GTA Trilogy is a mess, according to Digital Foundry breakdown

Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy — The Definitive EditionSome have criticized the game for performance problems and poorly-received changes to the original titles. The players will soon learn how awful the trilogy does. To understand the collection’s variety of problems, and educate viewers on why they exist, Digital Foundry has published a 38-minute video breakdown of Grand Theft Auto 3 alone.

Digital Foundry chose to focus on each of the games individually, as they are available in different formats across multiple platforms. Monday’s video covers Grand Theft Auto 3’s debut on the PlayStation 2, comparing its initial graphics issues to other games of the era while also highlighting what players have always loved about the GTA series: freedom.

Problems with the new Remaster Grand Theft Auto 3First, make sense of the information after you have finished. realization that it’s actually a rebuilt version of a mobile port. Digital Foundry guides the players through several changes to their character models, art direction and more. There’s a fascinating section about the rain system in the The definitive editionThis is how the new version of the game affects gameplay.

Digital Foundry believes that there are still some visual improvements to be made, including shadows. Grand Theft Auto 3This remake has seen the most drastic loss of its style sensibility.

Once the analysis moves from art and graphics to performance, it gets worse. The remaster is consistent at 60 frames per second in Performance mode, however Digital Foundry claims it experienced sections with 40 frames per second. Digital Foundry found frame pacing issues in Fidelity mode. The game ran at 30 frames per second.

Performance mode is worse on PlayStation 5, with more inconsistency than on Xbox Series X. It’s bad enough that Digital Foundry recommends that PS5 owners download the PlayStation 4 version of the Grand Theft Auto 3 remaster and play it instead, because of its “near-flawless” 60 fps performance on PS5.

It’s a sight to behold, and the Nintendo Switch version has a lot more features than you may expect. A little over halfway in, the video dives into the game’s performance in docked mode and handheld mode. The resolution of the Nintendo Switch in either mode is very low. Just looking at the comparisons to PlayStation and Xbox, it’s almost shocking how rough the Switch version looks and how poor the frame rate (with frequent dips under 30 frames per second) is for a 20-year-old game.

By the way, if you’re just interested in seeing a wide variety of bizarre bugs, the end of the Digital Foundry video has you covered.

It’s fairly easy to look at screenshots from Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy — Definitive Edition, or just scroll through Twitter, and surmise that it’s a mess. But as usual, Digital Foundry does an excellent job breaking down exactly why and how it’s a mess.