Classic GTA trilogy replay feature

[clammy]

Hey folks,

 

Sorry if it was brought up in the past, but I wasn't able to find this topic in the forum search.

 

What are your thoughts about the replay feature in GTA3, GTA VC and GTA SA? The idea of this feature is that when you press a button on your keyboard - you will get the last minute of your game play on your screen.

 

I never used that intentionally while I was casually playing GTA Trilogy, but I do know that speedrunners are abusing this feature to hack the "game state".

 

Have you used this feature intentionally while you were playing GTA Trilogy casually?

Edited May 18, 2024 by clammy

[NightmanCometh96]

Honestly, I only use the replay feature to cheese Firefighter in III from time to time (activating replay automatically extinguishes the current fire. While it's cheating, the fact that it's a fairly easy side mission compared to Paramedic "justifies" using it in my personal view, at least in a time-saving sort of way). That said, it's a neat feature (that has only been made better thanks to the cool ways that speedrunners have used it to their advantage) and a predecessor of sorts to IV's Video Editor and the R* Editor in V. It's a shame that GSG couldn't be bothered to add it back to the DE, although, needless to say, those "remasters" have much more fundamental issues than a missing platform-exclusive feature...

 

Fun-fact: the OG Xbox version of SA actually has replays, believe it or not. I never messed around with it that much, but I remember it being a bit primitive compared to its PC counterpart. It's the only console GTA that included the feature until the R* Editor was patched into the PS4/XB1 versions of V.

Edited May 19, 2024 by NightmanCometh96

[The-Ghost]

I don't think I have ever used that feature intentionally, and funny enough, I first got it in Vice City and it replayed a replay from a previous session, it got me very confused.

I think the most impressive thing about it was what Speedrunners managed to do with it though, pretty insane stuff.

[clammy]

I'm just wondering what R* wanted to achieve by introducing this feature. Taking into an account that GTA3 and GTA VC had major challenges with memory management that developers were able to overcome - they still decided to keep this feature.

[cant remember]

I only tried it once when GTA3 came out and I thought it was terrible. The clips played at inconsistent speed without sound and there weren't any menus or anything to manage the clips.

Beside the various tricks mentioned above I've never heard of anyone using it the way it was intended and AFAIK no one was sharing clips of cool things with each other.

 

Fun fact: activating the feature is the official way of adding/removing the soft top when you're in a convertible.. yeh

[Lock n' Stock]

I thought it sucked quite frankly, especially coming from the Driver games which had really in-depth replay editing for the time.

[PointlessRedemption]

The feature just felt pointless to me. It's like they saw Driver and were like "Oh f*ck we gotta do that too!!", but they didn't even bother doing anything to make it better or unique. 

[GrudgefromSanAndreas]

iirc replay mode had some stuttering of sorts and it would've been better off if trilogy had a director mode like gtaiv and driv3r mashed together, but it would take up too much resources so maybe even vanilla replay should not have been implemented at all. instead, modders would have taken care of that, i know you can make proper machinima in sa but not sure about 3 and vc