Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – The Definitive Edition - GTA 3 trilogy remaster

[Alienman]

Funny. Currently, according to the public the worst gaming companies.

 

[Trithne]

"The updated versions of these classic games did not launch in a state that meets our own standards of quality"

Then why did you release it?

 

[J_C]

the unexpected technical issues

Yeah, you can go and fuck yourself.

 

[Justicar]

 

[Fedora Master]

 

[Dexter]

 

[Terra]

 

[JamesDixon]

 

[Utgard-Loki]

so if you wanted to play gta san andreas in the year of our lord 2021, what would you install to make it a pleasurable experience?

 

[Drop Duck]

so if you wanted to play gta san andreas in the year of our lord 2021, what would you install to make it a pleasurable experience?

PCSX2.

 

[ferratilis]

so if you wanted to play gta san andreas in the year of our lord 2021, what would you install to make it a pleasurable experience?

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=382803643

 

[Gilius Thunderhead]

All this talk of GTA made me want to play the series again. I just played the entire main mission campaign of GTA 3 in re3 and had a blast. The game holds up much better than I thought, with missions that often allow quite a bit of freedom compared to some of the later titles. Liberty City is a fantastic place and just the right size for the amount and variety of gameplay that it offers.

As for re3 itself, it's pretty much perfect. It runs smoothly without major issues and I've only had a couple of crashes in a particularly chaotic mission with ped and traffic density set to max. You can set these values right in the menu, together with increased draw distance and a bunch of other stuff like antialiasing, filters, PS2 or XBOX style car textures, etc. It feels a lot more authentic compared to the standard PC version and AFAIK makes all the "essential" graphic mods like SkyGFX obsolete. Oh yeah, there's also freecam, which means you can use the mouse to look around at all times. Class.

I don't think there's any must have mods for GTA 3 which would require me to have the standard version, so I'm ready to consider re3 the real "definitive edition". I've just started reVC and will play the reLCS beta later.

Unfortunately, with all the shenanigans related to the DMCA takedown and the Pajeet Trilogy launching, it seems no mod scene has yet sprung up for the reverse engineered versions. If I understand things correctly, it could allow modders to, among other things, use VC opcodes in 3. I did a little modding for SA more than a decade ago, so I'm just becoming reacquainted with how things work. Still, I managed to make my recent playthrough of 3 more challenging by messing around with the text files (double ped defense and vehicle collision multipliers). Together with the increased traffic, it made a lot of missions quite challenging! I might try my hand at a more ambitious hard mode for the RAGE engine games at a later date.

Oh yeah, don't forget about GTA 1 and 2, nowadays very underrated games. I hadn't played the first game in over 20 years and I found it more enjoyable now than before. When I played it as a kid, I only cared about driving around causing destruction, but if you actually care to play it properly, it offers a fantastically open arcade experience. Unlike the 3D games there's no progression, instead you play the same missions over and over as optimally as possible while trying to increase your bonus multiplier until you master the map. Graphics, music and overall atmosphere are still awesome. I suggest using the Max Pack by Toshiba-3 (the same heroic modder of the Carmageddon series) for hassle-free playing in recent Windows: https://gtaforums.com/topic/860039-grand-theft-auto-max-pack-a-complete-pack-ala-gog/

 

[SharkClub]

I just finished replaying GTA3 for 100% completion (original steam version with mods, I did not buy """"the definitive edition"""") and while most of the main missions were good and held up, the side content absolutely does not.

The ambulance missions are a travesty if you're trying to get infinite sprint, since the ambulance doesn't repair itself as you complete paramedic levels like in the later games (starting from Vice City it did). So you're basically navigating a minefield in a thing that handles like shit and can flip at any time and lose you an hour of what is essentially grinding.

Shoreside Vale as a whole in particular is designed like absolute dogshit for all of its side content, and is only used in a handful of main missions where it works just well enough. Paramedic may as well be impossible there, Firefighter and Vigilante barely fucking work and you'll more often than not just be stopping and starting the mission until you get an objective close enough to reach in the time it gives you. If you try to do streaks in Firefighter and Vigilante in Shoreside the game will consistently throw you some absolutely impossible tasks like "get to this objective that is 3 minutes of driving away in 1 minute of time".

