Is Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – The Definitive Edition worth playing in 2023? The “Definitive” Edition of Grand Theft Auto 3, Vice City and San Andreas was released in 2021 and it received highly negative responses from both critics and players alike. These classic games were remade into utterly broken and bug-infested garbage and people were angry. For the hefty price tag, this Trilogy was the definition of a bad deal. Heck, even if it was priced for less than $10 for all three games, even then this would’ve been a bad deal.
What went wrong
Let’s try and briefly remind ourselves of the disaster of GTA Trilogy: Definitive Edition. At launch, it featured minor and almost worse visual “improvements”. Many developers tend to think that making an old and dated game shiny and adding an unnatural colour palette makes it a remaster and this Trilogy was the same. Except it was worse. I don’t think we need to discuss the graphical improvements of this edition in detail because those were hardly what these dated classics needed. Look at the following image and decide for yourself if it looks hardly anything current-gen.
All three of these games were released before 2004 and at those times, games tended to have clunky mechanics and frustratingly difficult sections solely because of the lack of accessibility and comfortable controls, among other things. While these three games were revolutionary at the time, their animations look terrible by today’s standards. The lack of autosaving in missions results in rage quits and other frustrations. Driving in these games felt clunky and unnatural. And let’s not forget the notoriously bad gunplay. These were what needed improvements. Simply making a reshader and retexturing a game can be done with the help of mods. But that’s exactly what Rockstar did with this edition. They featured next to no improvements to the accessibility and included only a few improvements to the dated gameplay mechanics.
On top of all that, bugs riddled the games and they were practically unplayable. Because of insanely frustrating glitches around every corner, the game broke every few hours. GTA Trilogy: Definitive Edition was a bad game. It was substantially worse than the originals because of their bugs and it wasn’t worth the price. However, after more than a year, is the game finally worth playing now?
Is it worth playing in 2023?
No. The simple and short answer is “no”. With the bug fixes and patches Rockstar introduced, they managed to fix a few issues and introduce new ones. Bugs are still present in the game and there have been no improvements to the graphics or more importantly, the gameplay or accessibility either. I do not think I need to drag this on any further. GTA Trilogy: Definitive Edition is far from Definitive, even in 2023. It’s best to not buy or waste time playing this game even now.
