I'd Love To See More Rockstar Switch Ports
A couple of years ago, I wrote about how Rockstar Games was at a crossroads. Across the last console generation, they transformed from one of the world’s premier video game storytellers into a multiplayer-focused cash machine. Their vast network of studios stopped producing regularly-released titles, and instead makes new updates for GTA Online and Red Dead Online. Instead of shipping anticipated new games every year or two, they’re about to release GTA V on a third consecutive generation of consoles.
I yearn for the glory days of Rockstar’s Xbox 360/PS3 output. They had an incredible string of hits that generation, built on a technology platform that is still ahead of the competition in enough ways that it’s the driving force behind Red Dead Redemption II, one of the most technologically impressive games ever made. Rockstar put out Table Tennis, Midnight Club LA, GTA IV, LA Noire, Red Dead Redemption, Max Payne 3, and GTA V on the seventh generation of consoles.
On generation eight, their lone fully new release was Red Dead 2.
However, tucked in amidst all the online microtransaction success of their two huge online endeavors, Rockstar did something I didn’t expect. They put out a lavishly reworked port of LA Noire, and took the time to bring it to the Switch alongside the PS4 and the Xbox One. The Switch is a surprisingly capable machine in spite of its older mobile hardware. Nvidia originally announced its internal Tegra X1 processor as a “portable supercomputer,” and indeed, it has a processing capability beyond the level of the seventh generation that Rockstar seemed so comfortable with.
LA Noire shines on the Switch, with better performance and visual quality than either the Xbox 360 or PS3 versions, and only an occasional moment of pop-in to show off the Switch’s battery-saving CPU limitations. It completely captures the full scope of the game’s massive, hand-designed recreation of 1940’s Los Angeles, and it still makes a great case for the abandoned “MotionScan” tech used to create the characters. This elaborate setup required actors to perform the face for their character in front of a 360 degree spherical camera rig. The camera data was then used to make a convincing fully 3D “video head” for every single person in the game world, mapping their video performance onto a perfectly- animated underlying model. When combined with separate motion capture for the body motions, it makes every character in the game freakishly realistic, and only occasionally horrifying.
Of course, this technology is one of many reasons that the game’s development ran long, and many after-release rumors pointed towards Rockstar having to wrest control of the game completely away from its original team just to get it out the door. The new version that appears on Switch has all the rough edges smoothed out, and it’s clear that at least some people internally care about the game still. It’s also a perfect test case for their technology on the Switch platform, and I thought it would lead to ports of the numerous other titles mentioned above.
Nintendo Switch screenshot taken by the author.
Why isn’t Rockstar mining their extensive back catalog of games and putting them out again on Switch, or elsewhere? Strangely, they’ve done things that seem to suggest a hostile distaste for their past work, like letting music licenses expire for certain GTA IV tracks, then just patching them badly out of the game instead of signing new deals. But the LA Noire port is so well done it undercuts that speculation a bit. I think the potential returns on Rockstar’s catalog are huge. Not as huge as their money-printing awkward MMO’s have been, I guess…but it’s truly baffling to me that they haven’t tried.
Rockstar trained me to expect a new high quality game every year or so on my Xbox 360. They hired some of the most talented people in the industry and they put out a bunch of interesting games. Now, all of those talented designers are making new horses and hats for Red Dead 2, and new cars for GTA V. I know that those games get occasional larger content drops for their multiplayer, but all of that is a pale shadow of what Rockstar used to mean to the industry. Their open world design concepts, game flow ideas, and storytelling experiments reverberate through nearly every other game produced in the current market, and while Red Dead 2 was an amazing return to form on the single player side…it also just made me pine for their older release schedule, when it felt like they were a little hungrier. Or perhaps better managed.
I’d love to see Rockstar actually take care of their back catalog instead of just re-releasing GTA V over and over. I’d love to see them produce smaller stories, like they used to. Red Dead 2 has between 60-100 hours of content depending on how much stuff you do, and while that’s “great” for investors who just want them to compete with Assassin’s Creed, I’d love to see what this talented team could do if they went back to making 20-30 hour games that blew everyone’s minds.
I mean, this company once made a brawler out of The Warriors, for crying out loud. They made a game called Bully that caused controversy based on its name and a handful of marketing assets, that turned out to be one of the most clever satires in gaming. They saved a wacky cowboy game that Capcom cancelled and turned it into one of the biggest franchises in the world. Rockstar is a company that can move mountains, and thanks to their cash-generating online machines, they could still be doing that if they wanted to.
Putting the back catalog on Switch (and other consoles) would be the perfect way to re-kindle that legacy. And it wouldn’t even cost them that much. The games industry as a whole does a bad job of preserving its history, and it’s a shame to see the “bad boy outsiders” at Rockstar fall victim to stepping away from a safe pile of money in Switch ports to even safer piles of money from their online games. Even Nintendo, with their weird drip feed of old games through the Nintendo Switch Online service, and their locking-up of old Mario games in a digital vault, has done a better job of respecting their own legacy on current hardware.
I’ll come at it another way. Legend of Kay is one of the most miserably awkward and terrible games I’ve ever experienced. It got a definitive re-release on the Switch. Don’t Rockstar’s games deserve new editions with their music fully intact? The Switch audience would eat these games up and they’d probably recoup the development costs on day one. I know LA Noire appeared in the charts for quite a while. I guess Rockstar doesn’t like money because they’re too busy liking money?
