GTA:IV from a casual standpoint.
GTA:IV from a casual standpoint.
Spoiler warning: There will be spoilers about early missions in this entry so don't complain to me if you're butthurt that I spoiled a mission that you would play five minutes into the game.
Recently I indulged in what could very well be described as bit of a gaming binge. I had hardware failures left and right and I was already overdrawn with my bank, so I figured I should amuse myself a little for some RnR. I played TF2 a little, but got bored of it so I finally decided to buy Left 4 Dead (great game, actually. I only hope Valve is going to hurry up and release more compaigns) and finally Silent Hill: Homecoming (yet to play it) and GTA:IV for PC.
We're here to discuss GTA:IV, so forget about the other games mentioned.
Let's just go over my specs, shall we?
Windows XP x86
AMD 64 x2 6400+ BE (3.20GHz)
nVidia 9600GT 512MB
4GB Geil Black Dragon RAM (3.12 detected)
Abit AN68SV MoBo
Audio Kontrol 1 External Soundcard
First of all, I pirated it to make sure it would run on my system (Note to R*: That 200k you spent trying to make this game unpirateable? You failed miserably), played a few missions and then during the third or fourth mission (the car chase one) I hit a memory leak. I go speeding into an alleyway - overjoyed that I was yet to hit a wall - and then suddenly the frame rate drops. I sat back and watch my car move at maybe 2fp/s and shrugged it off assuming that it was my CPU playing up or overheating. The interesting thing is that the audio worked 100% fine, it came up in real time (hearing Roman screaming at me for losing the car and the Mission Failed sound) yet my car had moved maybe half a metre.
I uninstalled it deciding it was a problem with the pirated version and did a bit of research and that's when I found out that I was one of thousands of people who had came across this exact same error in various parts of the game. Some people can't actually get the game to run, which surprised me until they told us the settings they were trying to run in at.
Thump's note: I know why you do this - I do the same thing. I get a game and the first thing I do is head into the options menu and crank up the visual settings, but remember that GTA:IV is a port and you're trying to play it on settings that are higher than even the consoles can play (some people were playing at twice the resolution). Take a deep breath, sit back and lower your settings. I'm playing it on 800x600 to get an increase in other settings.
Now I'm feeling a little hesitant to buy GTA:IV, but on the 24th I decided that all of these problems would be ironed out eventually, so I bought the game hoping that R* would hurry up and release patches. Let's just go over the major problems I've encountered so far.
These are the things I've noticed that can actually stop you from playing the game. GFW:L/RSC is the most annoying thing in my opinion. It wouldn't let me save my game because my wireless connection had faultered whilst I was creating a GFW:L account. Why not just tie it into the Steam system? It does the exact same job and you don't need to fight with the damn thing to get it working.
What do I think of this as a port? I think it's probably one of the worst ports in gaming history (yes, even worse than the MGS2 ports). It seems like those long months they were porting this game they completely ignored the optimisation and spent all their time figuring out how to stop the pirates - which is a total failure. Of course, in order to pirate the game you have to jump through hoops like a show horse on steroids and have to create accounts for GFW:L and RSC which can be a bit of a hassle, but even then it's nothing severe. Once you've made those two accounts, you block the applications from accessing the internet and you're playing the game. The only possible way to prevent piracy (as far as I can see) is to refuse offline play, and let's face it - that would be a disaster.
Don't get me wrong, I feel a lot of sympathy for R* and other PC game developers. The pirates are damaging the world of PC gaming, but instead of taking advantage of it, they brag about the game being "impossible to crack" which is enough to motivate any pirate. The gaming world is suffering the exact same knee jerk reaction that almost destroyed the music industry, and quite frankly, it's quite pathetic. I admit, I have pirated games in the past and will continue to do so, but if that game is worthy of my money than by all means I've no problem whatsoever in buying the game and supporting the developers (most of the time - they really aren't worth shit).
Let's swing the argument in another direction for a second.
PC gaming isn't suffering via piracy - everything is. PC is the easiest because it requires no modification whatsoever, the 360 is somewhat easy to modify (not sure how far the dev is on the new drives) and the PS3 is naturally resilliant to modification because nobody wants to spend a week downloading a 50GB game (along with the blu-ray burner and disks). Piracy has been around for ages and will continue to thrive as long as there's something that people want for nothing -- that's just human nature and greed.