Vice City in comparison has a far higher level of polish overall.

 

[AW8]

so if you wanted to play gta san andreas in the year of our lord 2021, what would you install to make it a pleasurable experience?

When I replayed it two years ago, I don't think I used anything other than SilentPatch (to bring the frame limiter from 25 to 30 FPS and fix some bugs) and probably the Widescreen Fix. Both are linked in the Steam guide ferratilis linked.

You can of course go deeper and fine-tune the textures of every individual pool ball, but chances are you'll end up never actually playing the game.

 

[Butter]

I just finished replaying GTA3 for 100% completion (original steam version with mods, I did not buy """"the definitive edition"""") and while most of the main missions were good and held up, the side content absolutely does not.

The ambulance missions are a travesty if you're trying to get infinite sprint, since the ambulance doesn't repair itself as you complete paramedic levels like in the later games (starting from Vice City it did). So you're basically navigating a minefield in a thing that handles like shit and can flip at any time and lose you an hour of what is essentially grinding.

Shoreside Vale as a whole in particular is designed like absolute dogshit for all of its side content, and is only used in a handful of main missions where it works just well enough. Paramedic may as well be impossible there, Firefighter and Vigilante barely fucking work and you'll more often than not just be stopping and starting the mission until you get an objective close enough to reach in the time it gives you. If you try to do streaks in Firefighter and Vigilante in Shoreside the game will consistently throw you some absolutely impossible tasks like "get to this objective that is 3 minutes of driving away in 1 minute of time".

Vice City in comparison has a far higher level of polish overall.

Shoreside Vale feels like half-finished content. The layout is so bad and there's so little content compared to Portland and Staunton Island. It basically exists just for the airport.

 

[ferratilis]

Guys, if you want to make ambulance, firefighter and taxi missions more manageable, do them before you unlock the second island in 3 and VC. There's less ground to cover, thus less chance to fuck up. I'm also using re3 and reVC but didn't change the ped density, it changes the flow of the game imo, those games were simply not designed with such density in mind. re3 and reVC would be perfect if they also fixed the blocky headlights on vehicles, that's the only niggle they didn't manage to solve before Take-2 took them down. But they're great if you don't want to take time to install other mods, which is also easy nowadays due to modpacks.

 

[SharkClub]

Guys, if you want to make ambulance, firefighter and taxi missions more manageable, do them before you unlock the second island in 3 and VC. There's less ground to cover, thus less chance to fuck up.

Well, no. At least in GTA3 when you start doing emergency side missions the ground you cover is restricted to the island you're on. For Firefighter and Vigilante you also HAVE to do them on Portland, Staunton AND Shoreside for 100% completion (you unlock the Flamethrower when you've done 20 Firefighter missions on each island, and 2 police bribes for 20 Vigilante missions per island).

You're never asked by the game to drive from Portland to Staunton during an emergency or taxi(?) mission. It's been a while since I've played Vice City so I can't remember if you're told to cross the islands constantly during the emergency missions in that game.

The real reason to do Paramedic asap in GTA3 is because if you leave it til later the Mafia are hostile once you kill Salvatore, so the Mafia can just instantly destroy your ambulance if you're doing Paramedic in Portland. Doing Paramedic in Staunton and Shoreside is also undoable because of the hostile cartel areas in Staunton and the awful unplayable layout of Shoreside.

 

[ferratilis]

Ok, I might have been wrong about GTA 3 since I never 100%-d it, but I did VC, and there were occasions where it made you drive from one island to the next. Iiirc, the way those missions work is proximity based, as you finish one, it spawns the next one in the radius around your location. So, if you're on the edge of one island, it's easy to get the next drive that will take you to the other etc. The reason why I never did it in GTA3 is because the cars take less damage to explode and are more wobbly in general. Too easy to fail. VC's handling was slightly improved.

