Decoding the GTA Definitive Edition Update ► Ludology Now!

I didn’t hate the Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – Definitive Edition releases of GTA 3, Vice City, and San Andreas as much as a lot of people did. Sure, some of the character models didn’t translate very well, and the collision textures didn’t always line up with where the buildings actually were, but at least most of the lighting was pretty. Most of it.

Well, it’s prettier now. As of November 13, 2024 – a full three years and two days after the Definitive Editions released – a new update for GTA: The Trilogy has finally, inexplicably, and unexpectedly dropped for consoles. Here are the official patch notes for the GTA Definitive Edition update:

Numerous fixes and improvements
Added Classic Lighting mode which restores the look and feel of the sky in the original games

Weird, that doesn’t tell us much. So I booted the game up to see what the differences were. And, well, let’s dive in.

What Happened to Grove Street Games?

CJ in a green car in Grove Street in GTA: San Andreas

The first thing I noticed when turning on the DE version of Grand Theft Auto III was that I had to sign a Rockstar license agreement. That was weird. The second thing I noticed was that all mentions of Grove Street Games, the developer who was responsible for remaking these titles, was entirely absent from the opening titles. That was weird, too.

A tweet from Thomas Williamson, CEO of Grove Street Games, which reads: "Speaking entire hypothetically: It's a dick move to remove primary developers from credits in an update, especially when an update includes hundreds of fixes that were provided by those developers that stayed out of players' hands for years."

Apparently I wasn’t the only one who noticed. Above is a message posted by Thomas Williamson, owner and CEO of Grove Street Games. While the company is still included in the credits of the games in question, removing all allusions to GSG in the opening splash screens is indeed a curious choice. What’s more curious is that all of the GTA Definitive Edition update fixes included in these patch notes appear to be from the DE mobile ports.

What I Missed Out On

Close-up of Tommy Vercetti in GTA Vice City

I haven’t played the GTA Trilogy much post-launch, although I do have a save on each game that I like returning to every now and then. Because of this, I wasn’t aware that so many issues present in the console versions had already been fixed with both the mobile release and the Netflix Games versions. Who is out there playing games on Netflix?

These versions of the Definitive Edition have a vast amount of improvements. Here’s an article from April 2024 which details all of the improvements GTA: The Trilogy DE mobile made, up to and including things like water visuals, NPC and character model improvements, collision fixes, and animation improvements. From what I can tell, nearly all of these have been added to the console versions with this latest GTA Definitive Edition update. But what took so long?

Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – Unnecessary Edition

Claude driving a Banshee away from the police in GTA 3

These game releases were never necessary. As I said in my original 5/10 review of the GTA Trilogy Definitive Edition, “An overall lack of polish and inexplicably missing features make it hard to call the GTA Trilogy the “definitive’ way to play them – which makes it even more unfortunate Rockstar recently made GTA’s older versions harder to come by.” While Rockstar did eventually put the original games back up for purchase, it adds another weird brick to our growing pile.

The obvious answer to nearly all of the questions surrounding the GTA Definitive Editions is “money.” Why did Rockstar delist the old versions? Money. Why were the Definitive Editions rushed out the door? Money. Why were there so many missing features? Money. But why did Rockstar remove Grove Street Games from the splash screen? That question has a different answer.

Rockstar, The Mysterious

Rockstar is about tied with Nintendo in the race to be the most secretive game development company currently in operation. What we do know is outdated, and what we don’t know is most things. We know that Rockstar has been working on Grand Theft Auto 6 for a decade, and we know that it’s scheduled to release next year.

We know that working conditions during RDR2’s development were pretty horrible, and we know they’ve promised to change that moving forward. We know that the company has basically kept its head down since RDR2’s PC launch, only publicly focusing on updates for GTAO and, to a much lesser extent, RDO. Major studio executives and long-time collaborators have left the company in recent years, and the shoddy state of the Definitive Edition launches did little to placate hungry fans.

Will Grove Street Games Change Its Name Back?

