Rockstar Producer Rich Rosado shared how the company approached the GTA: The Trilogy remaster. He provided information in an interview with The Gamer.
According to Rosado, the approach chosen by the developers is largely based on the expectations of the fans. He acknowledged that for many gamers, emotions and feelings gained in the past are very important, so making changes to games would be a big problem.
Rich Rosado:
“We know that those games had their own characteristics that people loved, and it would be foolish to try to correct the good and bad aspects of the original. Therefore, we decided to leave them unchanged. “
The path chosen by the developers created a lot of problems due to the need to transfer the old code to the new engine. Rosado added that the games essentially run two engines in parallel.
Rich Rosado:
“Yes, it's a terrible headache and a lot of technical difficulties, but the game feels exactly the way we wanted it. At the same time, we managed to add support for a new render, which not only changed the lighting, but also added a bunch of new features with which you could have fun. “
Rosado also talked about overcoming the technical limitations of the original PS2 hardware: in order to achieve a better picture, the developers had to sacrifice the drawing range, which was no longer a necessity on the new generation of consoles. At the same time, many elements of the game were not saved, since during development no one thought about a possible re-release of games in the future. According to Rosado, the team had to both use neural networks to improve clarity and manually redraw individual elements.
Separately, the producer spoke about the approach to character redesign. According to him, changing the geometry of the hero models was a difficult task: the original models were low poly and with a small amount of detail, which needed to be changed for re-release, trying to keep the image left by the players.
Rich Rosado:
“It is very difficult. You constantly think about how gamers will react to this. It's much easier with cars: you add new polygons, and she still looks like herself. But the characters required a lot more effort and options until we achieved the desired result. “
Rosado also added that the team's biggest challenge was reworking the original GTA III.
Rich Rosado:
“When we got to San Andreas, it was obvious that the development team already clearly understood the specifics of the hardware. Compare assets from it with GTA III – how to compare day and night. Very spartan models, more like boxes. Pedestrians assembled like Michelin men. Their bodies were made up of separate pieces, so we had to redo them to be more stylistically like San Andreas. “
The release of GTA: The Trilogy – Definitive Edition took place on November 11. It includes GTA III, Vice City and San Andreas. The cost of the trilogy on PC was ₽4,279, and you can also purchase it on Steam.