The GTA Trilogy was released to waves of ridicule earlier this month. Everything from bugs and glitches to strange design choices and character models were latched onto by gamers. Players began demanding refunds, Rockstar had to stop selling the trilogy on PC, and the games received some of the lowest user review scores ever on Metacritic.
The backlash was so bad that it led to Rockstar apologizing for the state of the games. The company also pledged to fix the plethora of issues via updates and offered PC players the original versions of the games for free. The day after the apology, the first update for the game (not including the day one update) was released. That was update 1.02 and it included a variety of fixes. Now, Rockstar has released update 1.03 and this is the first one that seems to actually be taking player feedback into account.
The update notes, which are extensive, reference many of the issues that have spread like wildfire across social media. In GTA: San Andreas, there are multiple fixes to character models, particularly CJ. Other issues that were prominent online have also been taken care of. These include misspelled store names, the Nut prop on the Tuff Nuts donut shop, and the utterly bizarre rain. The patch notes almost read as if the top Twitter threads and Reddit posts from recent weeks were consulted directly by the developers. That’s good news in a sense. It shows that Rockstar has been taking note of the biggest complaints in the community.
It’s likely going to take several of these major updates to actually fix the GTA Trilogy to the standards that fans of the series have. Unfortunately, that is becoming more and more commonplace in the industry. In the past, games may have needed one or two updates to fix glaring issues. Now it seems like more and more are needing months of post-release support to get the games up to day one standards.
