PC players are fixing the broken GTA Trilogy remake – but they shouldn’t have to
Modders to the rescue
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PC players have had enough ofGTA: The Trilogy - Definitive Edition’s problems and are already fixing the game with their own mods.
The recentGTAremaster has been widely criticised asone of the worst game remakes ever released. Slapdash texture updates, an incomplete radio soundtrack, and vision-obscuring rain are just a handful of the issues plaguing the title – meaning that players are taking it on themselves to fix the Rockstar games.
Mods for the PC edition of GTA: The Trilogyhave been released that take aim at the most egregious faults, and members of the modding community have vowed that more fixes will come as time goes on. One of the main targets is the rain which falls in these thick white lines that blanket the game’s screen and make it nearly unplayable – with mods so far making the streaks more transparent and looking to fix issues whererain won’t fall over water.
Other mods have already started to expand the trilogy’s radio station’s music collection after it was discovered that many tracks from the original games were in the game’s files but aren’t playable thanks to certain lines of code.
What makes the current efforts especially impressive is that the modding community has achieved these early fixes in very little time. While the game was officially released on Friday, November 12 theRockstar PC launcher was broken for around two daysand the game was actuallytaken off sale for a timetoo – meaning that those on PC had spent less than 24 hours actually playing the game before fixes began coming out.
Unfortunately, console players are forced to wait a while longer, with the head of Grove Street Studios Thomas Williamsonexplaining in a Tweet that the team is working on updates;however, we don’t yet have a timeline for when these changes will arrive.
Mods shouldn’t have to fix new games
One of the main draws of PC gaming is mod support that allows players to add their own wild creations to games they love and update titles that are the best part of a decade old.
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To that end, the texture upgrades and fixes that we’re seeing with GTA: The Trilogy - Definitive Edition is exactly what we’d expect from the modding community. The difference here is that they’re not normally created for games that were released days ago.
Over the past few years, we’ve seen plenty of remakes and remasters, and while we can’t expect every game to receive theResident Evil 2 Remaketreatment, we should at least expect the remaster to be worthy of release on current-gen hardware.
Take theCrash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy: while the levels are laid out exactly as players remember, the game has been made to look brand new – the same simply cannot be said of the GTA Trilogy remake.
While we love to see that mods are helping to fix a busted game for PC players, it shouldn’t be on the community to provide these fixes – especially as many mods are created and released for free. This kind of work should have been done by the developers – isn’t that why we’ve been asked to pay $60 / £55 / AU$80?
Hopefully, the Grove Street Studios team will be thick and fast with its patches so that console players won’t be stuck with the busted version of the GTA Trilogy for much longer. In the meantime, we can once again take this as a lesson to think twice about buying a game before we’ve seen it action.
Hamish is a Senior Staff Writer for TechRadar and you’ll see his name appearing on articles across nearly every topic on the site from smart home deals to speaker reviews to graphics card news and everything in between. He uses his broad range of knowledge to help explain the latest gadgets and if they’re a must-buy or a fad fueled by hype. Though his specialty is writing about everything going on in the world of virtual reality and augmented reality.
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