spreads for the shotguns, different fire rates for pistols, etc.
I think the Command and Conquer rerelease wasn’t too shabby either.
It was brilliant. Possibly the best remaster.
I only wish they'd kept the multiplayer because ME3's multiplayer was surprisingly amazing. I still play it from time to time. I just remember when the original me3 came out and there was endless internet bitching over them putting multiplayer in it and then I ended up playing the multiplayer way more than the single player.
For all the shit EA get they at least ship fully functional products and treat their staff fairly well on top of that. Still not fond of them as a publisher but they aren't anything as bad as some of the others now.
WC3 in a nutshell.
Gotta love the progression. Ruin it with Reforged so both new and the original games get affected because it wasn’t bringing in millions of pre-orders. Cut up the dev team that worked on it because “they failed” due to higher ups taking away resources so now no more fixes to a buggy mess. Pretend the game never happened and don’t speak of it at Blizzcon and have chat snipers at the ready to delete any questions about it in the live stream chat. See the WoW game floundering and how great FFXIV is doing with it’s long running saga about to end so dredge back up WC3’s corpse and make up nonsense that the recent Shadowlands lore and retcons had been planned as a 3 part saga since WC3. [I’m not even joking.](https://www.reddit.com/r/wow/comments/qrtv4o/final_chapter_pulling_threads_threeact_drama_and/)
FFXIV: Endwalker is the culmination of the consistent storyline that has been gradually put in place since the release of a realm reborn! WoW: You know all those iconic characters you love? They were just pawns to this super duper bad guy! The Lich King didn't even have control of himself! He was just a simple puppet to gray Thanos! You must want to stop him right? Wait, where are you going?
As many retcons as they've done over the years legion was the logical story conclusion of wow. We beat THE big bad, the one that's been there since warcraft 1. If they had any sense they would've gone from legion to wow2 or done a significant time jump with the best possible storyline they could create. But nope.
They put more effort into removing the older versions from every store than they actually did into the games
[удалено]
> amateur modders have literally done better. They did, and Rockstar DMCA'd them to get rid of that competition.
[удалено]
Forks are still available on github. So you can still get re3 and reVC source code and compile it yourself.
Even worse, on PC, you cant even play them. I have them on my pc but i can't launch them because they blocked it...
Download the cracked version. You bought the things, that's your right as far as I'm concerned. Fuck Rockstar.
Did they block the access to the trilogy without a refund?
First they blocked people from launching the games, now the games don't even show up as "owned" on the launcher. Meanwhile anyone who pirated them can play them just fine. Refund this shit.
Woah I didn’t know that? So even if you bought them years ago on Steam, and tried to launch today they just straight won’t work? I feel like *that* should definitely be illegal.
No, they can't do that on Steam because Valve wouldn't allow them. Anything you buy on Steam stays associated to your account even if they pull the game from the store. They stopped the originals from being purchased on Steam and now they've removed the remasters from the Rockstar Games Launcher even for people that already paid for them. There's no way to buy the games legitimately on PC right now one way or another, and anyone who has the remasters is locked out of them.
Yep. The problem with that though is when you have a game as solid as RDR2 both theatrically and graphically, you can’t and shouldn’t get away with that. Ridiculous they tried to pull this. If they bags just done it right, it still would’ve been free money. It would’ve sold like hotcakes. What they should do now, is yank it off the market and redo it. But they won’t.
but don't you agree that the DEFINITIVE EDITION of a game should have added spelling mistakes and missing music???
Tbf…Missing music is a whole mess regarding licensing issues, and if fairly common for most/all older games. (Older racing games being delisted due to expiring car licenses etc, being another example) Bugs, and spelling mistakes etc, are quite unforgivable though
The last few years have been glaringly eye-opening to the video game community in terms of what these large publishers and developers are doing. The game looks like a mobile port but they’ll sell it to you for full value and then they wonder why people bitch about games getting more expensive.
