After many months of leaks and rumors, Rockstar had finally taken the wraps off its latest project, Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy - The Definitive Edition. Developed by Grove Street Games, it is a collection of remastered versions of the early 3D GTA games: Grand Theft Auto 3, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.
But anyone expecting nothing more than upscaled textures and higher framerates would be surprised by how much work it appears has gone into these games. These aren't mere remasters in the traditional sense as they've been enhanced to take advantage of the capabilities of modern consoles. So between visual upgrades and quality of life improvements, here are the biggest changes made to the games in Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy - The Definitive Edition.
6 Higher Resolution Textures
In this day and age of 4K displays and consoles powerful enough to render cutting-edge visuals, trying to play the original trilogy of GTA games can be a bit of a pain. Not only are the graphics pretty basic by today's standards, their numerous defects and shortcomings also get magnified on anything that goes higher than 480p.
The good news is that the textures in the games have been completely reworked for their definitive editions. In addition to that, most character models have also been improved so that they have more overall detail, like separate fingers for instance. The team at Grove Street Games has gone with a visual style that strikes a nice balance that helps the new games retain much of their original charm.
5 Improved Draw Distance
The thing that players of the old GTA games remember most fondly is the cities themselves, with each one feeling distinct from the other. Going back to revisit them today though, it quickly becomes apparent that they haven't aged all that well.
Most egregious is the fact that the original trilogy of GTA games was plagued by very aggressive pop-in. This was of course necessitated by the hardware limitations of the PS2 and was alleviated somewhat when the games made the jump to the more powerful Xbox. But the games and their respective cities have never managed to look as good as they do now, with buildings and foliage stretching as far as the eye can see, vastly improving the overall sense of immersion.
4 Smoother Driving & Gunplay
A video game is only as good as its gameplay and oftentimes the way the game plays comes down to how it controls. The early Grand Theft Auto games were definitely products of their time, with control schemes considered clunky and unresponsive today.
All that is set to change as the new versions have also received touch-ups to their controls. This is coming in the form of a GTA 5-style controller layout for driving and on-foot actions, which should be instantly familiar to fans of that game, as well as the introduction of a weapon wheel, and improvements to its targeting system for better gunplay. The definitive edition of GTA: San Andreas in particular promises improved drive-by controls, which makes sense since drive-bys were a big part of that game's mechanics.
3 Platform-Specific Features
The GTA Remastered Trilogy is releasing on just about every modern console currently on the market, and players on some of those consoles get to enjoy some platform-specific features. For example, players on the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X will be able to take advantage of the graphical capabilities of those machines to play the games in 4K at up to 60 FPS.
Players on the Nintendo Switch will be able to use a combination of touch screen controls and gyro aiming to make playing on the go feel that much more intuitive. PC players on the other hand can take advantage of NVIDIA DLSS to play the game at its highest possible level of graphical fidelity without taking a hit to performance.
2 Quality of Life Improvements
The Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy - The Definitive Edition also boasts a number of smaller quality of life improvements that aim to make the games feel closer in parity to the newer entries in the series.
Gone are the days when failing a mission meant having to respawn at a hospital or police station. Now players can choose to take another stab at that particular mission immediately after they die or get arrested, without the need of having to drive back to the mission marker, a feature that was first introduced in GTA 4. The new games are also receiving the mini-map and enhanced navigation introduced in that game, giving players the ability to set waypoints that should make getting around feel closer to what they've come to expect.
1 Advanced Lighting & Effects
With the move to modern consoles and the Unreal Engine, the developers at Grove Street Games have been able to implement some contemporary rendering techniques that simply weren't possible when the GTA games were originally released.
The biggest of these is the reworked lighting system, which is instantly noticeable as it breathes new life into the games. Everything is now more accurately lit, with real-time character shadows in the older games, as well as actual reflections on surfaces that support them. The water and weather effects have also been overhauled to look and behave more realistically than before. And all these things come together to create some truly stunning visuals worthy of the definitive edition name.