The remastered GTA Trilogy is once again available for purchase and download on PC, after the game briefly rendered the Rockstar Game Launcher useless. Rockstar announced the game’s re-upload Sunday evening on Twitter along with a short apology message.
“We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience, and are working to improve and update overall performance as we move forward,” the company wrote.
Rockstar has not yet made it clear what kind of overwhelming bug forced the company to shut down its entire game launcher. Rockstar did explain the problem with the GTA Trilogy, albeit very briefly: some sort of files were included in the PC versions unintentionally.
The cause of the downtime is much less concerning for GTA fans than the general state of the remastered trilogy, which is — how do we put this politely — messy AF.
Unintentional files —
Rockstar hasn’t exactly been forthcoming with details about this outage, other than that extremely vague message about “files unintentionally included” in the PC versions. We don’t blame it for the near-silence. This whole thing is pretty embarrassing.
One popular theory is that the files in question were related to songs with expired licensing agreements that may have unintentionally been included in Vice City and San Andreas. PC Gamer spoke to a couple of data miners who had taken a deep look at the PC game’s code and found the existence of such music files — though they weren’t accessible in the game themselves.
PC Gamer also suggests that those files may have been related to the NSFW “Hot Coffee” files originally included in San Andreas. Hot Coffee was a minigame accessible only through mods that allowed players to have simulated sex with one of the protagonist’s girlfriends. Hot Coffee was eventually removed from San Andreas via a patch. But what if it ended up included in the remastered San Andreas code?
Not exactly well-received… —
Unintentional files aside, the GTA Trilogy remasters have not proven to be the joyful nostalgia bump fans of the series hoped for. Players across all consoles have complained about wonky character remodels, frame rate fluctuations, and many missing songs, due to the aforementioned expired licenses.
We can hear what you’re thinking. Maybe this is just a fluke. Maybe Rockstar will release a simple patch next week to fix all these issues. Metacritic, the reviews aggregator site, tells a different story. The remastered trilogy currently has an average rating of 0.5 — as in half a point — across 3,200 reviews. That’s dismal.
This isn’t quite a Cyberpunk 2077-level nightmare, but it is a big let-down for series fans who’d looked forward to newly polished versions of these classic games. Rockstar can expect many more refund requests in the months ahead.
