The GTA Trilogy's new patch is far bigger than Rockstar seems to want to admit, with a host of quality-of-life adjustments in addition to its visual improvements.
Yesterday, the GTA Trilogy - a collection of GTA 3, GTA: Vice City, and GTA: San Andreas which launched in a pretty shaky state in 2021 - received its first update in two years. From the patch notes, you might assume that the changes were pretty minor - Rockstar says that as of November 12, the game had received "numerous fixes and improvements," and it had "added Classic Lighting mode which restores the look and feel of the sky in the original games."
For those of you particularly fond of San Andreas' sepia palette, that's great news, but if you simply took Rockstar at its word, you'd be missing out on some pretty chunky changes that have been added to the game. Twitter user Besk, for instance, notes that GTA 3 and Vice City now allow you to run and gun with larger weapons, like shotguns and flamethrowers, in a change that wasn't even present in the original games.
You can actually run around GTA3 and Vice City DE with shotguns assault rifles and the flame throwers and shoot at the same time in the new GTA DE PatchBoth in the previous version and classic GTA3 and VC this wasn't possible. pic.twitter.com/RxNjP37PFvNovember 12, 2024
Besk also says that it wasn't just old glitches that have been fixed but new ones unique to the Trilogy release - you can no longer, for instance, glitch through stretches of open water to get to Liberty City's other islands. Elsewhere, they highlighted several visual and animation improvements, including an adjustment to the soda-drinking animation that saw CJ up-end cans onto his face rather than into his mouth.
Rockstar Games has not only patched new glitches in the new GTA DE Patch but classic ones also. You can't glitch through the water and visit all the islands before you unlock them pic.twitter.com/Nqg0RFcLG3November 12, 2024
They fixed the Soda drinking animation in the GTA SA DE Patch pic.twitter.com/zS8tbgiYWXNovember 12, 2024
Interestingly, while the patch notes themselves are minor, it seems as though Rockstar is keen to stamp its impact on this update. User TJGM noticed that mentions and logos of Grove Street Games, the company that created the Trilogy editions of each of the three games, appear to have been scrubbed from menus and splash screens. Rockstar, publisher Take-Two, and development tool owner Epic Games are the only companies mentioned in the games' intro, though it's likely that Grove Street is still mentioned in the end credits.
Rockstar could, of course, be keen to put a greater stamp on the games because of the inclusion of Vice City, which will be the location for GTA 6. While you could argue that GTA 3 is more important than its counterparts and San Andreas has the greater legacy, Vice City and the wider state of Leonida are set to have the spotlight shined on them next, so a new coat of paint for this older version can't hurt.
On its 20th anniversary, a GTA San Andreas veteran shares that the open world was originally split into three maps: "Memory was very tight on the PS2."
