Rockstar is super popular Grand Theft Auto Franchise is in a strange place in 2021. It’s a series of games that remains huge, even though there have been years without a major new release. Its online iteration is more popular than ever, but if you looked around on Reddit and Twitter, you’d assume there’s no pointns.
And on top of that, Rockstar has released a somewhat nice looking but completely broken collection of remasters GTA Classic and decided to fight modders all year round too.
And still, no GTA 6even if it happens to come online over and over again. So yeah, it’s been a weird year.
2021 started well enough with a funny video of Gerald “Slink” Johnson and Shawn Fonteno re-enacting their roles as Lamar and Franklin in a real replica of the infamous roast scene GTA V. GTA role playing game also exploded back on Twitch, with some non-GTA characters too. And some smart and smart modders in February decompiled Vice City and GTA III’s Source codewhich opens up the potential to port these classics to other platforms.
Meanwhile, even another tech-savvy fan has the terrible load times of the PC version of. corrected GTA Online and Rockstar paid them $ 10,000 to do it.
However, things went south quickly and a slew of bad news for them GTA Fans and players started.
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First rock star and take two got a DMCA takedown against the people behind that GTAIII and Vice City Source code project. Some of the Developers have held their own against Take-Two and all of that led to an ongoing legal process.
Then Take-Two started using legal threats and DMCA deactivations remove old GTA III, Vice City, and San Andreas Mods from the internet. This annoyed modders, some of whom found nearly ten year old mods removed due to legal takedowns. Other YouTubers have been closed and old ones removed GTA Modifications for fear of legal retaliation by the publisher. (Take-Two still does that, by the way. The publisher is said to have removed it only last month GTA IV Modifications, including a save file, from a popular GTA Community site.)
All of this led to further speculation that Rockstar was planning on releasing remastered versions of the classic GTA trilogy. In August, Kotaku confirmed with sources that all rumors were true and Rockstar planned to release remastered ports from GTA III, Vice City and San Andreas Switch is part of all major consoles.
Later that year, as the hype built over these remasters, Rockstar and Take-Two pissed off the community again by creating tear the original editions of the classic trilogy out of digital shop windows.
Meanwhile over in the land of jet bikes and long loading times GTA Online, the game received its first of two major free updates. The first came in July. This summer update focused solely on street racing and used fast cars to commit various crimes and street races. If that sounds like a lot Fast and Furious, well … that’s because the update was basically Rockstar’s adaptation of those films. (Well, the early ones at least.) It was a great update that was really enjoyed by the community and felt like Rockstar was actually listening to its players who have long wanted more car culture content GTA online. Oh, the update also added an almost indelible one Terminator Discount. Like I said, strange year.
About the same time, Take-Two tried to convince investors that Rockstar Games has a very diverse selection of games that contained GTA V …Ah... GTA Online, and … hmmm …. GTA V, again…OH! and Red Dead Redemption II. The reality is that Rockstar Games has spent almost the last decade ignoring most of its popular franchises and not creating new games that don’t start with them Large or Red.
As September rolled around It seemed like GTA 6 happened to be more and more trendy in 2021 than in the past. This was due to a few factors including fake rumors reported by websites and the growing demand for GTA Fans who wanted to know about the next entry in the series. It got so bad in 2021 that someone crashed a live television just point to scream GTA 6. As I write this in mid-December, it seems extremely unlikely that 2021 will be the year Rockstar Games finally confirms and announces Grand Theft Auto 6. There’s always next year, right?
Add to this the growing frustration GTA Fans was the news that the release of the PS5 and Xbox Series X / S ports from GTA V and GTA Online was lateD. Originally, these ports were supposed to appear in November. But during a major PlayStation event hosted by Sony, Rockstar released a new trailer that failed to impress fans and announced a four-month delay. It didn’t help that in the run-up to the event there were more and more (and unfounded) rumors about GTA 6 to be unveiled or even a trailer for the still-clapped remastered classic trilogy.
None of this happened and instead a nearly ten-year-old game was postponed in 2021.
In October, GTA Online received a minor Halloween update which added deadly cars and NPC slashers to the online city of Los Santos. It also added some deadly clowns. And if you looked at the sky in the scary month of October, GTA Online was contaminated with UFOs. While it wasn’t as cool as the tuner update, it was a fun way to celebrate the best holiday, Halloween.
Finally, after a lot of leaks, Rockstar confirmed that on October 22nd GTA Remasters were real and would be released on November 11th. The new ports would have and use newly created textures and models GTA V-like controls. It all sounded so good …
Of course, if you have visited Kotaku or any other video game website in the past few weeks, you know how the revamped collection has become. Not good.
While it looked good at times, it suffered from numerous bugs, including rain, which was painful to look at and terrible looking models, and other unwanted visual tweaks. It was a complete train wreck. Hell, people who did the data mining remakes even found leftovers from the infamous Hot Coffee Content in GTA San Andreas. Ouch!
The response to GTA The Trilogy: Definitive Edition was so bad and so lasting that Rockstar eventually issued a rare apology on November 19th. In addition, the publisher announced plans to remove the classic versions of. bring back GTA III, Vice City and San Andrés to PC gamers through its Rockstar Games Store. And owners of the remastered collection would get the returning classics for free.
Continue reading: The year in gaming excuses
Since the release of the remastered collection, Modders have tried to fix and improve the games. Lots of modders and GTA Tinkerers have decided to sit it out, citing how Take-Two Interactive treated them in 2021. * Insert the GIF “It’s Ironic Palpatine” here. *
Rockstar and Grove Street Games, the developers of the remastered ports, have also released a few updates to the collection since the disastrous start. These updates actually fixed quite a bit and made the games more playable. But the developers still have a lot of work to do if they really want to fix these remasters. It now seems clear that these things took more time in the oven.
But Rockstar ended the year on a positive note with the release of GTA Online’s latest update. This new update, The Contract, plays Dr. Dre and plays about a decade after the events of GTA V. This update didn’t just add a few great new tracks to the GTA Online Radio waves, but it also featured some missions that felt like they were snatched from an unreleased single player GTA Game.
It’s a shame GTA Online is still a kind of broken mess after all these years that takes forever to load. But if you can play the new update, it’s one of the best Rockstar has made. It even provided lore nerds like me with some new information about Michael De Santa’s postGTA V status. Clean! Also, it now means that Dr. Dre a real figure in the GTA Online Universe.
Unfortunately on December 16, just like GTA Online on PS4, Xbox One and PC received a brand new update, the original versions of the game on Xbox 360 and PS3 have been shut down by Rockstar Games. The company had announced its plans to shut down the servers for these outdated versions of the game earlier this year, but it was still sad to see the final moments of the game on Twitch that day. REST IN PEACE.
And with that the year is almost over. For sure, GTA 6 obsessed fans didn’t get what they wanted and the remastered trilogy was a disaster that still hasn’t been fixed. But a few good ones GTA Online Updates helped ensure that 2021 wasn’t a terrible year for them GTA Community.
Let’s hope 2022 brings better news, better games, and fewer lawsuits.
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