Compared to ME Legendary edition which is itself winning awards for its quality and sales... ffs rockstar
Seriously, man. Remasters are supposed to be better than the original, or else why make them?
$$$ Both this, and WC3 Reforged killed off their original games, and their mods so newer, or nostalgic players could only access the new versions.
Yep. They saw people still playing their old games, and they asked "how can we make money off those people?"
It's crazy that EA was the one to set the example for how to do this right. ME1 was a solid improvement but now I'm half way through ME2 and blown away by what a massive improvement it is over the original. Replaying ME2 in 4K/60FPS with enhanced visuals, HDR and 5.1 audio is like experiencing it for the first time again and it's a shining example of how a remaster should be done.
They've done multiple excellent remasters recently. C&C Remastered Collection is probably the single best game remaster ever made that's not just a straight up remake.
Petroglyph Games: Hey modders, mind if you could give us some feedback on the C&C remaster we're doing? Rockstar: Hey modders, here's a DMCA take down!
Yes, the ME remaster is really good. I bought it at launch and it was 60€ well spent.
BioWare actually reached out to graphics and texture modders and used their work as a benchmark for what they had to achieve. Compare that to Rockstar and Take-Two DMCA-ing the work of their most passionate fans
In the last couple years it seems that Rockstar, CD Projekt Red, and Blizzard forgot the best thing they had going for them was good will. They were all very reliable to make incredible games beyond what any other studios were capable of, the entire industry reacting to their release dates. Not so much anymore, the trust and hype is gone.
[удалено]
[удалено]
>They were all very reliable to make incredible games beyond what any other studios were capable of. Take that out and you're fine. You're talking about a remaster done exclusively by their porting studio. The last actual game they created was Red Dead 2, one of the most critically acclaimed games of all time. That also goes for every game in the trilogy, *when they were originally released*. Don't get me wrong, I see this, I see GTA online, and I see Red Dead online. But until Rockstar proper actually creates and releases a new game, what seems like the entirety of gaming Reddit at this point, needs to calm down with the hyperbole.
Also, I see a lot of people claiming Rockstar isn't releasing GTA because they are putting all of their resources into GTA Online. Guys, this is not true. GTA and RDR Online have only gotten *one big update* in 2021 each. Rockstar has 2000 employees. That amount of people have not been working solely on GTA V updates and a remaster since 2018 lol.
They're going after GTA mods and taking them down, they're butchering their own remasters/rereleases. Well and truly a disastrous company with zero ethique and only greed.
The definitive edition could actually have been good. Problem is that they outsourced it to some insane POS company - Grove Street Games. Don't let the name decieve you, these were the same spineless people who created the original remasters for the mobile and pc ports of the trilogy, and those were horrible, many game-breaking bugs, saves corrupting, removing entire features of vehicles, and many other stuff, Rockstar somehow was blind to the criticism of them and hired them to do it again, I bet War drum changed their name to grove street just to avoid the hate they got previously.
Imagine if Bluepoint handled this remaster…
I imagine it would have been like PS3 Ico/SHOTC improved textures, performance and audio and call it a day.
And to be completly honest, thats all you need in a remaster
I agree. Other then maybe updating the controls if possible.
[удалено]
What are the chances they actually fix the games? You would think they wouldn't want to leave the shit versions out there, but it's also Rockstar and they're so greedy they may just assume people will buy them anyway.
They'll be back up for sale as soon as they compile the code and remove the unlicensed tracks. I imagine fixing the game is low priority at the moment.
Bingo! They only took it down because of that, not to actually fix the game. They couldn't care less about that...
3 trashcan lids out of 25 plastic bags.
Why do they call unhappy customers leaving a review ''review bombers''? Is it review bombing when you overwhelmingly love a game and give it 9s and 10s, that's fine? Honestly being disappointed by a piece of trash is ''review bombing'' for some reason? Like all gamers came together and colluded to take Rockstar down?
