GTA Trilogy returns to PC as Rockstar promises performance fixes
It's been a pretty wild ride for owners of Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – The Definitive Edition on PC. Shortly after the game launched last week, Rockstar pulled both it and the Rockstar Games Launcher offline. While the Launcher came back a day later, the game was down for most of the weekend. The PC version is back now, but there's still a lot of work left to be done on the game across all platforms.
GTA Trilogy and the story so far
Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – The Definitive Edition launched on various platforms on November 11th. Unfortunately, later that day, Rockstar took both the PC version of the game and the Rockstar Games Launcher offline for maintenance, and the Launcher was offline for more than a day. This was particularly problematic because many of Rockstar's modern PC games rely on the Launcher to function, even those that aren't sold directly by Rockstar.
This means that Steam versions of GTA Online and Red Dead Redemption 2 were inaccessible while the Rockstar Games Launcher was offline. At the same time this was happening, Rockstar stopped selling the PC version of the GTA Trilogy, removing the listing for it from its website.
Initially, Rockstar didn't explain why the GTA Trilogy had been removed from sale, but as the weekend was getting underway, the company's support account published another tweet saying that it was working to "remove files unintentionally included in these versions." This was revealed as the Rockstar Games Launcher came back online for PC users. Now the PC version of Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – The Definitive Edition is playable once more for those who already own it and available for purchase from Rockstar's website for those who don't.
Still a long way to go
If you were planning to buy the GTA Trilogy on PC, you might want to pump the brakes and hold off for now even though the game is up for sale again. Ever since launch, users across all platforms have reported various issues with the game, from remastered character models that are shockingly bad in some cases to performance problems.
These issues seem to exist in the GTA Trilogy regardless of the platform, and it's led to abysmally low user review scores on Metacritic. Every version of the GTA Trilogy has a user score below 1.0 on Metacritic at the time of this writing, with the Xbox One version sporting the lowest at 0.4.
That, as you might imagine, is not great, but in the tweet announcing the PC version's return, Rockstar also says that it is "working to improve and update overall performance as we move forward." There are no concrete details on when Rockstar plans to deliver an update to the GTA Trilogy, but judging by some of the replies to that tweet, there's a lot to fix. We'll update you when Rockstar shares more, but for now, it might be a good idea to put the GTA Trilogy down and spend time with other games as we wait on the company to start pushing out fixes.