GTA Definitive Edition: Vice City and San Andreas add to the disappointment
We’ve already looked at the opening entry in the Grand Theft Auto Trilogy Definitive Edition – and found the remastering to be anything other than definitive. Shoe-horning the RenderWare-based originals into Unreal Engine 4, presumably in order to tap into the modern technology’s advanced rendering capabilities, delivers an experience that at its very best falls short. The mixture of old assets, AI upscaled textures, geometry-enhanced/smoothed vehicles, remodelled characters and modern rendering sensibilities is jarring to say the least. GTA3 was the oldest game and potentially showed off the biggest possible boost but what about Vice City and San Andreas? And what about the recently released patches – is the situation made any better?
Before we go into depth on the individual games, it’s important to put the patches into context. Since they arrive relatively soon after the release of the trilogy, we should expect them to have been in development for some time – likely before launch, before the backlash. The patch notes suggest as much, ticking off fixes for a range of bugs as opposed to addressing the fundamental issues raised when the game launched. Our work on the games was mostly carried out on the unpatched launch code, but we’ve spent significant time re-examining the post-patch Vice City and San Andreas. Unfortunately, none of our issues with the game had been addressed and performance was also unchanged. Interestingly, there is a mention of improvements to the rain effect in San Andreas in the patch notes but even this seems to run in much the same way as before.
Looking at the trilogy as a whole, if there is one title that fares best, it’s Vice City – perhaps because its original aesthetic is most ‘compatible’ with the new look of the Definitive Edition. There are broad similarities in colour schemes at least, so the often jarring look of the revised GTA3 and San Andreas isn’t quite as upsetting in Vice City. However, the decision to move to UE4 and the way that transition was handled still presents the same inherent problems: the AI upscaling is often clumsy-looking, with physically-based materials producing a wildly inconsistent look and an odd ‘plastic’ aesthetic, to the point where even the sand on the beaches looks like a shiny, artificial surface. It’s not a complete write-off though: the real-time lighting works, cube-mapped reflections on cars look fine, ambient occlusion is heavy but OK. Explosions are also a nice improvement.
However, this isn’t to say that the game is worth buying, or that the developers made the right choices. Character rendering is exceptionally poor, just to take one example. The original Vice City had crude but expressive characters but they fit just fine into the overall look of the game. The new versions are rounded off with additional geometry, sporting physically-based materials which look bizarre with weird animation. There are all kinds of oddities here, from eyebrows that seem to move of their own accord to telephones that slide up and down as characters talk into them. The worst offenders are pedestrian NPCs, where stepped-up geometry doesn’t seem to match up with animation rigging, resulting in esoteric alien-like creations.