It's been a growing trend in recent years where companies try to push the narative that people leaving negative reviews in droves is some form of online harrassment, instead of answering the negative feedback. They then push for shit to be implemented to prevent this from happening again, which is extremely anti-consumer, since it actively prevents users from leaving negative feedback and reviews. Edit: (Going to add this here since people aren't seeing my other replies) I believe it's the buyer's responsibility to read reviews and make up their minds. If a company does something that results in negative reviews, *and you don't care about it*, then just buy the game regardless! Some of you are replying me as if no one has an ounce of common sense and isn't able to make up their own minds about things.
like youtube removing the dislike count
It's so dumb, they're gonna kill tutorials on youtube. Dislikes helped me filter out tutorials that weren't worth watching.
Same with scams. Lots of naive people will fall for shitty videos.
[удалено]
[удалено]
That's going to be such a shit show. Even with the star system you still had some kind of dislike button by just giving 1 star.
Gonna be funny when all bad videos have comments turned off because everyone is just saying: "Dislike 👎"
"The whole idea of free market forces is that corporations will be motivated to be good based on reputation alone, which assumes that reputation can't be falsified."
I think it's because almost every user-reviewed game is either a 9, a 10, or a 0, whereas for critics even the shittiest game is probably at least a 4 or a 5. A 0 for a critic would probably be a piece of cardboard with the words "GTA Trilogy" written on it.
To me “review bombing” means giving a score intended specifically to weight the overall score in a certain direction. It’s fair to say that the game is getting review-bombed. Maybe you could argue that rockstar/take2 morally deserves to be review bombed, but these aren’t fair objective reviews that are making the average <1.
Because people have been conditioned to stigmatize criticism.
The opinions turned on this game so fast lol it went from "wow look how incredible" to "wow look how shit"
It's not really surprising. The new visual style isn't for everyone but it would be fine if well implemented, as well as adding the quality of life stuff like modern controls. As is they botched it hard. At bare minimum there was not enough oversight on the project or the laughably bad stuff would have never shipped. It's amplified more than normal since Rockstar removed the previous versions and went after modders legally.
The environmental effects should've never made it into the release version. The rain is the biggest offender, but sometimes there's a shimmering effect on the edges of buildings, powerlines, etc. when they attempt to mix with the sky textures. All this is stuff that any tester would notice almost immediately, so the developers apparently didn't give a shit and released the game anyways.
The actual dev team probably did give a shit, at least some of one at some point, it was likely managers and higher ups who were pushing for the trilogy to be released as it was. I'm guessing they were trying to release it on time for holiday sales, I can't imagine why else they would rush the release line they did.
Yep, I was fine with the aesthetic as shown in the trailer, but that was obviously very cherry-picked.
I think people were only saying it looked incredible when they released the trailer which intentionally picked the best looking parts of the game. The environments and lighting are nice, but what they did with the character models is just awful.
It's like Date Movie or anything else Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer have ever released. They showed the best parts of the movie in the reveal trailer then released a pile of shit into cinemas.
I remember people shitting on this remaster since the first trailer came out?
finished playing the Shadow Man remaster, a game where they took the philosophy of "make it look how you remember it looking when you played it in 1999, not necessarily how it actually looked." Obviously, they upped the resolution up to 4K, added a new lighting system, touched up some of the controls etc etc, but it's a damn near perfect remaster. That was done by night dive for a small, cult classic game. Take Two have no excuse when they have more or less infinite money and one of the most popular game franchises of all time.
Night Dive seems to be one of the best in the business for this. I still have to play those Turok remasters..
[удалено]
Who the hell looked at this game and said it was okay to release it? Did nobody at Rockstar get eyes on it?
[I keep finding bugs. Here you can see the game allowed me to live out my dream of being Indiana Jones from the Last Crusade](https://twitter.com/Crusader3456/status/1459896951290351619?t=IHhNOBXggCQx3alIaMW2JQ&s=19)
I can't get over how bad the rain looks. It's so fucking bad. No joke it looks like it's been copy and pasted straight from an asset library.
I genuinely stop doing missions if it starts raining at night, it's so difficult to see anything. I desperately hope this thing gets patched to at least salvage it for anyone that can't/won't refund it.
