{"id":53221,"date":"2021-11-16T06:00:27","date_gmt":"2021-11-16T11:00:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=53221"},"modified":"2021-11-16T12:19:20","modified_gmt":"2021-11-16T17:19:20","slug":"grand-theft-auto-trilogy-derision-edition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=53221","title":{"rendered":"Grand Theft Auto Trilogy: Derision Edition"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>On the podcast <a href=\"?p=53206\">yesterday<\/a>, we talked about the controversy with the GTA Definitive Edition. For the record, I have not personally experienced the games for myself, so my complaints are based on reports from other people.<\/p>\n<p>This puts me in a really annoying position as a critic. On one hand, I&#8217;ll get Rockstar apologists<span class='snote' title='1'>A dying breed, no doubt. But they do exist.<\/span> insisting that the controversy is all blown out of proportion and that I shouldn&#8217;t be talking about it if I haven&#8217;t experienced it first hand.<\/p>\n<p>But if I <strong>had<\/strong> bought the game, then I&#8217;d have a different group of people yelling at me: &#8220;What did you expect? If you were dumb enough to believe Rockstar&#8217;s lies and give them your money then you got what you deserved. If you&#8217;re dumb enough to fall for this, then I can&#8217;t trust you as a critic.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>So you can either be too uninformed to write useful criticism, or you&#8217;re unqualified to be a critic. In choosing between these two equally obnoxious fates, I took the one that didn&#8217;t cost me $60.<\/p>\n<p>However, the situation is even worse than I reported yesterday.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><br \/>\nOn Sunday, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=xOgFz6ZcjX8\">this video<\/a> caught my eye:<\/p>\n<p><table class='nomargin' cellspacing='0' width='100%' cellpadding='0' align='center' border='0'><tr><td><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"1024\" height=\"576\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/xOgFz6ZcjX8\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen class=\"embed\"><\/iframe><br\/><small><a href='http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=xOgFz6ZcjX8'>Link (YouTube)<\/a><\/small><\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n<p>Apparently, the shovelware dev that threw this mess together <a href=\"https:\/\/www.eurogamer.net\/articles\/2021-11-13-rockstar-says-it-pulled-grand-theft-auto-the-trilogy-the-definitive-edition-from-sale-on-pc-to-remove-files-unintentionally-included\">wasn&#8217;t paying attention<\/a>, Rockstar didn&#8217;t audit their work, and publisher Take-Two didn&#8217;t bother double-checking anything before shoving the game out the door in time for Christmas. As a result, they accidentally released a bunch of internal script files and tools. Also, they accidentally included some music tracks that Rockstar no longer had a license for. The tracks were disabled so they wouldn&#8217;t play in-game, but they were still part of the download. Also, remember <a href=\"https:\/\/www.eurogamer.net\/articles\/2012-11-30-who-spilled-hot-coffee\">Hot Coffee<\/a>? Those files were also somehow included with the Definitive Edition.<\/p>\n<p>You might remember that a few years ago, Rockstar foisted their stupid minimum-effort launcher on everyone, effectively Trojan Horsing their platform into all Steam users. Imagine if <em>Gears of War 5<\/em> came to Steam, then a year later Epic made it so that launching GoW5 would actually just launch the Epic Store, which you could then use to launch the game. This strategy is what economists call a &#8220;dick move&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>This would be bad enough, but then they never bothered to DO anything with the launcher, leaving this sad, pointless, zero-feature launcher as the front end of their billion dollar game franchise. I know I often complain about how under-baked the Epic Games Launcher is, but the Rockstar Launcher makes the EGS look like Steam.<\/p>\n<p>This sort of thing isn&#8217;t new, of course. Rockstar has been giving the finger to their PC customers for over a decade now. I mean, remember THIS bullshit?<\/p>\n<p><div class='imagefull'><img src='https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/images\/gtaiv_overlay.jpg' width=100% alt='Good thing they added SecuROM. It would be dangerously irresponsible to only have three layers of pointless DRM on this thing.' title='Good thing they added SecuROM. It would be dangerously irresponsible to only have three layers of pointless DRM on this thing.'\/><\/div><div class='mouseover-alt'>Good thing they added SecuROM. It would be dangerously irresponsible to only have three layers of pointless DRM on this thing.<\/div><\/p>\n<p>But when they screwed up and included all those extra files in the Definitive Edition, this behavior came back to bite them in the ass. They didn&#8217;t have a way to cleanly un-do that. If they&#8217;d left things alone, then they could have used Valve&#8217;s existing, stable, high-speed, feature-rich platform to push out an update to remove the offending files<span class='snote' title='2'>The consoles have versioning and update systems comparable to Steam.<\/span> or take the game down, or whatever they needed to do. But they had placed their game out of Steam&#8217;s reach. As far as Steam was concerned, your &#8220;game&#8221; was just the Rockstar Launcher. The actual copy of the game itself is invisible \/ untouchable to Steam.