10 Times In Gaming You Got SCAMMED
8. Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy - Definitive Edition
On paper, releasing a remaster trilogy of Grand Theft Auto III, Vice City, and San Andreas should've been an absolute can't-miss slam-dunk for Rockstar.
If any halfway-competent studio was given time and resources to do the remasters properly, this would've been a phenomenal commercial and PR smash hit for the studio.
Instead, Rockstar released the remaster trilogy with suspiciously minimal marketing focused less on showing off the shiny new gameplay than merely exploiting general nostalgia for the original games.
Despite scattered praise for some of the new quality-of-life improvements, many found the remastered presentation underwhelming, that its cleaner look stripped away the originals' grungier mood.
The rain effects were widely ridiculed for being excessive to the point that portions of San Andreas were nearly unplayable, and the new character designs were massively divisive.
This all led to infuriated players review-bombing the trilogy on Metacritic, enough that it ended up with the lowest user score on the entire site, 0.4/10.
This caused Rockstar to apologise for the state of the game and promise fixes, though for many these patches couldn't address the fact that the remaster trilogy was fundamentally hashed out without sufficient care or effort.
The games are certainly in a better state today, but it's frustratingly clear that Rockstar leveraged their standing in the industry to make a quick nostalgia-fuelled buck, with little regard for delivering a quality experience to players.