Update: The Rockstar Games Launcher is back online, meaning people can now get back to playing GTA V, Red Dead Redemption 2 and other Rockstar games, however Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – The Definitive Edition remains unavailable for purchase or to play for those that did manage to buy it.
As suspected after the discoveries by dataminers, the game was pulled from sale due to incorrect files being included that reveal the game’s inner workings and development cycle, and that include now unlicensed music tracks.
The Rockstar Games Launcher is now online, but GTA: The Trilogy – The Definitive Edition is unavailable to play or purchase as we remove files unintentionally included in these versions. We’re sorry for the disruption and hope to have correct ones up soon. https://t.co/NiMNXUKCVh
— Rockstar Support (@RockstarSupport) November 13, 2021
The original article follows
The Rockstar Games Launcher is now online, but GTA: The Trilogy – The Definitive Edition is unavailable to play or purchase as we remove files unintentionally included in these versions. We’re sorry for the disruption and hope to have correct ones up soon
Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – Definitive Edition has been removed from sale on PC as Rockstar deals with a variety of issues with the newly launched remasters. The main problems are that the game simply hasn’t been playable for over half a day, as the Rockstar Games Launcher has suffered from server connectivity issues (so it really wouldn’t matter if you could buy the game anyway), but there’s also been some embarrassing gaffs with the files that have been available to download.
Dataminers quickly dug into the game files to see just how Rockstar had gone about making this Definitive Edition release, only to discover that the developers had left in many of the files for music cut (for San Andreas in particular) from the soundtrack after licenses expired – the game was simply not playing them, thanks to scripting tweaks. That’s probably the main reason why the game has been removed from sale, as Rockstar simply does not have the rights to distribute these songs and will be getting some calls from some notoriously litigious record label lawyers.
Speaking of scripting tweaks, maker of in-depth GTA videos and content Vadim M has found that the game included an uncompiled version of main.scm. This dates back to the trilogy’s original development, featuring some of the developer notes and comments, revealing a lot of how the game works, and what cuts were made before shipping. For example, Prawn Island was nicknamed ‘Porn Island’ during development.
But again, none of this matters when most people can’t even play the game on PC. The last communication on the Rockstar Games Launcher outage came four hours ago. We’re now up to 19 hours of downtime total. Oh dear…
We thank you for your patience and understanding as we continue to work on restoring services for the Rockstar Games Launcher and supported titles.
— Rockstar Support (@RockstarSupport) November 12, 2021
The game is available to purchase and play across PlayStation, Xbox and Nintendo Switch consoles, but even that is resulting in a few red faces at Rockstar as early hands on time from critics and fans alike has led to some disappointment over the quality of the product.
In particular, you would have hoped that the game would run flawlessly on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X, but that simply isn’t the case, with the frame rate dropping from 60fps to 30fps during intense scenes. You can imagine that there are similar issues on PS4, Xbox One and Switch – Nintendo’s handheld only targets 30fps anyway.
Here’s GTA3 running in the 60fps Performance mode, but struggling like anything:
Vice City and San Andreas perform a little better, but the frame rate still drops to the low 40s when there’s a lot going on in the game.
All in all, it’s not been the smoothest of launches for Rockstar, and we hope that they quickly address all the issues and concerns with these games.
via VGC
