“Liberty City is a dirty place,” Rich Rosado tells me. The Rockstar producer knows it well – he’s been there before, among the grime and the grit, underneath the overcast skies of the crime-ridden city. A producer at Rockstar for over 20 years, he worked on the original Grand Theft Auto III, and now he’s back there again, making it dirtier than ever.
“When we brought it over into Unreal Engine 4, one of the downsides was it got real clean, real fast,” he says, before telling me how the developers went in with a mud brush to make the city even grubbier than before.
At launch, GTA III was a quantum leap for game design. It set the standard for what an open-world game should be – an emergent playground where you seamlessly travel by car or on foot, completing missions or creating your own fun. It’s a testament to the believability of the world how we all have one friend (or are that one friend) who roleplayed the crime saga as an upstanding citizen, obeying traffic laws and stopping at every red light. GTA III put the pacing in the players’ hands, and chaos was only ever one rocket launcher blast away. It would take a whole console generation for the rest of the games industry to catch up, and even then the competition felt like pale imitations.
Rockstar has never been a studio that’s about looking back. Always on the cutting edge with every new release, it continues to redefine what an open-world game can be. But with the release of Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – The Definitive Edition, we get the rare chance to see the studio – along with co-developer Grove Street Games – in a retrospective mood. With the games reaching their 20th anniversary, now felt like the right time to be nostalgic. But that’s not the only reason Rockstar decided to remake its games. There was another goal, too: preservation.
“It’s a way to maintain the titles for the next decade-plus without having to rip out our hair every time there’s a crash bug that we were having problems fixing because there are some terrible old tools,” Rosado explains. “So it was [a case of] dealing with the real world dilemma of digital marketplaces, and the fact that they’re slowly replacing our physical market. And there was a very nervous caveat to it all, which was: don’t change the feel.
“For years, HD remakes became en vogue, and you started seeing remakes popping up for all these old games. We resisted that for a very long time for that same reason – if you’re going to revisit these titles, you have to make sure it’s done with a certain amount of TLC.”
Initially, Rosado found the idea of going back to these games he worked on 20 years ago “gutting”. “People love them,” he says. “Like, they love them. To go back to something like that after 20 years, it’s a little bit nerve-wracking because you have to make sure that people’s expectations are met. When released the trailer, you see folks projecting how they felt it should have been. You put these things out understanding you’re not going to please everybody. When you’re playing with somebody’s childhood, you’ve got to be very, very careful.”
The developers looked back over all three PS2-era GTA games and earmarked what makes them distinct. GTA is a series where the city comes first, and anyone who’s even been to Los Angeles can attest to how well San Andreas captures the tangerine glow of an L.A. sunset. When you’re up in the hills, it’s a city that seemingly stretches on forever – and now it can in-game too, thanks to improved draw distances – and when you’re downtown the city feels so flat that the sky might swallow you at any moment.
“Each [city] has its own distinct style,” Rosado explains. “Vice City was like a flamingo threw up all over the place, so it’s always bright neons – you want to capture the extremes of 1980s Miami. When you get to San Andreas, it’s that mix right? It’s kind of the beat-up, rundown city but there’s always that sun – in the morning, it’s blinding, and at night, it’s this orange sky. So every city had certain signature elements.”
Look at the original San Andreas now and there’s still something gorgeous about its sun-baked skies. But look closer and you’ll see the sun itself is stretched out and imperfect, and there’s nary a cloud in the sky.
“[We wanted] to introduce different dynamic colors throughout the day, add celestial bodies like stars, and of course corrections to the sun and the moon placement – how they the rise and lower – but not make it jarring,” Rosado says. “We introduced a sky that has different lighting for different times of day, [and took] a much deeper look at the clouds ranging up to volumetric clouds depending on the platform.”
This same thinking extended to the weather effects. If you look back at GTA III now, you’ll notice that the rain is simply a visual effect applied to the foreground. In the remasters, it’s a torrent. Puddles accumulate on the ground, and screen-space reflections allow nearby geometry, pedestrians, and cars to appear in those puddles, which makes a huge difference to the mood – especially in the neon glow of Vice City. Complimenting that are emissive lights, which light up nearby characters and vehicles.
“We used to do a lot of baked lighting,” Rosado explains. “So I would walk into an alley, and that lighting would just come from nowhere because we just need to light the scene. And now we use the actual lighting from the sky. And if we ran into an alley and the alley is now too dark because of that, we would add a lamppost or something nearby to cast the actual ray of light coming on down. Every light has to come from somewhere else.”
Other areas that needed some love were the games’ woodlands and trees, which were simply a long stick with some leaves applied to them in the original games. For this, Rockstar took assets from GTA 5 and replaced trees and foliage across all three games with these higher-quality versions.
“There was a great variety of GTA 5 trees that could cover all three of our titles here,” Rosado says. “The result was very pleasing. It made everything feel more dense and full.”
Take a close look at CJ’s house on Grove Street and you might also recognize some of the decor littered around. Some items here originated in GTA 5 too.
“The same is true for a lot of the surrounding areas like the barbershops, where we also lifted assets,” Rosado says. “If we need a new refrigerator, why make a new one have a perfectly good one right here? It was done in a way that, hopefully, that unless I told you that was refrigerator from GTA 5 you wouldn’t even notice because it just blends into the background.”
