We were concerned about Rockstar's re-production of the PS2 era Grand Theft Auto trilogy-when it was discovered that all three games would use defective mobile ports to be remastered into Unreal Engine 4, this concern did not abate. We will look at all three games in the package, but we want to start with Grand Theft Auto 3. It is the oldest game in the series, and we think it will be the game that gets the most during the remake. Taking a step back from the controversy, it can be said that the work of Grove Street Games is not without value, but there are many problems here-these problems are so blatant, harsh and absurd, it is difficult to understand how the game is made through quality control.

Let's first talk about the comparison between the remake and the original PlayStation 2 version-we can imagine this is the way most console players who enter the final version experience the game first. In its original form, GTA3 on PlayStation 2 was built using RenderWare, a popular middleware solution from Criterion that was used in a large number of games in that era, including all three GTA games. Let us be clear here: GTA3 is not a visual masterpiece. Compared with the equivalent of Metal Gear Solid 2 and Gran Turismo 3, it performs poorly. However, it is ambitious, with an all-day system, weather simulation, and of course the "open world" free exploration of Liberty City. Many of these concepts already existed in the original GTA game, but this is the first time that they can be experienced in full 3D, and the resulting sense of freedom is what made it unique and special in 2001.

We tested the "Ultimate Edition" of Grand Theft Auto 3 on all current and previous generation consoles, and compared the best version with the original PS2.

But RenderWare is outdated. Porting to today's hardware is not the right choice, and Unreal Engine 4 is a good choice as the basic platform for work. Unfortunately, the mobile port is known for numerous bugs and game issues, not to mention the missing features-the original hazy appearance using cumulative blur effects has disappeared. This is not necessarily a bad thing, it's just different. However, it is clear that some effects are simply too bad. The rainfall effect itself is presented in a very bad way. Essentially, you would feel that the developer attached a dazzling bright rain material to the post-processing volume around the player's camera, and then let it rip. The problem is that its contrast is too bright, especially in HDR, its brightness value is too high, and it can't classify water bodies correctly, causing malfunctions. Basically-it is not good to rain in this remake. The original PS2 version may not match the quality of the effects seen in MGS2, but it is still much better than the effects provided in the final version.

In addition, I would say that the updated car model is not too bad in the remake, and the addition of cubemap-driven reflections is a good choice. However, all aspects of the rendering still feel a bit biased. For example, the way the headlight beam intersects the road surface will cause the visible lines in front of the car to never look completely correct. I might argue that the effect on PlayStation 2 is more pleasing. Of course, thanks to Unreal Engine, the dynamic lights in the world will now indeed cast actual shadows-in addition to the street lights and the sun, this also includes your headlight beams, and even the overhead lights inside. This is an improvement of PS2, but the range of changes and quality changes are very strange.

In the best case (and when it doesn't rain!), the final version looks good, but it loses its sense of style. You will feel that many of the decisions made around the demo on the PlayStation 2 were well thought out-not only the hardware limitations, but also the artistic decisions made under these limitations. The new version seems to just take advantage of standard Unreal Engine features, which are not necessarily integrated with the visual design targeted by the game.

We also need to talk about character design. These are never super detailed on PS2: they must exist in the larger world, so polygon and texture budgets must be limited. However, we did get a feeling that the artists carefully used the resources they did have to produce huge effects-and creating a beautiful model with a small number of polygons was an art form. In the original form, Claude used fewer than 2,000 polygons, but his design was different. In the remake, he looks good, but there is still a feeling that something is wrong, and the deeper, the clearer some things will become. Basically, the update seems to try to preserve all aspects of the original design, but you end up with characters that look more like toy figurines. I believe this boils down to the rounding of the character characteristics and the combination of the nature of the illusory PBR material system when interacting with light-sometimes visible specular highlights do give the impression of being made of plastic.

The environment shows a significant difference, but the basic idea seems to be to use the basic geometric layout of the city while replacing textures with higher resolution Unreal compatible materials while adding new models to the objects. This kind of mismatch between old and new will not work, whether it is a texture alignment problem or the fact that the combination of old and new assets creates a sense of discontinuity. The texture quality on PS2 is definitely much lower, but they are suitable for geometrical details. Adding realistic PBR materials and modern visual effects (such as screen space reflections) to the world makes you feel like viewing the original map files through an editor instead of playing them in a game.

