Maybe we correctly predicted this ourselves, or it was obviously what would happen anyway. But fans are now worried after rumors came up that Rockstar Games could be making a Red Dead Redemption rerelease or remaster.
We did report on Red Dead Redemption getting a new rating from the Korean media rating agency. At that time, we had noted that fans may want to be wary if such a thing was in the works, because Rockstar Games has thus far a poor reputation for remastering their own work.
That is, in fact, exactly what happened. As reported by The Gamer, fans have been sharing screenshots of the poorly executed Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – Definitive Edition. As they are right to point out, Rockstar was so eager for the revenue from this rerelease that it was rushed out the door without proper care for making a product that would meet customer expectations.
Now, many fans believe a big part of the problem was that the ports on Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – Definitive Edition were assigned to Grove Street Games, which many fans assume are a new studio inexperienced with the work.
In fact, Grove Street Games has been around for over a decade, and they worked on the mobile ports of Grand Theft Auto games, as well as Bully. They ported the same games that they already worked on for iOS and Android, to Windows and consoles.
So what went wrong? As was discussed in this What Happened video, Grove Street did not get the higher quality source assets for the graphics and audio for these older games, to make better quality versions of them.
Even worse, Rockstar Games didn’t care enough to give them more time or resources to compensate. Quite famously, some of the assets were brought to higher resolution using a machine learning algorithm. This choice reduced the workload for Grove Street, but also meant there would be naturally a lot of mistakes that they would have to fix manually.
But Rockstar and Take-Two Interactive are not really lacking in resources, or capability to remaster or even remake Red Dead Redemption.
They essentially ported and remade Grand Theft Auto V, as well as its online multiplayer monetized component Grand Theft Auto Online, for three generations of game consoles. They so obviously know how to do this work, especially when you consider the potential pitfalls they jumped over to bring the game from the seventh to eight generation of consoles.
It wouldn’t necessarily be the worst idea if Rockstar sent the project to companies that specialize in porting games, but Rockstar can do this themselves, and they can do it in a way that will absolutely please anyone. It’s really up to Take Two and Rockstar management if they will do the right thing by their fans with this possible rerelease.