Sweet performing a drive-by in GTA San Andreas

Since the Grand Theft Auto Definitive Edition update, Grove Street Games has unfollowed Rockstar on social media and the CEO has given the previously discussed statement. This clearly indicates some sort of divide between the two companies, which is a shame because GSG has been assisting on the Grand Theft Auto games since 2011’s mobile port of the GTAIII 10-Year Anniversary Edition.

Despite this, they weren’t always known as Grove Street Games. In 2007 the company was founded in Gainesville, Florida by Thomas Williamson as War Drum Studios. In addition to various GTA titles over the years, it worked on Ghostbusters: The Video Game for the PS2 in 2009 as well as multiple other mobile ports. War Drum Studios brought Max Payne, Auralux, The Conduit HD [Editor’s Note: Who asked for a The Conduit remake??], and even Ark: Survival Evolved to mobile devices. The company was never just a GTA cloner.

Bang on the Drum All Day

Let’s imagine a theoretical situation. Let’s say we did our best to meet the expectations of fans while still delivering a product in the time window that was given to us by the publishers. The fans weren’t pleased, so then we worked for months and months to make the necessary changes and adjustments.

Then, perhaps, it was time to deliver the mobile port of those same games. Since we’ve been working on updates and fixes for the fans already, there’s no reason not to shove those fixes in the mobile version as well. Let’s then take another theoretical tangent and imagine that we’re not actually allowed to update the previous version of the game ourselves, because of some rule or another. We have to have the publisher do it, so we send off all the files and ask for them to be updated ASAP.

You Know Where This Is Going

An image of the tram in GTA 3 overlooking the bay between islands.

Anyone who has ever worked for a corporation knows how easy it is for an email to get misplaced, some vital part of some instruction get misremembered or forgotten, or (most often) for simple incompetence to get in the way. Look back at that tweet from Thomas Williamson. Speaking purely from my own perspective, from where I’m sitting, that tweet feels fairly accusatory.

Perhaps something like the theoretical situation I posed above happened with the GTA Definitive Edition fixes. Perhaps it did not. Perhaps the CEO of GSG was getting more and more irate with Rockstar for not making the fixes available sooner, and perhaps that irate attitude led to something which then led to Rockstar no longer wanting GSG’s name on the front of their product. I don’t know if that’s what happened – this is all just theorizing – but it’s weird.

Another weird brick to add to our pile.

THIS WEEK’S RECOMMENDED MEDIA:

Taskmaster Series 18 is over, and Junior Taskmaster (which I recommended in a previous issue of Ludology Now!) is off to a fantastic start. For anyone who wants a play-by-play, stats-focused, incredibly detailed breakdown of the final episode of Series 18, I highly recommend Jack Bernhardt’s round-up.
I read The Sky and the Forest by C. S. Forester this week for the first time. I think it may have been the last Forester novel I haven’t read, and I’m fairly certain that if it was the first I would not have continued as vehemently as I did when I started with Mr. Midshipman Hornblower. It’s an incredibly raw story about the first colonialism of Africa told (almost entirely) through the perspective of a tribal leader. Well-written, informative, and incredibly depressing, I’ve had bad dreams all three nights since reading it. Easy to recommend, but only if you know what you are getting into. I won’t stop thinking about it any time soon.
The past week has seen a mass exodus of Twitter users, with many of them settling on Bluesky as their new home. Lots of people have expressed concerns on both social media sites about Twitter using its posts to train AI models. If you are currently considering deleting your Twitter account and removing all your tweets, check out this lovely article by UpriseRI on how to bulk delete all your tweets for free. Don’t waste money on one of those TweetDelete services, this is an easy-to-follow, step-by-step process that takes very little work and needs no coding knowledge to understand.
Mark Brown (of Game Maker’s Toolkit fame) has finally released Mind Over Magnet! Check out the announcement video below and go support both independent developers and content creators by purchasing the game on Steam!

Finally, to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Half-Life 2, Valve has released a 2-hour-long “making of” video on YouTube. For anyone who, like me, has been interested in the development of this series since Half-Life was still a Sierra game, this is required watching: