Digital Foundry Continues GTA Trilogy Analysis, Sets Switch As 'Bottom Tier' Version

Rockstar put so much thought into whether they could, and seemingly none into whether they should.

So the weakest platform has the worst performance, not so sure that's a revelation, and all that surprising.

Sadly not surprising. The first time Nintendo gamers get a 3D gta game and it’s this.

@johnvboy Which wouldn't be the biggest problem if the other versions were good.

Tbh it should play it just fine considering these were ps2 games.

@johnvboy might be the weakest console.but it outsold xbox one in 3 years.92.87 million switch consoles have been sold up to date.but the end of the switch life cycle.well nuff said besides it will outsell the ps4.and ps5 is only at 13 million in the first year
..power ain't everything

@johnvboy uh… the others versions are in the same boat as well. Plus, the Switch was never going to be the better version.

Gotta love Nintendo Life… going for those clicks.

@CharlieGirl I mean, these games could and should run very well even on Switch. It's just that this remaster was handled by a mobile developer who remade the mobile ports of GTA games in Unreal Engine. That's a recipe for a disaster.

I have a feeling the Switch version is probably going to get the least amount of patches, but it's no big deal, I just got a PS5 so I will pick up the trilogy on there if they ever fix it up to a respectable degree.

I prefer emulating the original PS2 version on my Xbox Series S

@CharlieGirl I’d also like to quote Dr Malcolm by saying “that is one big pile of sh*t”.

@progx,

They know the outrage on here is very easy to stir up.

I'm sure many of the curses uttered in San Andreas would aptly describe the quality of this "definitive" release.

@Darkyoshi98,

Totally agree with you the console is amazing and deserves it's success, my comment was aimed at the bait nature of the article, rather than any issue I had with the Switch or it's games.

I have three Switch consoles in my house, and the OLED is an awesome piece of kit.

Sorry for any confusion.

I guess it's safe to say that after this mess we'll never get a Warriors port? Always enjoyed that one more than GTA.

I don't think that this can be patched to an acceptable state on NSW. At this point I would convert the available Android versions... At least these games are playable😄

honestly I enjoyed playing through 3, almost finished it on switch.

I understood vice city and San Andreas play better on switch. I'm starting to get the feeling that crapping on the trilogy is an easy click for most YouTubers... The glitches are everywhere, but it gave me memories from weird and funny glitches on PS2. The performance is terrible, but that's true on all versions sadly, so the switch is between 20-30fps and xx and ps5 are between 25-60... Not unexpected. I do hope they find a solution for the fps dips.

Lazy as a solution this would be, they should have just ported the Android versions, as is, to Switch, with a few new features. Then, ironically, the Switch version would have been the best one.

Basically Rockstar gave it the green light to release it to make the Christmas rush to cash in.

No advanced review copies said it all!

1st time in my life (gaming since Atari at 5 and im 43 now), I can honestly say I wasted 60 bucks on a game due to believing a port of a best selling game would be ported perfectly and then some. Amazing how Rockstar (and some other companies) let this kind of ***** ship 🤦🏾‍♂️

@ferryb001 easy clicks because it's a crappy product that deserves all the hate it gets.

The game has nothing to redeem itself with. It's not like it has bugs but at least runs and looks great or runs poor but looks good and has no bugs.

No, it's looks like crap because they didn't make any effort to transfer the original art style at all, it's full of bugs and on top of that runs like crap as well despite looking like a complete turd.

Take two didn't care at all about this game and just saw it as an easy cash grab. Why else hire a bottom of the barrel developer that already did a less than steller conversion of the games for mobile?

Take take will have known about the horrible state the games are in and still decided to release it anyway.

I honestly don't see how you can enjoy a game that looks and runs as horrible as this. Sounds more like trying to justify ones purchase.

@thedudeabides05 on first read I thought you meant there was a Warriors spin-off for GTA like there was for Zelda and Fire Emblem and was really racking my head why I had heard nothing about it

So glad I decided to hold off. Thanks to gamepass and psnow I can play 3 and San Andreas. Will wait to play vice city. Hopefully switch version gets fixed cause I really want the trilogy there.

excluding the GTA before the GBA, Is that when Rockstar just stopped caring what went to Nintendo?

Meanwhile, re3 performs really well even with maxed out settings on a hacked Switch.
Granted, the Switch has to be overclocked to perform perfectly and San Andreas is not yet decompiled but it still looks and performs much better than the official Definitive Edition.

@Darkyoshi98 Dude he said nothing about sales.

And the other platform versions, what are they, semi bottom tier?

