Grand Theft Auto: Frosted Winter – Walkthrough

"It's early 2002s. After the death of Don Salvatore Leone, Tony Cipriani took the leadership over the familly as the traditions say that a new don is ellected from the capos. And Tony was the most experienced of them all. But this soon had to be changed as Joey Leone had to become the new don on behalf of Salvatore's last will. But there were two conditions. 1 - Joey had to create a familly. So he married Misty. 2 - Joey had to make a big deal which would bring profit to the familly. But then Tony betrays Joey and sends him to death. Joey survives. He's on the run now, cannot return home, cannot trust enyone. Only one thing is on his mind now. Revenge..."
— mod introduction on GTAForums

Welcome to my guide to Grand Theft Auto: Frosted Winter, a total conversion mod for Grand Theft Auto III. Frosted Winter takes place in 2002, the year following the events of III, and puts the player in the shoes of Joey Leone, one of the mission givers from the original game, as he deals with a betrayal and hostile takeover of the crime family he inherited.

The mod itself was posted to the community-run GTAForums by user BEGINit (under the Pistukas Mods "studio") in December 2010. Having been developed at that time, some many aspects of it certainly haven't stood the test of time and plenty of criticism can be made about the mod's quality. However, despite its issues I think Frosted Winter is still worth playing for various reasons, ranging from it being a time capsule of the GTA modding scene to simply offering a winter-themed GTA experience for variety. As for me, well... if I truly hated this mod, I wouldn't have cared enough to write a guide that would ease people into experiencing it and prepare them for the rough parts.

Many elements of this mod are unintentionally rage-inducing, and in turn this guide might take potshots at the mod, mostly for comedic value to point out odd elements of the plot, but occasionally to point out objectively bad gameplay design choices. However, I must make it clear that no kind of quality shortcoming justifies bullying and I do not condone any kind of going after any people responsible for the mod or bullying them. If you take the criticism contained in this guide as an excuse to go after them, go fuck yourself.

One of the key issues with completing Frosted Winter is a really clunky structure of mission progression combined with really aggravating mission design. The mod does a poor job of telegraphing what you're supposed to do in order to progress through the plot, so this guide will offer advice on what to do to keep going and also potentially make the sucky parts suck a bit less. Alongside that, this guide will separate parts into acts despite the mod itself not using such categorization. This is done to help roughly illustrate the progress the player makes through the plot and hopefully help cut down on the wondering "how far along in this mod's story am I?".

This walkthrough will describe missions and game mechanics as they appear after installing all the patches listed in the mod's GTAForums thread. This will mean some differences from the game's original unpatched builds, some of which are particularly egregious (like a tailing mission lasting about twice as long without the mission patch). In order to get the most out of this guide, make sure you have all the patches in place!

⚠ Guide under construction!