Rock, Paper, Shotgun

04/12/2008 at 17:06 RedBrain says:

I truly suspect this is entirely the fault of the DRM that was put in place. Awesome.

04/12/2008 at 17:11 Monchberter says:

Pitchfork and blazing torch duly lit. Mob mode on.

04/12/2008 at 17:12 Gap Gen says:

Well, I’m not sure that SecuROM has ever fucked up this badly? I smell a large fraction of the problem is just a bad conversion.

04/12/2008 at 17:19 Dude says:

Yeah, and then they will say the game is not selling on PC, and then they will say the platform is dying…

04/12/2008 at 17:25 FP says:

I think I’ve been lucky so far, only had two problems, a hang the first time it asked me to log in to GFWL (GTA was minimized to open my web browser but when I restored it it was just a blank screen) and the fact that the bowling controls are horribly broken with my mouse.

I think somewhere in there is a pretty decent port trying to get out, shame it’s buried amongst useless stuff like Securom, Social Club and GFWL.

04/12/2008 at 17:26 Putter says:

I’m a huge fan of GTA and really wanted to play this game right when my Christmas break starts (next Wednesday). Now I guess I’ll just play one of my many other games until they get this sorted out.

I should mention that the San Andreas PC initial release had a few hiccups, but nothing this major. Not being able to play on High or even Medium detail level on a supposedly capable system sounds familiar, though.

04/12/2008 at 17:30 qrter says:

Once in, Rockstar deems you too stupid to set your own settings and actively limits them.

Besides all the insane DRM/social network ridiculousness, this truly baffles me. I can’t think of any other PC game that does this.

(Isn’t there a config file somewhere, where you can change a line, etc.?)

04/12/2008 at 17:35 subedii says:

Is it cynical of me to suggest that resulting lower than expected sales will be solely attributed to (the character archetype humorously portrayed by Johnny Depp in the movie rendition of a Walt Disney theme park ride), and not in fact the fault of anyone directly involved with this project ?

04/12/2008 at 17:36 Man Raised By Puffins says:

Blimey, and I thought the GTA3 port was bad.

I was thinking of picking this up for PC down the line in addition to my 360 copy, mainly to sample mods and have properly integrated mp3 radio stations, but this fiasco has pretty much put paid to that idea.

04/12/2008 at 17:41 JS says:

@qrter
I cannot think of another game like it.
There are ways round most of the issues certainly, but I bought this game to play. Not spend countless hours, filled with anger and frustration trawling through forums to find out how to get it to work. It is truly a shocking release and I cannot express my distain for it, the company or my recommendation to all who read this NOT to buy this game, more forceably.

@Rook
My XP install is brand new. Drivers for XFI and GPU can be a week old at the worst. Regardless, what they have released is unforgivably poor.

04/12/2008 at 17:44 Bidermaier says:

Its really not that bad.
Some people just need to have an excuse to download pirated games.

04/12/2008 at 17:48 Lim-Dul says:

Good that I’m pretty much uninterested in the GTA series ever since it took to 3D and pretty much re-established the “sandbox game” genre in the 3D generation. =)

I’m like Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw – for me linearity in games is not necessarily a downside. I like my games to be like interactive books or movies. =)

04/12/2008 at 17:50 Downloads_Plz says:

Some people just need to have an excuse to download pirated games.

Reading far more stories of the install going badly and/or the game just plain not working than stories of the game working perfectly (of which I’ve read none…) is more than enough reason for me.

I’ll be downloading this as soon as the pirates are done.

04/12/2008 at 17:57 Theory says:

I’ve decided not to buy it due to all this not-working Kerfuffle.

I decided not to buy it in anticipation of the not-working kerfuffle. :p

I’ll probably pick it up a few patches down the line.

04/12/2008 at 17:59 Funky Badger says:

Reminds me of the Neverwinter Nights 2 “release”.

04/12/2008 at 18:02 Flappybat says:

Unfortunately I find it very believable that reviewers strongly downplayed bugs because of assurances from Rockstar or Microsoft that it was “review code” and eagerness to land launch reviews of one of the biggest games of the year.

04/12/2008 at 18:12 unclelou says:

This is very interesting, Alec – I read a few of those “hardware charts” German PC mags like to publish in their reviews, and they all said the game ran generally pretty well – no crashes, and good performance with any C2D and a reasonably up to date GPU.

What in Zeus’ name has happened between the review and the release versions?

I’d like to add that the game runs fine for me, but the perfromance could definitely be better.