<\/p>\n<p>So Rockstar had to take down their <strong>entire platform<\/strong> on the PC while they worked on an ad-hoc patch to clean up this mess.<span class='snote' title='3'>Which was pointless of course. Interested Parties had already datamined and captured the files and put them on the torrents. Apparently the people at Rockstar don&#8217;t understand how the internet works.<\/span> They never got around to implementing rudimentary features like offline mode, which means this move took down <strong>all of their games<\/strong>. For <strong>three days<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p>This wasn&#8217;t a single mistake, this was a long series of cut corners and gross irresponsibility, and in the end their customers were the ones punished for this outrageous behavior.<\/p>\n<p>And all of this from a company that made a billion dollars last year selling shark cards to teens to feed the toxic cesspool of cheating and abuse that is GTA Online.<\/p>\n<p>And speaking of&#8230;<\/p>\n<h3>Shark Cards<\/h3>\n<p><div class='imagefull'><img src='https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/images\/gta_shark.jpg' width=100% alt='No, we&apos;re not exploiting young people for money. We&apos;re SATIRICALLY exploiting young people for money. Totally different.' title='No, we&apos;re not exploiting young people for money. We&apos;re SATIRICALLY exploiting young people for money. Totally different.'\/><\/div><div class='mouseover-alt'>No, we&apos;re not exploiting young people for money. We&apos;re SATIRICALLY exploiting young people for money. Totally different.<\/div><\/p>\n<p>These would work as satire if it was something that existed within the universe that NPCs like Jimmy would buy, in order to mock him for being a mindless consumer. I mean &#8220;Shark Cards&#8221; is just one step away from calling them &#8220;Whale&#8221; cards. The supposed &#8220;satire&#8221; is blunt to the point of being insulting.<\/p>\n<p>But no! These are real cards that they sell to real people for real money, which impart actual gameplay advantages! That&#8217;s like Facebook openly referring to their users as &#8220;Products&#8221; within the public-facing Facebook UI. Shark Cards aren&#8217;t a satire of nakedly predatory microtransactions, they&#8217;re just a really brazen example of the form.<\/p>\n<p>I bring this up because Rockstar made a billion dollars last year from these stupid cards. With that kind of dosh rolling in, you&#8217;d think they would have a relaxed attitude towards doing this remaster. Cutting corners on this project is like a billionaire refusing to take his kids to the doctor because he wants to save money . The amount of money is so trivial, and the possible risks are so needless. <em>Just pay the money. You&#8217;ll never miss it!<\/em><\/p>\n<h3>Aged Poorly<\/h3>\n<p><div class='imagefull'><img src='https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/images\/gtade_downgrade1.jpg' width=100% alt='These three different images represent different versions of the game. Rockstar pulled the first one from stores and unleashed their legal team to make sure that the third one got taken down, all so they could sell us the second one.' title='These three different images represent different versions of the game. Rockstar pulled the first one from stores and unleashed their legal team to make sure that the third one got taken down, all so they could sell us the second one.'\/><\/div><div class='mouseover-alt'>These three different images represent different versions of the game. Rockstar pulled the first one from stores and unleashed their legal team to make sure that the third one got taken down, all so they could sell us the second one.<\/div><\/p>\n<p>The irony of all of this is that the GTA trilogy has aged really well in terms of visuals. Those chunky models and low-pixel textures still have a lot of charm. If there needed to be a re-release, it should probably be focused on compatibility and interface concerns. Maybe add support for modern resolutions, offer a control layout that mimics the inputs of GTA V, add some cheevos, and patch a few bugs. A lot of this work had already been done for earlier PC releases of the game. We just needed to migrate that stuff to the current-gen platforms.<\/p>\n<p>But Rockstar wasn&#8217;t doing this to preserve their legacy and make sure these classic games were available to the next generation. They were looking for a way to get their existing fanbase to buy the game again. So they decided to sell us a visual refresh. But then they outsourced the project to a mobile developer and didn&#8217;t bother to check if the resulting port actually accomplished that goal.<\/p>\n<p><table class='nomargin' cellspacing='0' width='100%' cellpadding='0' align='center' border='0'><tr><td><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"1024\" height=\"576\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/-QmcF-ecnJw\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen class=\"embed\"><\/iframe><br\/><small><a href='http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=-QmcF-ecnJw'>Link (YouTube)<\/a><\/small><\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n<p>Here is a collection of gripes I&#8217;ve encountered over the last few days. I&#8217;m sure this is just a subset of the whole:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Old character models have their skeletons deformed into horrific proportions. Other characters have WIDE OPEN EYES, creating a weird dead-eyed effect reminiscent of <em>Mass Effect Andromeda<\/em>. This isn&#8217;t just the uncanny valley, this is the uncanny abyss.