@somebread No just a random Rock Star game based off a movie. I don't think it sold anywhere as well as the GTA or Red Dead games though.

After Bloodstained and Dragon Quest Builders 2 I learned not to buy multiplatform games on the Switch.

@Ponyo404 have you bought the game? IMO it doesn’t look that bad in handheld at all. The underlying games are also still great. The FPS is the main issue here. I’m not defending my purchase, I bought 6 other games this week and I’m still playing gta because I’m having a great time.

@Ponyo404 "Take take" — I see what you did there! =)

@johnvboy why do you expected Switch is not powerful enough to run this game.

sadly Switch is not powerful enough to run this game.

People do know that this isn’t even optimized for even the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S too right?

For people who keep saying that the Switch is too weak to run this, lets be honest it’s not that weak. Not only that you are all assuming only the Switch version of the game is the worst version even though the last gen PS and Xbox consoles versions AND the new gen PS and Xbox consoles versions also run just like crap like the Switch version. It’s not any better on other platforms than it is on Switch

There is no defense for this port's performance, it's clearly well under what everyone was expecting, and by several accounts, it runs worse than the originals and has new bugs that weren't in the original games. But this much is true on all consoles.

To say the Switch version is the "worst" version because it doesn't look as good or perform as well as other consoles, well this can be said for nearly all games available on Switch and other consoles, with the small exception of a few games like Alien: Isolation that actually run slightly better on Switch. But sure, let's keep talking about it like it's a Switch-centric issue.

Woop, almost walked into a puddle of milk there.

@Astral-Grain indeed the Switch is the worst version but my problem here is that people are saying it’s the ONLY bad version. And yet the game runs just as crap on other platforms as it is on Switch.

Also it’s Alien Isolation not Alien Resurrection. Alien Resurrection is the 4th movie in the Alien series. Just would like to point that out

@Giancarlothomaz thats bs switch is capable of running these games but the devs were dam lazy and rushed it out unpolished and bug infested problems.

@anoyonmus Haha darn my bad about the Alien title, thanks for correcting me.

I didn't realize that was such a point of confusion. It's hard to understand why anyone would think this is a Switch-only issue, though these NL articles can be a little misleading if it's all you're reading about it. There are plenty of gameplay videos across all versions with issues and plenty of posts on social media to confirm it's bad across the board and not just on Switch.

@Giancarlothomaz,

You are all missing my point, my comment was a sarcastic dig at the article pointing out the bloody obvious.

@Astral-Grain exactly my point. Its not just Switch, its all platforms. Rockstar just rushed this.

And you're welcome for the Alien correction

@johnvboy yeah I kinda figured that out for a while but I wasn't 100% sure

@Uncensored better yet just wait for reviews on multi-platform games on Switch

@anoyonmus,

No problems at all, sorry for any confusion.

@johnvboy that is not sarcasm, cause you said the truth. It is the weakest platform and no doubt it will have 99% the worst performance compared to other consoles. This will not change even if you have 100 switches at home.

@yuwarite

Emulation of the PS2 Version would be even better
Best would be a Port based on the PC-Versions.

The PS3 and Xbox have Ports of San Andreas that are based on the Android Version.

You can clearly see that there are Bugs in that Version that aren't on the PC/PS2.

• The cinematic Models are bad, broken in their corporal Form and strange blockiness (i compared it myself yesterday)
  Trained CJ and ingame he looks muscular, in Cutscenes he looks like an Egg.
  The Faces are strange and also different.
• Skin Colours do not match.
• Vehicles change Colours when crashing (because it somehow has the Colour of the prerior Car saved).
• Sometimes there is no Music
• Everywhere Buttons based on Touch Controls.
• No Analogue Controls for Bikes and automatic fighting
• you can deactivate auto climbing (thats annoying in the modern Port)

This is only the Stuff i have seen so far, it seems not as Buggy as the new Versions, physical Stuff seems normal.
They carried over the Bugs from the Mobile, the new Models based on buggy messed up Character Models clearly made it even worse.
The new Engine seemingly caused even more Bugs, especially in the physical Department.

@clianvXAi,

You are clearly unhinged, my comment was aimed at the rather obvious nature of the article.

@progx nintendlife . Can anyone recommend another good Nintendo website to switch to? I’m ready

@Yeaitslenn as soon as I find one, I’ll post it. Otherwise, I’d recommend IGN.

If something is worth doing, it is worth doing right, or not at all. I would have preferred them releasing the PS2 originals rather than prematurely releasing a mess of a remaster

It's worst on Switch no doubt, but as a portable version I've still found it fairly playable. I'm not trying to defend the state of the game, it honestly feels unfinished and I don't think should have been released in its current state, but I remember how badly Vice City Stories ran on psp at times.