04/12/2008 at 18:18 JS says:

For reference on my C2D e6400, 4GB ram (less in XP obviously), overclocked 8800GTS, the game ran fine at 1152×864 with medium textures or 1280×1024 with low textures and practically all sliders at the bottom (those were the choices I was given).

But this was no longer the point. The 25 hours it took to download on a 24mbit connection, the littany of superfluous and wholly unwanted installations before getting anywhere near the bugs, the bugs when I got there, the handcuffing of the settings. By the time I was playing, I had experienced so much frustration and anger that I quite literally hated the game with a passion and had long since resolved to get a refund and complain to Rockstar.

04/12/2008 at 18:20 TychoCelchuuu says:

My friend bought the game and it works perfectly well. The huge amounts of people who aren’t having any problems don’t go onto the Internet and whine about it.

04/12/2008 at 18:22 Wookie_Wookstar (Big D) says:

It works on now, but I had to force Social Club to quit before I played, that was the only way I got past the insta crash bug. Graphics seem ok but I will wait for patch before I play as Rockstar have really Slapped PC gamers in the face on this one, it was born on the PC so should now shine on it!

Meh!

04/12/2008 at 19:10 spirit7 says:

For those Vista owners getting the RMN 40 error, I solved it by making sure both the GTA IV shortcut and the steam shortcuts were not running in Win XP SP2 compatibility mode.

So if you’re getting it:

- Make sure everything installed properly;
- Get the .NET Framework 3.5 from the MS website;
- Make sure compatibility modes are disabled;
- Pray.

04/12/2008 at 19:20 Frans Coehoorn says:

And this is why I am a pc AND Xbox 360 gamer. Oh and by the way, publishers always send out the non DRM release codes for the (early) reviews nowadays, so it seems. I had a Mass Effect release code from EA/BioWare without the damn DRM crap a few weeks earlier before release – before the whole DRMgate started at the BioWare forums (and thus the denying of it) as well. Rockstar probably did the same with GTA IV. Actually pretty mean, innit?

04/12/2008 at 19:31 mrt181 says:

i will wait for patches. if it does not take too long so that i still care for this game i will buy it, then get a sec-free version and enjoy. if i do not care anymore i will wait until it’s available for 10 -20 credits and think again about buying it

04/12/2008 at 19:36 Elyscape says:

When the game crashes, does it just display the Fatal Error Code or does it also tell you what it means? If it doesn’t, that’s absolutely unforgivable; implementing a useful-error-message system is a task that would take up all of a lunchtime, if even that.

04/12/2008 at 19:38 Alex says:

Pags said:

Have Rockstar ever had any success porting the GTA games to PC?

I bought GTA Vice City when it went on sale for $2.50 on Steam and haven’t had any PC-specific problems aside from the bizarre way the game treats mouse sensitivity.

Maybe if I wait six years before picking up GTA IV, I’ll have the same smooth experience!

04/12/2008 at 19:58 Switch625 says:

I had a right nightmare getting this up and running. After gritting my teeth and signing up for a social club account and a gamertag, I find that it’s associated my gamertag with the Live login I use for work, which is attached to my MSDN subscription. There seems to be no way to change it.
Finally in the game and it runs at 800×600, looks like shit and all the textures are missing. I have a GeForce 8800GTS. I’ve just updated my nVidia drivers to the latest, but no change.
About to go look at Keiron’s earlier post where there was a link to a thread to fix it but, like him, I’m not over the moon about the idea of “safe mode” being involved.
So, yeah, a bit grumpy about the whole thing at this point.

04/12/2008 at 20:10 IvanHoeHo says:

I was under the impression that the dev team spent 12 months doing nothing except optimizing this thing for the PC. And maybe DLC.

04/12/2008 at 20:12 Caiman says:

Actually, the result of all this was me buying an xbox 360 today. We really wanted to play this game on PC, but forget it – we’re going with the easier option. I should have done this 7 months ago, but for some reason I trusted Rockstar to do better.

04/12/2008 at 20:16 Migit says:

I don’t think Rockstar is interested in making A GOOD pc game no more

04/12/2008 at 20:51 Duoae says:

I just like clicking plus i hate restrictive and cumbersome DRM….

Also, i already have it on 360 and wasn’t particularly impressed. It has none of the Charm of Vice City or San Andreas and the social aspect of the game can get in the way of things.

04/12/2008 at 20:56 Heliocentric says:

Missed that in the maelstrom of comments.

My bad, still props to valve. They acted swiftly.

04/12/2008 at 21:01 GregP says:

What I want to know is, why have 99% of the screenshots supplied with various websites’ review of the game used only the nice, touched-up, antialiased ones that Rockstar themselves created? You cannot find a single “real” PC version screenshot in anybody’s review, anywhere …

I run at 1920×1080 with all graphics options maxed, but with no AA or AF, it still looks nowhere near as good as the review screenshots you see everywhere. This is criminal, IMO.

