Still no release date for mobile beyond H1 2022
Grand Theft Auto III, Vice City, and San Andreas represent what a lot of people call the “golden age” of Rockstar’s GTA franchise. They made popular what we know nowadays as open-world games. But the graphics haven’t aged too gracefully. All three games are currently available for Android, but aside from a few mobile-specific optimizations, they look and feel mostly the same as the original early-2000s games. Rockstar recently announced a remaster of all three titles in the form of Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy, which is set to come to smartphones sometime next year. Now we’re getting our first glimpse at how the games will look with their vastly improved graphics.
The remastered games look like they’re doing quite a bit to breathe some new life into this series. The lighting looks way better, and the games will get modern, GTA V-inspired controls as well. The art features the same cartoony, 2000s-era style as the originals, but now kinda looks like a Telltale Games-style release, with intentionally stylized graphics on a more robust engine. All of that makes sense, as at least on the console/PC builds the games are reportedly running on the modern Unreal Engine 4.
This video highlights the console release, and we don’t know exactly how these visual changes will translate to the mobile version once that’s ready. But while we might not see quite the same image quality, we can probably expect the same art style and similarly modernized controls.
Last we heard, Rockstar was planning to release the remaster for Android phones sometime in the first half of 2022. Hopefully we’ll pick up some more details as we get closer to that date. For now, you can see the kinds of graphical improvements Rockstar has in store, and play the current mobile versions of the three classics.
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