I also own the PS2 PS4 versions and they are not great. SA runs as a slide show if you use an external hard drive, there is a weird graphical 'grid' effect visible on the screen, the music cuts out and the PAL versions have something really wrong with the frame pacing as were native 50Hz, forced into 60Hz as PS4 doesn't support the former. The higher resolution of PS4 also makes the LOD switching out at distance look awful. The type of thing a CRT TV would help disguise back in the day.

This 'definitive' edition is a real missed oppertunity at this point and I hope they improve it.

@Ristar24 Vice City Stories ran poorly? I played it just two years ago and it had pretty good performance for a PSP game. Granted, I ran it at 333MHz, maybe the game normally only runs at 266MHz, I don't know.

These games should have worked smoothly on the Switch with no hiccups. We've seen Panic Button and Saber bring masterpieces to the table. Some sort of sorcery even the way their ports works on the Switch. This one by Grove Street games seems incompetent or half-arsed or maybe both.

@nintendoknife "for a PSP game" is right. The original Vice City game and VCS on PSP had loading screens when changing islands and even then there was constant stuttering. I can't even call it stuttering because the game would just come to a halt for several seconds and back then it either meant the game was frozen for good or it would return to normal after waiting patiently. I recall Vice City Stories having a lot of instances of "waiting for the screen to start moving again" but it was still loads of fun for a PSP game.

I don't care for GTA III, but have been playing Vice City and San Andreas Definitive versions quite a bit on Switch, and both still seem to have similar stuttering instances, but comparatively less frequent and shorter periods of "halting" the screen. It's better than it used to be, but it really shouldn't be happening at all.

@nintendoknife I have the digital version of VCS and tried on PSP and Vita (and even PS TV I think), I still found it stuttered a lot under 30fps, or it seemed to, perhaps the UMD version is better. My consoles are not over clocked, but I found it pretty difficult to play at times, though still enjoyable overall. Liberty City Stories ran better though.

@johnvboy how's he unhinged ? The switch will run all 3rd party games that come to it the worst with only 4gb of ram & a mobile processor it is the weakest 'current gen' console that's just a fact

@Would_you_kindly,

My initial comment had nothing to do with the power of the Switch, or it being good or bad at running games.

The article is just reporting the obvious, and my comment was being sarcastic, not sure how many times I need to say this, or how more clear I could have made it.

Techlands port of Dying Light is out on Switch, not to mention the amazing work Panic Button have done over the years with their excellent ports, all putting this travesty to shame.

GTA 3 is 20 year old and looks.....the way it looks. There's no reason it shouldn't at the very least be a solid 30fps with a higher resolution.

This is clearly not a simple case of "well the switch is underpowered, what do you expect?".

@Astral-Grain That... I have never encountered in vcs, weird. I played through the entire game around 10 times, half of these 100%ing it, and never had it freeze like that, not even once.

I played it off the memory card, and the loading screen when crossing between islands was always exactly half a second.

At standard 222 MHz, the fps hovered between 20 and 30 fps, usually somewhere in the middle, with exactly one spot holding a steady 20 or slightly sub-20 (inside the second apartment, looking out the windows). At 333 MHz it would hold a pretty steady 30 fps.

I've never really encountered any bugs like those shown here, no being thrown across the map, no lightspeed npc cars, no random car attacks during cutscenes, almost no graphical glitches, no map layout problems, no falling through the ground, no disappearing map elements, no distorted models, etc. About the only replicable glitch it had was the car spawning breaking of you played it for real long without shutting the game off once, for several hours. The cars would stop spawning outside of roadblocks and those that were there had their pathing broken (constantly driving into walls, or on the underside of a bridge). Restarting the game of fix it.

Dunno why you had such a negative experience. Though, was your PSP the OG fat one? Maybe playing it off the umd in the cacheless OG model caused these problems. Or maybe your memory card was dying, dunno. Even on a ***** knockoff memory stick it'd run fine for me.

And, as a bonus, it always ran at native resolution.

As a side note, so reporting on DF videos when they're not praising the switch is clickbait now? Should they stop reporting on DF unless they only have good things to say about the Switch version? Since there were no cries of clickbait or bias when they were praising the switch numerous times.

Cya
Raziel-chan

This appears to be an example of a company not caring about its product. It will result in short-term profit but long-term disdain.

To those who say the Switch cannot run these games, they were originally on the PS2. That should not be a problem. And there have been far more ambitious ports to the Switch that worked.