04/12/2008 at 21:07 mutiny sound says:

Surprised people are complaining about the size! It’s a massive, detailed environment pasted with high resolution textures (and you can’t really do a city procedurally like FC2 does savannah). Did you think it wouldn’t be huge?
Everything else is a massive wreck, obviously, which is pretty appropriate for GTA.

04/12/2008 at 22:05 Erlam says:

As has been said, I’m awaiting the news that this is somehow the platforms fault, even when games come out for it a dozen at a time every day that work fine.

04/12/2008 at 22:32 well says:

Hmmm, “half the internet?” I don’t know. It’s pretty easy to take things out of proportion when it comes to the internet, all anyone has to see is a couple forums of complaints, and then its usually assumed that ‘everyone’ is having a problem. Also, perhaps the popularity of the GTA series itself is why the problems seem to happening to so many more people – if some game you don’t care about has some problems, no big deal, but everyone’s heard of GTA and is at least somewhat interested in it, and so any problems will grab your attention.

04/12/2008 at 22:52 Thomas Larsen says:

FYI, the .Net requirements are for the Social Club application, and not the game.

Doesn’t dismiss the criticism though, as the Social Club application could easily have been integrated into the game itself, and without requiring .Net as well.

As for the installation process, it went pretty smooth, but it should be noted that since i also use .Net for programming i pretty much install any updates to the .Net Framework the instant they’re available, and i apparently got my Live updated with the Fallout 3 release, so no problems there.

The game itself is having serious issues here though, it’s not as serious as being unable to start it, but it’s close, if i want to play GTA4 probably 3 out of 4 times my game will be “blank”, meaning that there’s nothing being rendered except for a skybox(not even that sometimes).

So restarting your game several times just to get past that is annoying.

The only thing lacking in my system is a decent graphics card, it’s only a Geforce 8800 GTS(G92), other than that i got top of the line hardware (Core i7, Velociraptor, DDR3, etc.) and even then my settings are medium and less.

The game is also riddled with various rendering bugs, somtimes you’ll even see the game constantly flickering between low-resolution textures and higher resolution textures.

Performance seem to drop sometimes even when there’s nothing going on, but work fine when half the city is blowing up.

And as a last sidebonus the “grain” effect on the shadows are annoying me like hell, it looks like someone is using the paintbrush tool on your shadows while you’re running around.

Any chump could’ve protected against zero-day piracy, heck Valve even did it 5-6 years ago, i feel sorry for them that they pissed away their money on anti-piracy, money better spent on debugging. The game is already cracked, and people have already begun to bypass their “wobbly”-camera protection.

04/12/2008 at 23:41 Trithemius says:

I seem to have fairly smooth sailing now that I am in the game. It takes forever to shut down, but I have not had a crash to desktop yet – and I get them regularly, albeit at a fairly low frequency, with Fallout 3 (and Oblivion for that matter).

Having to dick about with all the multiple logins is a bit of a pain and I don’t really know why it takes so damn to load up on my machine, but it sounds that I am having a really good time compared to – oh – everyone else.

Pls don’t hate on me.

05/12/2008 at 00:20 Orange says:

Although it’s a bit fiddly getting past social club and into the game, and the install was very slow, I’ve had no issues.

I do feel the anti-drm pitchfork wielding is excessive. Not convinced it will result in a happy ending for pc gaming either.

05/12/2008 at 02:34 Tim says:

I regret buying it now, it’s been such a pain and runs like a dog now I’ve got it going. I doubt steam will give my money back though, since I’ve actually put a couple of hours into it. Irritatingly a lot of that was starting and stopping it trying to figure out a way to make it reasonable. Hmm. I don’t get why I can run fallout beautifully and flawlessly, but this looks like the screen has been sand papered. Definitely an over rated game.

05/12/2008 at 04:48 mkreku says:

Aaiih, I have this on pre-order that hasn’t arrived yet! HOW DO I STOP IT??

Will it work if I weld my post box shut?

05/12/2008 at 05:16 well says:

I really wonder how many people are affected by these problems. If you have problems, of course you’re gonna make a thread “GTA4 doesn’t work!!” or whatever-you’ll complain about the problem. But if your game installed without a problem, you’re not going to start a thread saying “GTA4 installed just fine!”-unless you’re just bragging, you probably won’t report a successful install to the internet.

