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PC Games (Games) Games

Glitchy GTA Re-Release Still Unplayable on PC, Said to Contain Infamous 'Hot Coffee' Mini-Game (kotaku.com) 40

Posted by EditorDavid from the game-within-a-game dept.
Kotaku reports: Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy — Definitive Edition was released on November 11 on all major platforms including the Switch. However, for folks who bought the game on PC, they've been unable to play the game since just shortly after it was released. Now three days later, [PC] fans are still unable to access the game they bought days ago with no update from Rockstar on when the GTA Trilogy will become playable again.

The remastered Grand Theft Auto trilogy has had a very, very rocky launch, with players across all platforms reporting various graphical bugs, gameplay glitches, and other annoying changes and tweaks to the classic PS2-era games. But while players on Xbox One or PS5 or Switch are dealing with annoying bugs and odd visual problems, players on PC are left unable to play any of the games included in the collection.
In a review Screen Rant writes that all three games "look better here than they ever have before." But... The visual improvements don't discount the fact that there are a lot of things missing in Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy — Definitive Edition, including basic functions like the series' iconic cinematic camera mode which premiered in GTA 3. Gone also from GTA 3 is the top-down camera angle which was added in to please players coming over from GTA 2. Both of these camera angles were also missing in previous re-releases of GTA 3, but not including them in what is called the Definitive Edition feels like a mistake.
On the plus side, they write that "Some new but fun inclusions also make returning to Liberty City, Vice City, and San Andreas enjoyable, like San Andreas' updated bridge facts or the new cheat which lets players turn on Big Head Mode in all GTA Trilogy games if they enter the Konami code. The ability to instantly restart missions after being killed, busted, or otherwise failing is also much appreciated."

But Eurogamer reports that unhappy fans are now review-bombing the newly-released game on Metacritic: At the time of writing, the trilogy has 2000+ user reviews on the aggregate site. Of the 2054 reviews recorded by PC users on Metacritic, the combined score is a miserable 0.5. It peaks at 1.0 for PS5 players, but otherwise, most other platforms boast a similarly low score...

"This is it! This is the end of Rockstar, this is just too much," opines one particularly unhappy Xbox One customer, who has the highest number of "helpful" points.... "This so-called definitive edition is one of the most pathetic remasters of all time, especially considering how amazing Rockstar used to be. They were the top. They were the best there ever was. They showed other developers what can be done. I just can't believe that the end of Rockstar would be like this..."

Rockstar is now being inundated with refund requests as the Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy — The Definitive Edition backlash intensifies.
Oh, and one more thing. IGN reports that the game also appears to contain files for the infamous deleted sex mini-game "Hot Coffee."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Glitchy GTA Re-Release Still Unplayable on PC, Said to Contain Infamous 'Hot Coffee' Mini-Game More

Glitchy GTA Re-Release Still Unplayable on PC, Said to Contain Infamous 'Hot Coffee' Mini-Game

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  • Hot covfefe (Score:4, Funny)

    by hdyoung ( 5182939 ) on Sunday November 14, 2021 @07:51PM (#61988529)
    Its all the rage nowadays.

  • The bare minimum is to apply patches and remove crap that got you in trouble before. It seems likely that less than the bare minimum effort was applied to this grab for money.

    • Re:$60 to re-sell an old game (Score:5, Interesting)

      by tysonedwards ( 969693 ) on Sunday November 14, 2021 @08:14PM (#61988567)
      The funny thing is they re-created the game using Unity. It is not the original codebase. Someone REWROTE Hot Coffee!

      • yea. that's the part I don't buy. are we sure it wasn't some sort of automated script that sucked up the old data and dumped it into the new engine?

        • The thing you dont understand is that game logic and such is all handled by middleware and scripting, not only agnostic to the rendering technology, but also literally agnotic to the contents of the programs binary.

          It also makes loading slow ... inefficient parsing going on, and so on....

          • Yes, I don't understand how that is relevant.

            • You don't even need a script to suck up the old data, you change the middleware to use the new engine and the gameplay doesn't get changed at all. Nothing had to be done to include it, except include the old files.

              • OK. So they didn't vet the old data. they just tossed it into the new engine modded to read it. So back to the original point ... is charging $60 for this game below the minimal expected effort?