The world now also has real-time shadows-this means that as the time of day changes, you will see the shadows move with the position of the sun. For obvious reasons, this is not feasible on PlayStation 2. In other words, the areas in the shadows sometimes appear too dark-it feels more system driven than artist driven. I also found that using screen space environmental occlusion is a bit offensive because of the large and flat structure that defines the city-you end up with black outlines around anything close to the wall, and it doesn't look good. This is really the key issue: the more you explore, the more you start to feel that things don’t match up-small details are often wrong, such as the logo texture magnified by AI, and you will find typos that are missed due to magnification.

To be honest, I'm just scratching the surface here-you might spend a few days combing through the game and finding examples of things that seem strange or inappropriate. At the same time, I don't think the result is terrible-it's not perfect in style, but it sometimes looks good when driving at dusk. This is not what you would expect from a remake of one of the most successful game series of all time.

This analysis and comments are colored according to the version you can choose to play. Some strange decisions were made on how to deploy the remaster to current and previous generation systems. When I took the opportunity to report on the game, I naively thought that the game was comparable on every machine because the source material was relatively simple. I was wrong. Let's start with the current game consoles: PS5, Xbox Series X and Series S. These represent the most feature-rich version of the game, each version provides a fidelity mode and performance mode, the default setting is fidelity. It has an upper limit of 30 frames per second and has some visual improvements-the most obvious are volumetric clouds and adjustments to elements such as shadows, but even that is not simple.

So, for example, both modes on the PS5 have reflective puddles and surfaces, but this only appears in the fidelity mode of the X series, and the S series completely omits this feature in both modes. PS5 and Xbox Series X also seem to run with similar resolution metrics. Both the fidelity and performance modes seem to be around 1800p-there is evidence that dynamic resolution scaling can occur, but, 9 out of 10 times, the pixel count returns 50 out of 60 count samples, which shows that it is not really often Scale and maybe be more aggressive in performance mode. However, the S series is lower, the fidelity mode is about 1440p, and the performance mode is 1080p. However, to be honest, image quality and pixel count are not important in this case-image quality is not the real issue, and it looks clean enough on all three machines.

The real problem is performance. Xbox Series X is almost the only reliable version available for 60fps games, and even this is not perfect. When the action heats up, the frame rate drops sharply, dropping below 40fps-which is unacceptable for the re-production of the game 20 years ago. VRR can help to a certain extent, but even this is not enough to completely eliminate the tremor. So, how about entering the fidelity mode with 30fps locked? Performance is indeed limited to 30fps, but the inconsistent frame pacing makes it look like it has encountered major problems at runtime. In fact, every 30fps ultimate version has this problem. This is ridiculous. This problem was solved 4 years ago by UE.

On the PlayStation 5 in performance mode, initial impressions indicate that the performance is worse than that of the Xbox Series X. This is true-the frame rate is not consistent. Then I went back to collect more frame rate analysis shots and found that it was quite stable, which made me wonder what happened... Then it started to rain and it hit me. In the PS5 version, in the performance mode, the visual functions reserved for the fidelity mode are retained. When using performance mode on PS5, reflections on wet surfaces and improved cloud rendering seem to remain active and have dire consequences in terms of frame rate. So it's almost like the performance mode is the same as the fidelity mode, but with the upper frame rate removed. Therefore, this mode feels bad to play-in my experience, it is not smooth enough. 30fps fidelity mode? Frame pacing problem. The only way to lock 60fps is to download the PS4 version. Running the PS4 Pro codebase solves this problem, but it will affect the visual function and reduce the resolution-the pixel count is usually only 864p.

S series? The performance mode is not smooth. In fact, it's like PS5's performance mode is only at 1080p instead of 1800p and no additional visual effects. It has similar severe drops and a general lack of fluidity, and in some cases we even recorded performance drops below 30fps. Of course, the fidelity mode suffers from the same fate as the other versions-inconsistent frame pacing in random bursts, although this may be the best way to play it on S-series hardware.