For the existing assets, Rockstar and Grove Street used an AI program to scale up the textures before going in by hand and tweaking them to make sure they look right. “They hate signage and it would screw [it] up pretty fierce,” Rosado laughs. “And you know, you start with a certain selection of textures before realizing that it’s creating a mismatch across the map. So you’re stuck with having to do all of them. It makes for a better end product, but it was a giant task – you’re looking to the tune of well over 100,000 textures.”
Textures aren’t the only place where Rockstar employed the help of AI for these remasters, either. To give The Definitive Edition less friction for the modern audience, the developers wanted to add a GPS to the game’s minimap. Choose a mission and the map will draw out lines on the road, leading you to your destination. It’s a feature most modern open-world games have, but it wasn’t present in the original releases. The GPS is based on the AI pathfinding and the routes NPCs take as they drive and walk around these virtual cities.
“We used to ship the game with [physical] maps,” Rosado explains. “And there was a practical reason for that, because we give you a destination in the game, but wouldn’t tell you how to get there – you’d have to trace out where you’re going or constantly pause the game to keep referencing the map. And so when we were building out the GPS, there were some easy wins to be had, in that we already have logic baked in the game scripting and the AI and how the ped vehicles work. And it’s a matter of using that same logic stream to carry it over to your vehicles.”
Much like the AI texture upscaling, this method introduced some issues of its own. Since it was based on AI pathfinding, there were places in the map where AI was forbidden from exploring, forcing the developers to go in and correct the GPS manually. The same issues cropped up whenever the player was tasked with choosing between multiple targets to chase, so the team disabled the GPS for some specific sequences.
While there are a bunch of quality of life changes, character tweaks, cube-mapped windows and all the other changes covered here, Rockstar was focused on looking back and protecting the legacy of these games. The developer hopes to retain the essence of what those games were at launch – like capturing a snapshot in time as viewed through rose-tinted glasses.
“We’ve all played various remakes and remasters where you pick up the controller and immediately something just feels off,” Rosado says. “One big tenet that we had was to maintain as much as the original art style and feel as humanly possible. So we essentially lifted the physics game code and ported that into Unreal verbatim. If any individual wants to point out this feels different, I will very happily tell them they are wrong because it’s the same exact game code.”
While the original control scheme will be accessible in the options menu for purists, it’s one area of the game that Rockstar and Grove Street felt like they had to modernize. When the original trilogy launched, video game control schemes were in their emo phase – they were still finding themselves. It’s only in the past couple of console generations where inputs have been standardized, allowing players to carry a baseline knowledge of how games control between each title they play.
Halo introduced the world to a shorthand – the left stick moves your body, the right stick moves the camera, and the right trigger shoots. This foundation has been iterated on and tweaked until we have what games use today, and Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – The Definitive Edition will support these more natural inputs.
“Look at our right stick in GTA III – that thing wasn’t touched,” Rosado explains. “There was no way to look around except for first-person mode, which is very foreign today. When you play San Andreas using that control system, there was no way to do a drive-by without clawing your hands on the right side of the controller.
“So it was about adapting those controls to these titles. And just by that alone, everything just feels a little more accessible. Your muscle memory immediately kicks in – I know how to accelerate a car, you press the right trigger, and you just do that without being told. And just by having that map there properly, there’s a much easier kind of accessibility point, for new players, current-generation players, and even retro gamers who just have the rose-colored tint in their brain.”
Improved controls add to an aging game, whereas messing too much with existing assets would have the opposite effect. Characters in the trilogy were built with cartoonized dimensions, and their motion capture data is tied to those existing wireframe skeletons. Their inhuman proportions are locked, so they have to remain as exaggerated caricatures. If Rockstar were to then dump a bunch of realistic roads and buildings around them, the art styles would clash. It’d be like seeing Homer Simpson in Times Square.
“So there’s a balancing act that’s also employed, where you want to take advantage of modern lighting effects, but you don’t want to mess around with the original color palette,” Rosado says. “And you don’t want to mess around with the original art style. So when you’re adding geometry to certain characters, you’re still maintaining that same look. The big goal here – besides making sure that we future-proof the titles – is it must look like you remember it. Your brain has this habit of just modernizing things ever so slightly smoothing out certain edges that weren’t there before.”
While it might seem strange to see Rockstar looking back, this isn’t a studio that does things randomly. Nobody expected L.A. Noire’s VR version, but that was likely a testing bed for the upcoming San Andreas VR port. Rockstar Games Presents Table Tennis felt completely leftfield, but it laid the groundwork for the realistic physics simulations in GTA 4. In making these remasters, Rockstar has learned even more about its development processes.
“I’ve been associated with these titles for over 20 years and you always go into one of these types of projects with the feeling that you understand how the world works,” Rosado explains. “But what I discounted was just how enormous these games still are, and the help needed to kind of move these things along at a better pace. San Andreas is a 100-hour game. Now add Vice City and GTA III, and doing a renderer move, and you’re supporting every platform that exists.
“Hindsight being key, I would have done a lot more upfront planning with dealing with all of the projects as a whole. Instead of initially looking at it as more of a piecemeal plan, in which we’ll only highlight certain elements, feature the central characters, and then realize the inconsistencies that were created as we went. If there’s one big takeaway from it all, you always wish you can go back to that initial planning stage and do it all again, with everything that you’ve learned. But looking ahead, it’s about being very guarded and very careful as to how we approach something of this scope in this size initially.”
Even when the studio is looking back, it finds time to think about what lies ahead. Perhaps it’s the improved draw distance.
Written by Kirk McKeand on behalf of GLHF.
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