While it was only announced a few short weeks ago, Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy - Definitive Edition is quickly approaching. The ambitious remasters of the PlayStation 2 classics have quickly accumulated a lot of hype from Grand Theft Auto fans who have been waiting for something non-Grand Theft Auto 5 related for almost a decade. Now that Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy - The Definitive Edition is only just over a week away, the file sizes for PlayStation platforms have been revealed.
Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy - Definitive Edition is a compilation of Grand Theft Auto 3, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas that was first rumored to exist just a few months ago when websites such as Kotaku reported that an Unreal Engine 4 conversion of the classic Rockstar games was in development for modern consoles, mobile platforms, and PC.
After months of speculation, Rockstar finally revealed the remaster collection just ahead of the 20th anniversary of Grand Theft Auto 3, the game that made the series a cultural landmark and cemented it as one of the most important video game franchises of all time. With this, the series will arrive on next-generation platforms and Nintendo Switch for the very first time, and it's bringing a slew of improvements with it, including an almost entirely new visual style inspired by the PS2 games' artwork.
For such a monumentous release, it's understandable that the file sizes for each of the games included in the package would have to increase, as brand new textures and in some cases models will undoubtedly be added to the new versions. It was already revealed that the physical Nintendo Switch version will require a download given the 25.4GB file size that would increase the manufacturing costs of cartridges on behalf of the publisher. This implied that the console versions of GTA: The Trilogy - Definitive Edition would be bigger on the whole. In regards to PlayStation, this seems to be the case, with the PS4 and PS5 versions of the collection coming on at around 38GB, assuming there are now day 1 patches, as revealed by PlayStation Game Size on Twitter.
How this breaks down is that Grand Theft Auto 3's remaster will come in at a respectful 5.29GB, with Vice City and San Andreas coming in at 10.76GB and 22.67GB respectively. While the GTA 3 remaster's size makes sense given the smaller size of the game compared to its successors, San Andreas' 22.6GB file size is surprising to say the least, given that its PS2 emulated version on PS4 was a measly 3.2GB. The difference here is that Rockstar has not only ported the game and all of its original assets to a new, more relevant engine, but it has also replaced many of those assets with newer 4K versions and essentially rebuilt the entire game.
Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy - The Definitive Edition will release digitally for Nintendo Switch, PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X on November 11. The physical versions will release on December 7.