@Razzy I played Vice City Stories originally on the PSP via the physical UMD and also have the PSP version digitally on my PS Vita and the stuttering/pausing has happened across both versions. I wouldn't call it a negative experience, it's just something that was in Vice City and therefore wasn't too surprising when it was present in VCS.

As far as the Definitive edition goes, I also haven't encountered many of the glitches and bugs other people are mentioning, but that doesn't mean they're not happening. The other day while playing San Andreas Definitive edition, I noticed NPCs just stopped dropping weapons and money. This was quite a bummer because the way I made money without cheats in SA is by finding drug dealers and killing them, they drop thousands of dollars each time and this glitch made it impossible to pick up items from dead NPCs. I tried restarting the game, still there, tried resetting the Switch, and it was still present. I was very lucky I made a backup save a couple hours before noticing this glitch, and loading a previous save let me loot items and weapons again, but if I had to throw away my 20 hours of progress and start all over because of this glitch, I would have just deleted the game.

Silly wonky graphical glitches are one thing, but when a game includes irreversible game-breaking bugs like items/money not spawning when an NPC dies, people have every right to be upset.

The fact is it Really SHOULDN'T be this bad. These games were originally released for the PS2, the Switch would have zero problem with that even with the automatically generated glow-up the games have been given. It should not tax the switch's capabilities at all and the fact that it does shows off how badly these things were remade.

Silly me for thinking they could comprise a collection of PS2 games, remastered or not, and get them running on Switch. This preorder haunts me.

Side loaded Vicy City on my phone, plays like butter. The only one worth replaying anyway.

@Ristar24 So you'd say it's still worth picking up on Switch(even if it is a mess across the board) and just hoping much needed fixes come sooner rather than later?

I ask that as someone who also wanted to nab it on NS.

@Lalivero I'd watch some Switch gameplay and see what you think. I bought the game though I knew it's not in a great state, as really I just wanted to play Vice City portable (I have a Switch Lite, on a TV I would guess it doesn't compare well to the other consoles). Its pretty blurry, low framerate, lots of missing effects compared to the other versions (no shadows at night) and there are definitive glitches (like cars driving around the airport). I wouldn't recommend the game at the moment at the price its going for, though I've found it playable at least. I think the review here was pretty well measured.

It definitely was a bottom tier port effort in general regardless of version. Game needs a heavy overhaul to salvage

@Darkyoshi98 Power isn't everything if you don't care about playing crappy games. I see people fawning over the Switch and I just have to assume they've not played on a more powerful platform. Indie games are usually fine, but once you have played a game with ray tracing at a high resolution it is very hard to go back. I love Nintendo games, but their system is terrible. Rounded joysticks, joy cons that are meant for toddlers to hold, and a portable screen that has a resolution outdated for years. The problem is that it sells so who cares. I guess a lot of people are okay with crappy versions of games. What can you do but just laugh and carry on. I'll rebuy a Switch when a pro version is out and it can do graphics for this century.

@CharlieGirl - I dunno, considering the state these games ended up in, I reckon they probably could've spent more time wondering if they could.

@Ristar24 - Ouch. Sounds like you might've been better off getting the mobile version (if that was an option); at least that version works properly, and wouldn't have burned as much of a hole in your wallet.

But yeah, it's pretty sad to see the PS2 GTA trilogy perform so poorly on Switch, even after the big patch they released afterwards to try and mitigate the situation. Thankfully, the original versions are still available on the iOS/Play store, so a working portable option is still available, but here's hoping these versions get fixed sometime in the near future.

Honestly I can look past the blurry distance textures and lower resolution if they can just fix the bugs and the pop-in. Honestly the fog present in the originals would do more good than harm for the Switch port, my biggest issues are not the new textures because that was an artistic choice so I have no right to say they should be changed. The bugs on the other hand and the slamming into cars that pop in front of me need to be fixed before I bother trying to play these games again. The framerate could be tweaked, I'm sure, but I didn't notice anything game breaking but I also grew up on the PS2 versions and as a fan of the N64 frame rates have never affected my enjoyment of a well-made game.

@ferryb001 saying it "doest look that bad in handheld mode" is just another way of saying it does look bad, but you just don't want to admit it. All the games I have look good on the big screen and in handheld mode.

Even if the smaller screen hides a lot of the imperfections that still doesn't change the fact that they completely ruined the art style. The original games simply look better because of that

@Darkyoshi98 yep. And sales won't make bad games any better.

The switch always was going to be the weakest version but updated graphics weren't what I wanted.

If they could have somehow given us the old PS2 graphics along with GTA 5 style controls, they would have had my money.