Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – The Definitive Edition – Test, Action-Adventure

More than just open worlds

The influence that the third-person action of the Grand Theft Auto series had on game culture, action adventure in general and open worlds in particular is enormous and can still be felt today. And not just because Rockstar Games later raised the bar with Grand Theft Auto 5 and the westerns from the Red Dead Redemption series. But there is hardly a game that deals with an open world that is not based in one form or another on the three-dimensional gangster epics. Volitions Saints Row series would have been unthinkable without GTA (3 and following). Without the Rockstar base, Ubisoft would probably have needed significantly longer to develop its open worlds.

Mercenaries or Saboteur, Destroy All Humans (all by Pandemic), Mafia, The Simpsons: Hit and Run, Jak 2 and 3, Driver: You can feel the influence that Liberty City, Vice City and San Andreas exerted in one of them or other form. It is inevitable that, in-house, with titles such as The Warriors (for me still one of the best film adaptations of all time), the Midnight Club series or Bully, attempts were made to take up open worlds and to experiment with them mostly successfully. Of course: Open worlds already existed before Grand Theft Auto 3. But the way in which Rockstar Games interpreted them and continuously expanded them with the sequels was new, refreshing and incredibly motivating.

The ravages of time

But in retrospect you can tell that the titles are up to 20 years old (did GTA 3 actually come on the market in 2001 ???) the age. The staging, for example, is a bit crude by today’s standards, especially in GTA 3. But the cinematic elements, which increased with each subsequent offshoot up to the official part 5, are already more than clearly noticeable here. And they are continuously being expanded in Vice City and San Andreas. Especially since with the trip to the fictional Florida metropolis, especially with the cast, you can draw on the full and secure stars en masse as speakers: Tom Sizemore, Dennis Hopper, Ray Liotta. Burt Reynolds, Phillip Michael Thomas, Robert Davi, Gary Busey, Debbie Harry and Danny Trejo, to name just a few, ensure that at least acoustically there is an absolute Hollywood atmosphere.

But the trilogy has not only aged moderately to well (depending on the episode selected) not only in terms of staging. Especially in GTA 3, the mission design is very superficial with a few exceptions. In case of doubt, the driving behavior is rather “soapy” even by arcade standards. And in the close combat or ballistic action you can also feel that Rockstar was still in the discovery phase with the first three-dimensional excursion to Liberty City. The AI ​​is also far from what is considered acceptable in open worlds these days. People run in front of you

the car. As if out of nowhere, other vehicles race into you when you turn. And in arguments, cover is also rather a foreign word for the rather stupid henchmen running towards them. Nevertheless: The story and the character drawings, which, as with almost all rock star titles, come from the pen of company founder Dan Houser, despite all the quirks, ensure that you tackle one mission after the other while roaming through today’s GTA -Scales rather small town also finds one or the other secret or collectibles. In Vice City and San Andreas, the AI ​​problems are not necessarily less, but the staging is getting better and the continuously larger action playground with even more activities and finally better mission design invites you to linger.

From renderware to unreal

What do the early Burnout games and the GTA series on PS2 have in common? They use the RenderWare engine developed by Criterion. While the engine designers optimized it in terms of speed in order to give the Burnout series the appropriate horsepower under the hood, Rockstar concentrated on exhausting it for its vision of open worlds. The result was more than impressive at the time: Liberty City, Vice City and San Andreas were convincing detailed metropolises that could be explored in all directions. Of course: If you look at the original versions on PS2 today, a lot doesn’t seem so chic anymore. So it’s a good idea to give the new release a replacement graphics engine. But just because you are now using Unreal technology, that is not an automatic guarantee of visual quality.