If the rumors about a Grand Theft Auto trilogy are true, it would be nice if Rockstar allowed players of any game to travel between Liberty City, Vice City, and San Andreas at will. All three of the first 3D Grand Theft Auto titles featured large airports (and GTA: San Andreas actually had three of its own) which would be the perfect way to let Carl Johnson stretch his legs in Miami, or allow Tommy Vercetti to return to the town that abandoned him.
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas already has a mechanic which can be adopted for this travel feature. In San Andreas, players could visit any airport in the game (provided they had unlocked access to the other areas) and purchase a ticket to travel between Los Santos, San Fierro, and Las Venturas. There is even a mission where CJ must steal a passenger jet and fly all the way to Liberty City in order to take care of some business for the mafia. That mission only featured the exterior and interior of one iconic GTA 3 location, but with the possibility of a remastered GTA trilogy, Rockstar has the opportunity to expand on this idea and make it much more enjoyable.
It's well-known that Grand Theft Auto's parent company, Take-Two Interactive, doesn't want simple GTA remasters. When talking about 2K games' remastered version of the Mafia trilogy, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick said "...we don’t just port titles over, we actually take the time to do the very best job we can making the title different for the new release, for the new technology that we’re launching it on." Connecting all three GTA locations would be perfectly in line with this mindset, and would make each game's airport a more interesting location for players to visit.
GTA Airports Could Finally Be Used For Something
Even though all three games in the 3D Grand Theft Auto trilogy feature plenty of airports, not many missions actually force players to go there as passengers. Events in the GTA series more often simply take place around any given airport or, most commonly, their runways, which are great for chase scenes but are ultimately fairly non-engaging, since the wide open spaces don't allow much in the way of obstacles or challenge. Sometimes breaking into an airport will give the player a wanted level, but even then it's the same form of emergent gameplay they could achieve anywhere else in GTA's environment.
Allowing players to travel between Grand Theft Auto 3, Vice City, and San Andreas' maps at will would obviously create some complications, even when ignoring that all three take place in different decades. Out of the three protagonists of the 3D GTA trilogy, only Carl Johnson has the ability to swim, and motorcycles and usable helicopters are practically non-existent in the GTA 3 version of Liberty City. It is possible Rockstar could change the mechanics of all three games to allow for Vice City's and San Andreas' engine upgrades to apply retroactively to the world of Grand Theft Auto 3 - GTA: Liberty City Stories brought motorcycles to Liberty City already, after all.
As the wait for Grand Theft Auto 6 grows ever longer, many players would likely be happy to jump back in to the maps of GTA 3, Vice City, and San Andreas in a GTA trilogy remaster. Letting both new and returning Grand Theft Auto fans hop between the three game maps at will would be an incredible addition to the available open world gameplay options on display, and it would definitely push the rumored remasters past the title of a "simple port."