<\/li>\n<li>Somehow, this new version struggles to hold a steady framerate on modern machines. The game seems to have these odd lurches every once in a while, as if this was running in a language with <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Garbage_collection_(computer_science)\">garbage collection<\/a>. (It isn&#8217;t.)<\/li>\n<li>The fog is just gone. This is really bad in San Andreas, where the fog was needed for both artistic and practical reasons. One, the orange fog was part of recreating the LA smog that gave the world its personality. Two, the fog existed to hide how small the world was. It&#8217;s really weird when you can see that all of San Andreas is just a couple of miles wide, and &#8220;Mount Chiliad&#8221; is basically a big hill. If nothing else, there should have\u00a0 been an option to re-enable fog.<\/li>\n<li>Too many input problems to count. Lots of little headaches and oddities. You can watch <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=HwyhOy-QL9M\">this speedrunner<\/a> trying to make sense of the inputs to get a sense of all the ways in which the current system isn&#8217;t just different, but demonstrably <strong>worse<\/strong> than the original.<\/li>\n<li>The lighting is a disaster. Some cutscenes and locations are too dark. Many interior spaces have flat lighting with no contrast.<\/li>\n<li>Numerous signs are misspelled or misplaced, like the burger place where the menu board shows pizzas, or the pizza place where the six-panel menu board now repeats the same panel six times.<\/li>\n<li>New bugs! One speedrunner couldn&#8217;t pass a particular mission because a scripted explosion was killing him in a cutscene.<span class='snote' title='4'>Something like that. I couldn&#8217;t totally follow the discussion.<\/span><\/li>\n<li>Expanded bugs! In the old versions of San Andreas, having a high framerate would make you swim more slowly. Now you always swim slowly, regardless of framerate.<\/li>\n<li>LOTS of little attention-to-detail mistakes. Bump maps that don&#8217;t match the texture, parking lots nonsensically covered in grass, weird collision on objects, stretched or misaligned textures, and <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Level_of_detail_(computer_graphics)\">LOD<\/a> objects that vanish up close.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>It&#8217;s not like these problems are hidden in the obscure corners of the world. Many of these are incredibly obvious. And yet the developer never caught them, Rockstar never caught them, and the publisher never caught them. It feels like this thing passed through three companies without anyone doing any QA testing.<\/p>\n<p>While the visuals of the originals have aged gracefully, one thing that didn&#8217;t age well is <a href=\"https:\/\/www.gamespot.com\/articles\/take-two-boss-on-remasters-we-dont-just-port-titles-over\/1100-6488370\/\">this quote from Strauss Zelnick<\/a>, president of publisher Take-Two:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Remastering has always been a part of the strategy. What we&#8217;ve done differently than the competition is we don&#8217;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&#8217;re launching it on.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>So what we have is a &#8220;Definitive Edition&#8221; of a classic game that is the absolute worst version of the game, and this version is now the only one for sale on any platform. The old versions have been pulled from store shelves and the various user-made beautification mods have been lawyered out of existence.<\/p>\n<p>Like I said on the podcast, it really lights my fuse when these games begin sneering their disjointed high-school level criticisms of &#8220;capitalism&#8221;. It&#8217;s like Harvey Weinstein complaining about women in Hollywood not getting enough respect.<\/p>\n<p><em>Just shut your mouth, Rockstar. You&#8217;re not just part of the problem, you&#8217;re at the forefront of making the problem worse. You&#8217;re not allowed to be sanctimonious about capitalism, you hypocritical goddamn vultures.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>On the podcast yesterday, we talked about the controversy with the GTA Definitive Edition. For the record, I have not personally experienced the games for myself, so my complaints are based on reports from other people. This puts me in a really annoying position as a critic. On one hand, I&#8217;ll get Rockstar apologistsA dying [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-53221","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rants"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53221","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=53221"}],"version-history":[{"count":26,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53221\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":53252,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53221\/revisions\/53252"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=53221"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=53221"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=53221"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}