R* fucked up with GTA:IV for the PC. Yes, I pirated the game but I decided to give them the benefit of the doubt and bought the game (which I'm now beginning to regret). My chief complaint is that the game isn't optimised at all... it's an awful port of the 360 version, and they need to take a long hard look at their list of priorities and figure this shit out - preventing piracy is one thing, but preventing gameplay is something else.
Update: I actually had every intention of posting this the other day when I had wrote it, but my internet disconnected (it hates WPA encryption) and I thought "fuck it" and went to bed. Since then I've tried just about every fix I can imagine. I found an interesting fix and tried that... it gave me better graphics, but I still had the annoying stuttering glitch. My message from R* was that my processor wasn't powerful enough to run the game constantly (another nail in the R* Toronto coffin), so I replied immediately with the system specifications that they had handed out, and to no surprise of mine I got no response from them.
Sigh.
On the forum I linked to earlier, a topic caught my attention. It was entitled How I fixed my stuttering/lagging problem. Intrigued, I looked to see what it said and promptly laughed like a crackwhore being tickled with a feather by their dealer. Earlier today I figured I'd try it just to try and improve my graphics at full screen and holy shit it worked. I actually played more than two missions without a sign of lag... I was fucking amazed.
And I swear I'm going to destroy the next person who says this game doesn't work because "it's still in development". If R* Toronto weren't so eager to get the game out for Christmas, we wouldn't have had to go through this whole bullshit. Sometimes you just need to spend more time with a game before you release it - and this is one of those times.
Spoiler warning: There will be spoilers about early missions in this entry so don't complain to me if you're butthurt that I spoiled a mission that you would play five minutes into the game.
Recently I indulged in what could very well be described as bit of a gaming binge. I had hardware failures left and right and I was already overdrawn with my bank, so I figured I should amuse myself a little for some RnR. I played TF2 a little, but got bored of it so I finally decided to buy Left 4 Dead (great game, actually. I only hope Valve is going to hurry up and release more compaigns) and finally Silent Hill: Homecoming (yet to play it) and GTA:IV for PC.
We're here to discuss GTA:IV, so forget about the other games mentioned.
Let's just go over my specs, shall we?
Windows XP x86
AMD 64 x2 6400+ BE (3.20GHz)
nVidia 9600GT 512MB
4GB Geil Black Dragon RAM (3.12 detected)
Abit AN68SV MoBo
Audio Kontrol 1 External Soundcard
First of all, I pirated it to make sure it would run on my system (Note to R*: That 200k you spent trying to make this game unpirateable? You failed miserably), played a few missions and then during the third or fourth mission (the car chase one) I hit a memory leak. I go speeding into an alleyway - overjoyed that I was yet to hit a wall - and then suddenly the frame rate drops. I sat back and watch my car move at maybe 2fp/s and shrugged it off assuming that it was my CPU playing up or overheating. The interesting thing is that the audio worked 100% fine, it came up in real time (hearing Roman screaming at me for losing the car and the Mission Failed sound) yet my car had moved maybe half a metre.
I uninstalled it deciding it was a problem with the pirated version and did a bit of research and that's when I found out that I was one of thousands of people who had came across this exact same error in various parts of the game. Some people can't actually get the game to run, which surprised me until they told us the settings they were trying to run in at.
Thump's note: I know why you do this - I do the same thing. I get a game and the first thing I do is head into the options menu and crank up the visual settings, but remember that GTA:IV is a port and you're trying to play it on settings that are higher than even the consoles can play (some people were playing at twice the resolution). Take a deep breath, sit back and lower your settings. I'm playing it on 800x600 to get an increase in other settings.
Now I'm feeling a little hesitant to buy GTA:IV, but on the 24th I decided that all of these problems would be ironed out eventually, so I bought the game hoping that R* would hurry up and release patches. Let's just go over the major problems I've encountered so far.
- Games for Windows Live/Rockstar Social Club - Really, if you're going to release a game on Steam, take your excessive bullshit out of the way. It's awful, uneccesary and you're only doing it because you don't trust Steam have the piracy issue under control.
- Memory leaks - What the hell, R*? I understand that you guys have a deadline to keep but that is no excuse for problems this big. This makes games unplayable and from what I can see there's no way to combat this. Once it hits it's game over, if you haven't saved then you're fucked. The most annoying thing about the memory leaks are that it can sometimes hit in the menu... go figure.