Nintendo Switch is not a good choice. For starters, in dock mode, the average resolution of the game seems to be around 648p-its resolution is very low, but what really stands out is the visual change. First of all, environmental occlusion is ugly on newer game consoles, but it is at least helpful to ground objects in the world. Since this feature is not available on the Switch, you will feel that objects and cars are just floating in the scene-it looks terrible. It also lacks some more advanced effects, such as reflections and post-processing components such as motion blur and lens flare. It's basically just fuzzy and lack of details...it still doesn't work well. There is an upper limit of 30fps (of course, the frame rhythm is not consistent) but it will also periodically fall below the target. In some ways, I think this runs and feels worse than the original PlayStation 2 version. I mean, when you see games like Dying Light or The Witcher 3 buzzing on the Switch, it just makes people feel even more unacceptable. It's a mess. Portable mode? Expect the same thing, but with a resolution of about 480p.

Let's talk about the previous generation of machines, where there are some confusing problems. Xbox One and One X are weird, running at approximately 1728p and 864p, respectively, and there is some evidence of dynamic resolution scaling. There are no visual modes on these consoles, and elements such as improved cloud rendering and rain reflections are not available. It looks basically the same on both machines, but the resolution on Xbox One X is four times that of Xbox One X. However, in terms of performance, it is indeed an interesting comparison. For unknown reasons, the developer chose not to set the upper limit of the frame rate on the two machines. Therefore, there is really no hope of reaching 60 frames per second on Xbox One X, which again feels ridiculous considering the visual effects. It usually reaches its average level in the mid-1940s-it can move up and down, but this is roughly where it is. Anyone who has followed Digital Foundry may know that we don't care much about such unstable and unlimited frame rates, but I'm not sure if 30fps with incorrect frame pacing is better. However, for the previous generation of Xbox users, this is not even an option.

However, the Xbox One S is very attractive-we know that it usually only renders a quarter of the Xbox One X, but the performance is significantly worse. Although the frame rate of One X is about 45fps, Xbox One S is usually lower than 40, resulting in a more unstable experience. It can even drop below 30 fps. This does have visual quality comparable to other console performance modes, but the average performance is lower. In the end, neither of these two Xbox One versions of the game are very good. Unstable frame rate and lack of visual features are the main problems here.

Finally, for the PlayStation 4, things seem to be just about to happen. It does have "higher-end" features, such as water reflections and puddles in the rain, while the Xbox One console does not. The basic PS4 seems to reach the same 864p range as the Xbox One, but the upper limit is 30fps-again, the frame transfer is inconsistent. Strangely, PS4 Pro has fidelity and performance modes that Xbox One X lacks. The former provides you with water reflections and other more challenging features, but you don't get a volumetric cloud system, while the latter disables these features and unlocks the frame rate. Both modes are lower than 1080p, but the performance mode is definitely more ambiguous, with all counts at 864p. You can guess the story of performance here: it's a choice between a crazy unlocked performance level and a compromised 30fps experience. In the end, my conclusion is that in most cases, the only version that works properly is the Xbox Series X and the PS4 Pro code that runs on the PS5.

While I was playing the game, I encountered many ridiculous and disappointing problems-but I will leave these problems to the video embedded at the top of this page. Most importantly, it is impossible to believe that this remake has been properly tested-if it is, the developers seem to have not resolved these errors. The final result is not good enough at all, which is really a shame. This is a landmark game and a truly important work. It also appeared after the original version was unceremoniously delisted and attempts to retain and improve them led to Take Two's legal action. It can be said that high-quality and more authentic experiences are being removed to support unqualified work. GTA3, Vice City and San Andreas deserve better.

Grand Theft Auto 3 is a fascinating time capsule: it is the originator of modern open-world games. Interestingly, its design does not include many of the problems and pitfalls that are common in today's sandbox games. Villefranche is a relatively small place that can reduce the time to cross-and it's actually fun to drive around the city. These tasks are very basic, there are no complex scripts that will appear later in this series, but the way to accomplish them is free. You get a goal and some tools—how you achieve it depends on you, and in this sense, it feels pure. This is a game that does not guide you to do things in a specific way. Of course, it has a history of 20 years and is outdated in many ways, but it is such an important game that it is still worth playing today. But not so.

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More about Grand Theft Auto: Trilogy-Definitive Edition

Senior Writer at Digital Foundry | Dark 1x

As an American living in Germany, John started playing games and collecting games in the late 1980s. His keen vision and obsession with high frame rates earned him the nickname "Human FRAPS" ​​in certain circles. He is also responsible for the creation of DF Retro.

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