Seeing a lot of posts or comments saying GTA4 doesn’t work doesn’t automatically mean the entire internet is having problems. Half the people don’t even have the game, they’re just supporting the ones who are having problems and declaring their hatred for a game they don’t have (unless they’ve played it on console). It’s easy to feed off each other’s comments and get wrapped up in frothing frenzy of hatred and speculation (by the way, I’m not talking about RPS). I’m on the internet though, I should really learn to just expect that to happen.

05/12/2008 at 06:13 wyrmsine says:

@well : It’s not just the installs, painful though they were. I’m finding it barely playable at settings equivalent to San Andreas. Simply put, the game chugs at any speed for me, and I well exceed system requirements. I keep trying – it’s clearly a first-class, must-play game. I just wish I could, y’know, play it. There’s no excuse for it – it’s a terrible product, made all the worse for it’s obvious, unattainable excellence. It’s got to be reiterated: GTA IV is not worth buying. No developer, or publisher, should put out a product this damaged. If it were a horse, it would be crapping chromosomes with every step.

05/12/2008 at 07:57 Nikolia says:

didnt work for me… untill i used a crack

05/12/2008 at 09:29 Nallen says:

The really funny thing about all this is that once you’re over the slight wow effect the game is pretty dry.

05/12/2008 at 10:06 Bobsy says:

The irony is that the last two GTAs were actually really good ports. It was a happy story – after the utter mess that was GTA3, Vice City and San Andreas were both ported with care, love and attention. Whoops.

05/12/2008 at 10:36 Urael says:

This is one of those occasions where I’m deeply ashamed to be as smug as I am about not touching this release with a 10-ft pole: much as I love the PC, I’ve learned some hard lessons in recent years about buying into anything jizzed-over with raw hype. Publishers have used gamer anticipation time and time again to push out shoddy, beta product, hoping to make their fortune before people cotton on, and I’m SICK to DEATH of it. I simply won’t buy new releases anymore, not until I’ve judged the response from the wider gaming community. I have better things to do with my life than spend days/weeks consulting forums, adjusting config files, downloading patches etc….just to get a game to run acceptably.

Sadly, for many gamers GTA IV seems to have taken this horror to new extremes, various parties bundling invasive software with it hoping that the wow factor will overcome the added inconvenience. It seems with every major release now, some fresh hell gets added to the mix by someone hoping to push their agenda onto the PC platform. Once it’s been out there a while…we get used to it, then another piece gets added….remember when Steam was voted the worst ever innovation for PC consumer gaming? Now, to read the comments on here and other places, it’s the saving grace of the platform. How low we’ve sunk.

Half the time it’s the evil money men ruining gaming, the other half – it’s the schmucks in gaming land who keep letting things like this slide. When is it enough, people? Where are we drawing the line?

05/12/2008 at 11:50 Dot says:

Once it’s been out there a while…we get used to it, then another piece gets added….remember when Steam was voted the worst ever innovation for PC consumer gaming? Now, to read the comments on here and other places, it’s the saving grace of the platform. How low we’ve sunk.

I’m sorry, but this is a rather stupid point to make. The reason why Steam was much disliked was because…it sucked horribly when it was first released. It doesn’t nowadays, in fact it has evolved into the single best PC game distribution service which is why people, myself included, love it today?

05/12/2008 at 12:30 unclelou says:

“….remember when Steam was voted the worst ever innovation for PC consumer gaming? Now, to read the comments on here and other places, it’s the saving grace of the platform. How low we’ve sunk.”

Er, no. I don’t remember that, actually. I do remember though that, a few technical hiccups some people experienced aside, most people except the usual doom and gloom paranoia crowd which now for the most part is a little ashamed welcomed it with open arms. :p

05/12/2008 at 13:39 psyk says:

Whats wrong with gfwl it stays hidden unless you press a button and you can stop it notifying you of achievements and messages.

05/12/2008 at 14:54 LEEDER KRENNON says:

i’d rather suffer the pain of getting this game to run, than sell out and buy a console.

05/12/2008 at 16:59 Salen says:

Had to skip logging in to Rockstar Social Club for the first day, but it has worked since then.

Framerate is terrible, even running at the lowest settings, but it is playable. As comparison, I play FarCry 2 at full stuff which is lovely and smooth.

From reading vast threads, it seems like certain graphics cards are particularly well suited; 8800GTX has been brought up a few times. Also that it relies a lot more than most recent games on the CPU. I wonder how much of that is due to the nature of the game (with all those little people needing their AI) and how much is due to poor design. For instance I hear that shadows are being handled on the CPU rather than graphics card, which seems a little odd.

When I play, I have THREE social networking services running. None of which I have any interest in. Hurray!