- Sometimes the game doesn't actually load - I've no idea what the hell this is about. You can get it working only by restarting the game (I spent an hour trying to load it up). When I first installed the game I tried to run the graphics benchmark and during the loading screen it just cycled the song (which isn't set to loop) and then the montage continued to loop. No graphics benchmark at all.
- Games for Windows Live - Once you're signed in (online or offline) you'll get a message at the bottom of the screen informing you that you can push "Home" at any point to enter the GFW:L service. That's all well and good, but sometimes when you press the Home key and the GFW:L overlay appears, and on occasion it will stop responding entirely. Also, it appears that the GFW:L account stops you from accessing Steam's "Friends" tab. I've pressed shift and tab and got it working once... but of course it wouldn't let me close the Steam Overlay.
These are the things I've noticed that can actually stop you from playing the game. GFW:L/RSC is the most annoying thing in my opinion. It wouldn't let me save my game because my wireless connection had faultered whilst I was creating a GFW:L account. Why not just tie it into the Steam system? It does the exact same job and you don't need to fight with the damn thing to get it working.
What do I think of this as a port? I think it's probably one of the worst ports in gaming history (yes, even worse than the MGS2 ports). It seems like those long months they were porting this game they completely ignored the optimisation and spent all their time figuring out how to stop the pirates - which is a total failure. Of course, in order to pirate the game you have to jump through hoops like a show horse on steroids and have to create accounts for GFW:L and RSC which can be a bit of a hassle, but even then it's nothing severe. Once you've made those two accounts, you block the applications from accessing the internet and you're playing the game. The only possible way to prevent piracy (as far as I can see) is to refuse offline play, and let's face it - that would be a disaster.
Don't get me wrong, I feel a lot of sympathy for R* and other PC game developers. The pirates are damaging the world of PC gaming, but instead of taking advantage of it, they brag about the game being "impossible to crack" which is enough to motivate any pirate. The gaming world is suffering the exact same knee jerk reaction that almost destroyed the music industry, and quite frankly, it's quite pathetic. I admit, I have pirated games in the past and will continue to do so, but if that game is worthy of my money than by all means I've no problem whatsoever in buying the game and supporting the developers (most of the time - they really aren't worth shit).
Let's swing the argument in another direction for a second.
PC gaming isn't suffering via piracy - everything is. PC is the easiest because it requires no modification whatsoever, the 360 is somewhat easy to modify (not sure how far the dev is on the new drives) and the PS3 is naturally resilliant to modification because nobody wants to spend a week downloading a 50GB game (along with the blu-ray burner and disks). Piracy has been around for ages and will continue to thrive as long as there's something that people want for nothing -- that's just human nature and greed.
R* fucked up with GTA:IV for the PC. Yes, I pirated the game but I decided to give them the benefit of the doubt and bought the game (which I'm now beginning to regret). My chief complaint is that the game isn't optimised at all... it's an awful port of the 360 version, and they need to take a long hard look at their list of priorities and figure this shit out - preventing piracy is one thing, but preventing gameplay is something else.
Update: I actually had every intention of posting this the other day when I had wrote it, but my internet disconnected (it hates WPA encryption) and I thought "fuck it" and went to bed. Since then I've tried just about every fix I can imagine. I found an interesting fix and tried that... it gave me better graphics, but I still had the annoying stuttering glitch. My message from R* was that my processor wasn't powerful enough to run the game constantly (another nail in the R* Toronto coffin), so I replied immediately with the system specifications that they had handed out, and to no surprise of mine I got no response from them.
Sigh.
On the forum I linked to earlier, a topic caught my attention. It was entitled How I fixed my stuttering/lagging problem. Intrigued, I looked to see what it said and promptly laughed like a crackwhore being tickled with a feather by their dealer. Earlier today I figured I'd try it just to try and improve my graphics at full screen and holy shit it worked. I actually played more than two missions without a sign of lag... I was fucking amazed.
And I swear I'm going to destroy the next person who says this game doesn't work because "it's still in development". If R* Toronto weren't so eager to get the game out for Christmas, we wouldn't have had to go through this whole bullshit. Sometimes you just need to spend more time with a game before you release it - and this is one of those times.
posted by Thump at 4:17 pm
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