                • It seems like a lot of money to spend on a game, but I'm still playing Civ V and chess.

                  I've been playing around with Roblox development, but I doubt I'll get $60 that easily.

        • Shouldn't the definitive edition include the porn?
      • When I first heard they'd left in some of the original songs, I wondered if it could be a promotional stunt. And I wondered the same thing when I heard that they'd left in the sex mini-game.

        But it's equally possible that actual mistakes were made before the reissue. (Maybe they spent so much time on the recoding that they ran out of time for reviewing and fixing the rest of the trilogy?)

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        Not exactly. The game has two parts, the engine and the scripts/models that define all the behaviour. You can re-write the engine part to use the scripts/models as-is. Hot Coffee is scripted, it's not part of the underlying engine.

        This has been common practice for decades. For example old Lucasarts games run on an engine called SCUMM, and there is a completely original re-implementation of it called SCUMM-VM for modern systems. Even before that Infocom text adventures used a standard engine that all games c

      • The funny thing is they re-created the game using Unity. It is not the original codebase. Someone REWROTE Hot Coffee!

        No they didn't "rewrite. It's incredibly clear from the graphics, textures, and content of the game that the engine was re-written in Unity, and the rest of the codebase went through some automatic conversion. Hell in some cases the conversion introduced OCR mistakes in textures. In some cases the models translated in ways that made model bend in just bizarre ways.

        It is quite clear that not only did they not "rewrite" the game, they didn't even do QA/QC on the automatic translation.

      • No they used unreal. And what they did was put the old code running in parallel with a new renderer going through unreal gameface engine. So hotcoffee would still be there if r* had it there.

  • Not review-bombing. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by lytlebill ( 659903 ) on Sunday November 14, 2021 @08:23PM (#61988581)

    If a game is receiving hundreds or thousands of bad reviews because it's a bad game, that's not review-bombing, that's reviewing. People are saying these games suck because they suck. The re-released versions are completely shit when compared to the originals.

    It's not a difficult leap to make: if you want consistently good reviews for your game, make a good game. Extremely good and/or popular games seem (at least from my own limited perspective) to be largely immune to review-bombing due to the actions or behavior of a company or its employees anyway, simply because most 'causes' are typically short-term outrage at best. Regardless of a company's reputation or history, the new shiny object generally distracts the masses with ease.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Spoiler alert: there never was any review-bombing
    • I agree it is not review bombing. But neither are the reviews independent from each other. Once the consensus is clear, it's just people outdoing each other to express the majority view even more vehemently for likes, just like everything online.

      So, reviews tend to be exaggerated. Sometimes I've seen an old movie or album I liked that got bad reviews and I was glad I didn't have such easy access to reviews.

      • Maybe the authors should avoid getting so close to triggering your "runaway bad review" effect.

    • Re: (Score:2, Flamebait)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      It boggled the mind that companies keep doing this. The bulk of sales and profit come in the first few weeks after launch, so getting the launch right is critical. Instead they push out buggy crapware and end up issuing refunds.

      It keeps happening too. Cyberpunk, No Man's Sky, Fallout, the list is long.

    • Indeed the Switch version looks worse than the first Cyberpunk 2077 Playstation release which got pulled by Sony for how incredibly bad it was. It deserves it 0.6/10 metacritic score.

      And before someone says "underpowered hardware", the Switch is perfectly fine playing The Witcher 3, so not being able to play a game that came out a decade before is inexcusable bad optimisation.

  • It's back up now. And the version my son has been playing on Switch is pretty great, except maybe for the fact that they removed too much fog in San Andreas, and now you can see one city from the others, making the world feel smaller.

    • Yup. I've been thoroughly enjoying San Andreas on the Switch. Only had three issues so far:
      1)Cesar's hands were messed up. I'm sure that will get patched soon, it is a well-known issue. How this made it past testing is bizarre, but it's not exactly a big deal.
      2)Had a few triangles on the side of a bridge disappear for a moment, once.
      3)Had one crash, which is a bad bug for sure, but it was once in many hours of gameplay, and the game auto-saves checkpoints, so I didn't lose anything.
      They definitely should ha

      • Oh yeah those HANDS! Also have seen an invisible bridge somewhere in the sticks in San Andreas. Considering what they've done here and the great improvements in graphics and control, I have no trouble paying for these games for a third time(1st on disc, 2nd on Steam). They are some of the best games ever made, made better, with with acceptable loss of some songs and mods (for now).

