It seems that the remaster trilogy containing Grand Theft Auto 3, Vice City and San Andreas will be dropping in sooner than we might have expected — after years of rumors and months of leaks, the South Korean ratings administration has officially confirmed that The Trilogy's definitive edition does indeed exist — and it might be coming next month.
While we still don't have anything along the lines of an official announcement, the game getting an official rating does amount to certainty regarding it being a real thing. It's been a long time coming, with fans calling for the remaster of these classic titles in one form or another for years now.
In lieu of official information, we could only rely on consistently legitimate and reputable sources that have been feeding info to major publications, primarily Kotaku, a site that has been the home of countless dozens of major game leaks that have routinely turned out to be accurate.
The Xbox Series X|S and PlayStation 5 ports of GTA 5 were thought to greatly inform the release of the remastered trilogy, which will apparently be called Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – The Definitive Edition. The ports were initially slated for a late November release, which lead sources to pinpoint late October or early November as the launch window for the remaster trilogy.
However, since then Expanded & Enhanced has been delayed all the way to March 2022 — something that many fans took as a sign that The Trilogy is getting pushed back into the next year as well. However, it seems that the GTA 5 port being delayed just left the coast clear for the remasters instead. We won't be waiting until 2022 — it seems that The Definitive Edition will launch this November.
Alongside trusted sources saying as much, there is some concrete evidence here too. Just recently, the Rockstar Launcher got an update. At face value, nothing has changed and there still isn't any official acknowledgement of the remastered trilogy, but dataminers have dug into the code of the new update to find exactly that.
Not only do the new files of the launcher have entries for remastered versions of GTA 3, Vice City and San Andreas, but the code snippets specifically mention the Unreal Engine, which all leaks have been naming as the graphical engine on which the remasters will run. It's still weird that Rockstar isn't using RAGE, but hey, whatever works right?
https://twitter.com/videotech_/status/1445411336729530370
In any case, Rockstar isn't ignorant of data mining — it's been consistently spoiling upcoming GTA Online content for years now — so they wouldn't include these entries in the launcher update unless some official word was coming soon. Considering how last minute Rockstar announcements traditionally are, that just further reinforces the claims that the game will launch this November.
Sure, late November isn't sooner than the originally professed release window of late October to early November, but it is certainly earlier than expectations of a delay into 2022 like the GTA 5 ports. As it stands, we should probably be hearing official word in the coming weeks, or even days.
Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – The Definitive Edition will launch on PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5 and possibly on the Nintendo Switch.