One thing I forgot to mention about re3 and reVC, they don't change any textures, just the pipeline for car rendering and restoring some missing PS2 effects, like alpha. In the graphics settings, the "vehicle pipeline" setting toggles between MatFX (PS2 car color rendering) and Neo (the OG Xbox, darker colors, which I don't really like because taxis look more brown than yellow). If you want to get actual texture improvements from the Xbox version, it has to be done through mods.

The easiest way to tell if you have more detailed Xbox texture is by looking at headlights for Kuruma, the bottom one is from Xbox and has more detail all around. The rims also look different.

 

[Jigby]

The paramedic mission is one of the genuinely harder missions. With repair it would be too easy. Of course you have to do it at the start before the gangs turn hostile. So that's a bummer.

I hated doing the hidden packages and the rampages though.

 

[Zeem]

Shoreside Vale feels like half-finished content. The layout is so bad and there's so little content compared to Portland and Staunton Island. It basically exists just for the airport.

According to in-development maps this was actually the case. The airport was supposed to be located in northern Staunton and Shoreside was planned to be completely different, presumably incorporating a larger industrial or residential area.

EDIT: Updated the pic

 

[SharkClub]

The paramedic mission is one of the genuinely harder missions. With repair it would be too easy. Of course you have to do it at the start before the gangs turn hostile. So that's a bummer.

No, as evidenced by every later entry, the repair feature does not make it "too easy", it only partially repairs your vehicle as you complete each level of Paramedic. It is still a reasonable challenge and not free at all in Vice City, San Andreas, GTA Advance and Liberty City Stories (and I presume Vice City Stories). When was the last time you played GTA3 and tried to make it to Paramedic level 13 for Infinite Sprint, 20 years ago?

At least in Taxi missions building up large streaks is doable because you can pay n spray the taxi when you have a little bit of an excess of time. To get to Paramedic level 13 you have to rescue 78 people, while on a timer, without accidentally nudging any of them with your ambulance, without toppling your ambulance with its horrible GTA3 handling, while contending with the retarded GTA3 traffic AI, unlike Vigilante with cop cars you are NOT allowed to get out of the ambulance and get into a new one, without crashing (or in GTA3's case, nudging a lamp post or a trash can can strip it of 30% of the vehicle's health) the Ambulance enough to destroy it, it is a boring grind that takes a full hour (for the one successful run, not counting multiple hours worth of failed attempts) of super hard autistic focus and an exercise in frustration, not a fun or fair challenge. Forcing the player to also do it within the first small portion of the game because it becomes literally almost impossible once you've angered the Mafia (or try to do it on islands other than Portland) is horrible design. It is clear that Paramedic had the least amount of QA testing put into it out of any of the emergency missions and it is abundantly clear from playing it why it was changed to have a partial repair bonus upon levelling up to the next Paramedic level as soon as Vice City was made.

 

[ferratilis]

The D.E.P. guys are already working on a large modpack for the Definitive trilogy. Nice dedication. It seems that the most active mod scene for this trilogy is in Brazil, so we should be seeing more mods that restore original features and fixing inconsistencies.
https://www.definitive-edition-project.com/копия-iii-de

Spoiler

 

[Jigby]

The paramedic mission is one of the genuinely harder missions. With repair it would be too easy. Of course you have to do it at the start before the gangs turn hostile. So that's a bummer.

No, as evidenced by every later entry, the repair feature does not make it "too easy", it only partially repairs your vehicle as you complete each level of Paramedic. It is still a reasonable challenge and not free at all in Vice City, San Andreas, GTA Advance and Liberty City Stories (and I presume Vice City Stories). When was the last time you played GTA3 and tried to make it to Paramedic level 13 for Infinite Sprint, 20 years ago?

Finished re3 100% couple months ago. Did the ambulance mission on the first try. Before the gangs turned hostile though.

 

[Butter]

It's probably easier to do the ambulance mission on the flatter Staunton Island.

 

[Jigby]

The columbians will kill you there though. They should have disabled the hostility of rival gangs during the mission, just like it's disabled during some story missions...