Bully Gets Surprising New Update Nearly 20 Years After Release

Bully has gotten a surprising new update on select platforms almost 20 years after its initial release. Rockstar Games is one of the most prolific developers out there, best known for Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption. The studio is responsible for crafting rich open worlds that let you live out your wildest fantasies and pull off insane things via their sandbox worlds. Despite being best known for their big, open-world blockbuster, Rockstar has also carefully curated a portfolio of some “smaller” scale games like Max Payne 3, LA Noire, and Bully. The latter title is a game that is held highly among Rockstar fans and led to demands for a sequel since its release.

While Rockstar Games was reportedly working on Bully 2 in the 2010s, it was ultimately shelved in favor of Red Dead Redemption 2 and GTA Online. It’s a bit of a bummer and it’s unclear if a sequel will ever happen now that there’s been so much distance from the first game. Rockstar obviously has its hands full with GTA 6, but Bully 2 would be a perfect follow-up after that as it wouldn’t be as big of a game in terms of scope and scale. However, a lot of people who were responsible for Bully no longer work at Rockstar, so it’s unclear how much love the current regime has for that series.

Nevertheless, Rockstar Games hasn’t exactly forgotten that Bully exists. Last year, Rockstar added Bully to its GTA+ subscription service. On top of that, a brand new update for Bully: Anniversary Edition has been released and given the game’s age and lack of recent support, it’s a pretty sizable update. This update only pertains to the iOS and Android version of the game, so console and PC players shouldn’t get too excited. The update fixes a lot of different issues plaguing the mobile port of Bully, adds new features like haptic feedback, and more. It also sounds like this won’t be the last update as Rockstar’s patch notes state that the developer is investigating some other issues with the game. You can view the patch notes below.

Bully: Anniversary Edition iOS and Android Patch Notes

General

• Disabled Friends Challenges while we investigate related game issues
• Enabled Screen Space Ambient Occlusion (SSAO) on supported Android devices
• Updated the app icon on Android
• Implemented haptic feedback on iOS and Android

This update includes fixes to improve game stability on 64-bit mobile operating systems and supported devices.

Content

• Fixed an issue that resulted in a race condition during the Mission ‘That Bitch’ making Mandy’s locker unpickable
• Fixed an issue that resulted in the Mission ‘Weed Killer’ not progressing if the window is destroyed before passing through progress point
• Fixed an issue with both fighters at the Freak Show dying at the same time resulting in the game getting stuck on a black screen
• Fixed multiple issues that resulted in AI not attacking Jimmy when in combat
• Fixed an issue in the Mission ‘The Rumble’ that resulted in police cars falling through the floor during the police chase
• Fixed an issue that resulted in the broom being unbreakable with the brick or slingshot to open the door in the ‘Help Gary’ Mission
• Fixed an issue in the Mission ‘Save Algie’ that resulted in a crash after taking Algernon to his locker
• Fixed an issue in the Mission ‘Prep Challenge’ that resulted in Rivals not attacking or defending
• Fixed an issue in the Mission ‘The Tenements’ that resulted in Norton not attacking Jimmy
• Fixed an issue in the Missions ‘The Rumble’ and ‘Fighting Johnny Vincent’ that resulted in the police car not spawning in and gameplay not progressing during the chase sequence
• Fixed an issue that resulted in heap overflow in the Mission ‘Nutcrackin’’
• Fixed an issue when throwing toilet paper over the cubicle during the errand that resulted in a crash
• Fixed an issue that resulted in rendering issues during dodgeball gym class
• Fixed multiple issues that resulted in crashes during minigames
• Fixed an issue that resulted in weapons being incorrectly removed
• Fixed an issue that resulted in a crash due to a problem with vehicle controls
• Fixed an issue that resulted in a framerate drop because of particles generated from car collisions

Game Stability and Performance

• Fixed a race condition that resulted in a crash when starting a new game
• Fixed an issue that resulted in a crash when manually loading a save from the pause menu
• Fixed an issue that resulted in a crash when uploading cloud saves
• Fixed an issue that resulted in downloads getting stuck on Android due to Play Asset Delivery
• Fixed multiple issues affecting touch controls and Bluetooth controllers
• Fixed an issue that resulted in footsteps playing the wrong effect sound
• Fixed an issue that resulted in a crash when attempting to play a speech event
• Fixed an issue that resulted in a crash when deleting a 2D effect
• Fixed an issue that resulted a black screen during camera transitions
• Fixed an issue with in-game fires that resulted in the game crashing
• Fixed an issue that resulted in camera transitions completing before the world is fully loaded and ready to render
• Fixed an issue that resulted in motion rendering on Mali GPUs causing weapon effects, window glows, graffiti tags, and health bars to invert when a weapon was fired
• Fixed an issue that resulted in snow mound model ignoring Screen Space Ambient Occlusion (SSAO)
• Fixed an issue that resulted in incorrect texture compression extension detection on Adreno GPUs
• Fixed an issue that resulted in shadows rendering incorrectly on Adreno GPUs
• Fixed an issue that resulted in memory allocation not aligning on 64-bit CPUs
• Fixed multiple issues that resulted in crashes when objects were accessed before being initialized
• Fixed an issue that resulted in a crash during OpenGL texture upload
• Fixed an issue that resulted in several crashes due to compiler optimizations of older code
• Fixed an issue that resulted in performance being affected across all supported devices and enabled multicore rendering
• Fixed an issue that resulted in calculations in geography class placing flags in the wrong position
• Fixed an issue with sound coordinate calculations that resulted in floating point errors
• Fixed an issue with memory management code that resulted in crashes
• Fixed multiple issues that resulted in file handle leaks
• Fixed an issue that resulted in a crash when the game was attempting to delete a persistent entity incorrectly
• Fixed an issue in join constraint code that resulted in a crash
• Reduced the system load of the audio and asset streaming
• Fixed multiple typecasting errors that resulted in crashes
• Fixed several out of bounds issues