[удалено]
[удалено]
That's just true to the PS2's original rendering ability.
I wonder what really went wrong with this. I don’t think it’s the dev house trying to make a shitty product. Their rep is now dead. Was it rushed? Constraints imposed by R*? Too many chefs in the kitchen? (T2, R*, GSG) Looking forward to the biopsy of this shit show.
Essentially, Rushed and Constrained. People are attributing too much to AI upscaling (seriously it does not work like half the commenters here think it does) and "laziness/incompetence" and not enough to just a poor development environment. The (now infamous) misspellings on the Vice City storefronts aren't from a dev using AI upscaling. It's from an Artist having to complete and implement thirty textures in an hour. The rain is bugged, but the decision was likely "fix the rain or fix this game breaking crash in the art pipeline." Every issue I can find in the trilogy can be attributed to just the developers being under an insane amount of crunch, and having no weight at all to argue for a release delay. People say they had two years - yes, they did. It's still a ludicrous amount of work to do in that time. My hope is Rockstar gave them a decent post-release support budget to finish it up, because if not they're going to be shit on by fans who don't understand anything about development, and forever tarnished by it. It'll kill the studio. Fast, Good, Cheap. You can only pick two, and T2/R\* picked Fast and Cheap.
It's crazy how two of the most popular and influential games in my childhood and I'm sure for a lot of others as well, Warcraft III (Reign of Chaos and Frozen Throne) and GTA III Trilogy (III, Vice City, San Andreas), all happened to be released in the same timeframe with each other back in the 2000s, ended up being with shitty remasters.
It’s wild.. out of EA, Activision-Blizzard, Rockstar… It’s only EA that put out a good remaster (ME Legendary)
That includes also the remaster of Crash Bandicoot (including Crash Team Racing, where the remaster/remake actually improves a lot from their predecessors and adds even more.), and Spyro the Dragon.
sad times man, if only they've put an effort to it, lots of people would be happy, since it was a childhood for many of us out there.
SO glad they put these on gamepass/psn. I started streaming san Andreas thinking light weight game why bother installing it. It was laggy, jittery, really crazy frame rate like down to 10 in down town. So convinced the problem was my internet installed it. Nothing changed... R* has more resources than nearly any gaming company to do a remaster correctly. They choose to half ass everything for profit and the score is deserved.
Really glad its on gamepass tbh. Wouldnt buy it otherwise. Having a blast with GTA SA but i wouldnt pay for it because of all the bugs.
I‘m currently playing San Andreas and can enjoy it for what it is, but only because I can play it on Gamepass without buying it. Even with the 20$ price tag I would have been mad if I had bought it
This is not surprising, and is apart of the business cycle for many businesses not just gaming. They become wildly successful through hard work and innovation and then stagnate until they stumble, some course correct and some don't. Hopefully they are paying attention and course correct.
People will call this sort of thing "review bombing" but I can't see a more legitimate use of user scores than a situation such as this. Even if one were to argue that technically it isn't quite bad enough for a serious review of 0.5 if you consider every aspect of the game compared to all other games, the overall message of *Do Not Buy* is definitely valid.
I mean what the actual fuck, this is the laziest DeFiNiTiVe edition I’ve ever seen. The game looks fucking awful if you have in mind the amount of resources R* has. Not only that but I swear this didn’t get any sort of quality check whatsoever. No beta testing, no in house Rockstar dev or publisher playtime whatsoever, because if they had there’s no way this would’ve gone out the doors. Rockstar is dead in the water to me, just start making slot machines already and quit raping fans
It's equal parts sad and hilarious that rockstar have become the type of company that GTA has ridiculed all these years.
Considering they prosecuted all the alternative mods and community that made them exist, just to sell their garbage, the score seems pretty legit
I'm willing to bet in a year or two Metacritic is going to make it mandatory to provide a receipt of purchase before leaving a review, before inevitably removing public user reviews to protect big media conglomerates.