05/12/2008 at 17:20 Salen says:

Oh, secret top tip!

Press P during the game, and you can toggle post-processing effects. This gives a depth of field effect and motion blur.

Personally I hate the effect, finding it far too blurry. But it might be nice for some.

05/12/2008 at 20:18 foo says:

Actually, it worked pretty well for me.

Sure, load times are a bit long and performance a bit low, but apart from that the only problem I had was with the user-supplied music (“Independence FM” radio station), which seems to make the game unstable. (But that might be a problem with my MP3s)

Apart from that I had a single crash after playing 12 hours since it came out, so that’s not too bad.

Oh, and two times textures wouldn’t load at all after starting the game, however that could be fixed with simply restarting the game. This only happened directly after starting & loading a save, not while you’re playing.

So all in all it’s far from perfect, but certainly playable for me (I’ve finished about half the main missions so far)

05/12/2008 at 23:46 Tei says:

Something that I hate from console are retarded messages like “don’t shutdown the machine while is saving”. And is another thing that I love from the PC. On a PC game you just press F5 and a message say “Game saved” (or even not message at all). The game don’t need to stop, you can save anywhere, and it just work.
For some reasons console games have a problem with “just work” and need to add extra stuff, that is totally lame, or look like something forced by lawyers.

06/12/2008 at 04:58 Rob Merritt says:

Runs fine on my system. Hated the epic install with two online accounts to set up but once I was past that I avoided the issues others were having.

06/12/2008 at 06:27 Mark Stevens says:

Hoop-jumping circus aside, I think the game’s biggest flaw is that it’s simply not all that.

Unless you’re following the main story/missions (which just feel like GTA: The Greatest Hits), there’s not really much to see and do. Even the cops seem a bit half-hearted in their attempt to chase me around after I’ve shot up an entire city block.

I’ve gone back to play through GTA III again and I’m having a lot more fun.

06/12/2008 at 16:17 Kadayi says:

God the install took forever and a day and a few crashes later I finally managed to get the game running. Even in enormo-pixel, lousy shading, jaggy vision I have to say it’s a lovely looking thing though.

06/12/2008 at 18:02 adolf says:

in the gta 4 is say:fatal error:rmn40
what i shoud be do?

07/12/2008 at 00:03 terry says:

I was sort of dreading installing this after hearing several-hour-long ordeals but it was pretty quick and painless and the game performs more or less exactly as I was expecting. The only thing I see wrong is the distant scenery dithering being wonkified (technical term) in the same way that distant textures were in Oblivion. Even with my ageing x2 2.01ghz it is more than playable. Mystifying.

07/12/2008 at 12:49 terry says:

Haha, bang on cue I got the aforementioned invisible textures – installing the NVidia Beta drivers sorted that out, at least. The bummer now is that Roman keeps phoning and Nico refuses to answer the phone or put it away again. That patch might be welcome after all :P

09/12/2008 at 01:42 noclip says:

I’m still waiting for Rockstar to explain to me why I get a better framerate in Crysis than in GTA 4.

10/12/2008 at 07:44 malkav11 says:

Actually, I’d call GTA IV a rather good port. Here’s why – to me the quality of the port is not related to the quality of the technical coding (which seems to be quite low in this case). It’s a measure of how well they adapted the game to the new platform in terms of things like controls, settings, new content, usability, etc. And GTA IV looks better on PC – I can make out all kinds of details I never could on my SDTV beforehand. Watching fake ingame TV is hilarious and can zoom right to fullscreen. The cops no longer seem to glom onto me the moment I steal any car anywhere. Shooting people is of course easy with mouse aim, and even the notoriously finicky driving seems a bit more user-friendly with PC controls. All in all, I’m liking it a lot better on PC than I ever did on 360. That, and it easily and seamlessly transitions between mouse and keyboard and the 360 controller without even going into a menu. Just use one set or the other as you please. Even the tooltips will immediately shift to the appropriate controls.

Unfortunately, my framerate was slowly dying as I played on and was unacceptably low in particular during high speed driving chases. And the shadows as previously mentioned look awful. The P key produces post-processing that helps mitigate that, but that has its own visual drawbacks. And the game won’t remember that you’ve activated it.

So if they can fix the technical problems, particularly the framerate issues (I’ve had no trouble with crashes, possibly because I don’t log into the Social Club and use a crack to disable the copy protection.), I think they have a winner on their hands.

18/12/2008 at 23:20 S says:

Works perfectly fine on my quite-capable-yet-not-hi-end-PC, never crashed, not a single problem with Social Club. Running Vista SP1. And that’s it.