  • Suits (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Malays2 bowman ( 6656916 ) on Sunday November 14, 2021 @09:45PM (#61988747)

    Leave it to the suits and micromanagers to bollocks a great company into ruin.

    Rockstar was a great company, but they've been "Hollywood"ed to death.

  • But it is a "remaster" (Score:4, Funny)

    by Gabest ( 852807 ) on Sunday November 14, 2021 @09:58PM (#61988773)

    Obviously not just a new lipstick on a pig. Then it would not have missing features from the original. They tried to rewrite it, and it turns out, the original coders were more talented.

    • No, they rewrote the engine, and then used automation (likely some shitty script which they then market as "AI") to translate the original game into the new engine. They then proceed to do zero QA/QC, because LOL that shit costs money, and shipped it.

  • I for one always preferred the original top-down GTA games over the 3D open world ones. Has Rockstar - or anyone else - ever made another game in that spirit? I've seen Retro City Rampage, which is pretty close, but are there any others?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dohzer ( 867770 )

      Honestly never played GTA2, but I loved the first game. Is it worth playing?

      • Honestly never played GTA2, but I loved the first game. Is it worth playing?

        I thought it was a very good sequel. It's been some time since I played either but I remember enjoying them both. They used to have them available as free downloads on the Rock Star Game website but I don't see them up there any more.

    • GTA Chinatown Wars as a quick thought. It came out in 2009 though, but that was a year after GTA 4.

  • Console makers are also to blame. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Kitkoan ( 1719118 ) on Sunday November 14, 2021 @11:12PM (#61988929)
    Part of the whole getting a console thing is that the games are supposed to be tested to make sure they run, and run decent. The whole "Nintendo seal of quality" thing.

    I would have presumed that after more and more games being shipped out buggy for the past few years, starting with Assassins Creed Unity and leading up to Cyberpunk 2077, consoles makers would have stopped giving a blind pass and a pinky swear from big companies that their games don't need to be tested. The fact it keeps happening just makes me wonder what's happening behind the scenes with the whole QA of console companies.

    This is Atari level crap all over again, and yet its getting worse then Atari levels. At least Atari games worked.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      The tests they are required to pass are things like "does not crash completely" and "doesn't corrupt your save games". They don't test that the game actually plays well, or looks good, or isn't full of micro transactions and pay-to-win.

      Even back in the day when games came on cartridges that was true. Sonic 3D is one of the most well known examples - it passed QA because they put in an exception handler that displayed a "secret" level select menu, so when the game crashed instead of locking up or resetting y

    • Agreed and this failure to verify games before making them visible in the store will cost the console manufacturers sales I think. On PC it will likely promote piracy because from what I hear *cough*... the pirated versions of many games have patches etc integrated vs having to download an endless stream of patches when trying to buy a game legitimately... not to mention all the DRM that is removed in the less than official versions of such games

  • Misleading name (Score:3)

    by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Monday November 15, 2021 @03:09AM (#61989215)

    Should be "Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy — Defective Edition"

  • Is this the same ScreenRant which is running stories which amount to nothing more than a list of memes about how much worse the new version looks than previously [screenrant.com]?

  • Rockstar has *always* put the PC platform on the back burner when it comes to development on its titles. Their PC versions usually come out years after the console debut. I doubt they devoted any of their top end development resources to this remake in the first place, so I'd imagine the PC version is getting worked on by a couple of interns on their lunch break or something.

  • I purchased the Bioshock remaster for Switch when it came out and was pleased with the quality of it. Nicer graphics and the gameplay was smooth. However I learned years ago never to buy a Rockstar release for PC. I bought GTA3 for the PC when it was originally released and was unable to play it for 6 months until a patch was released for Radeon.

    If the game is as bad as the reviews are making it out to be, I'll just wait until it's heavily discounted and try to grab it then. It's clearly not worth what

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