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Players Furious Over Buggy GTA IV PC Release
Jupix writes "It took Rockstar most of a year to port Grand Theft Auto IV to the PC, and while they claim this was because they wanted polish and quality with their PC release, it appears the result has been less than satisfactory. Players all over the internet are furious over numerous bugs in the release, ranging from nonfunctional internet registration and graphics glitches to completely inoperative installations. One of the game's largest retailers, Steam, has reportedly gone so far as to start handing out refunds to hordes of unsatisfied (and no doubt uncomfortably noisy) customers."
People are getting their refund requests denied now. Presumably Valve were being nice to the first few, but shut the door when a lot of people started asking.
If you charge back you risk Valve shutting down your Steam account, apparently. The joys of someone else controlling access to games you've bought I guess.
Despite my concerns over all the hoopla DRM I purchased this via Steam. Let's go over a few of the problems:
a) ~15 Gig. Really? Really. ... since I only boot into windows to play games like this it has basically rendered itself a total fucking disgrace. Valve better be refunding my money or they will lose an up-till-now loyal customer. I've been playing games for like 28 years (GIT AWF MY L4WN) and this is the most buggy piece of shit my eyes have seen since some of the Atari Jaguar games.
b) Needs new versions of at least 2, maybe 3 Microsoft programs to be installed before playing.
c) Installs some fucking crap ass community software that was never asked for or mentioned when making the initial purchase over steam. This shiet from Rockstar goes in the system tray and puts up a fricken splash screen at every reboot on your desktop just to play their game.
d) The inane pushing of the new Games for Windows stuff. Oh I have to create a local G4W profile even if I never plan on playing online?
e) During loading it displays a black screen for 3-4 minutes on my box with 4gig/7200rpm disk. It's a laptop so at least I can feel the disk spinning to make sure it is doing something.
f) The resolution change takes SO long I never get to confirm it before it switches back when I am actually in the game.
g) The first time I ran it with defaults, no textures loaded until about 30 seconds *after* the opening cinematic was done and my player was sitting in the car.
h) Running the benchmark twice within one session causes a crash on my machine.
i) It has already crashed multiple times.
--- I do not moderate.
Huh... I guess I've just been very lucky so far. I've been playing GTA4 for two days now with no stability issues. I've got Vista64 installed with 4GB RAM. That's the gaming side of my PC (I do everything else in Debian), so I try to tune it towards better game performance... things like turning off services that I'll never need for games.
Now, the port does have some issues. I've got a fairly decent machine and, especially when compared with games like Crysis or Farcry 2, this engine clearly needs some optimization. Strangely, it seems CPU limited rather than GPU limited. After I quit the game, I can see on my CPU graph that both cores have been running at ~100%. I spent some time tweaking the video settings and right now I've got it running with both decent quality and a decent framerate.
One "feature" that seems to be annoying a lot of people is the video memory "calculator" the game uses. For each setting you modify, it calculates how much video memory that will cost. Your total is your installed video memory (512MB on my card). Not everything affects it, but increasing resolution, texture size, and draw distance will. So depending on how you set these you can't necessarily have them all high. But, it doesn't seem to work very well. You can override it from the command line. I forced it to use my LCD resolution (1280x1024) with high textures and a decent draw distance. This puts me at about 730/512MB on my "budget" yet the game still runs just fine and it looks better too.
They added a "dynamic shadow" feature to the PC version which you can adjust in the graphics menu. The values range from 0 to 16, but the quality at any setting is mediocre. It's a nice idea, but poorly implemented, and the game will run a bit faster when I turn it off.
Another annoying bit already mentioned is the control scheme. Fortunately, I purchased an XBox360 controller for use on my PC because that is the only gamepad supported by GTA4 (though I didn't know that when I bought the controller). Also, you can't actually *change* any of the mappings. There is a "Controller Configuration" menu item, but when you select it you are shown a picture of the controller and a diagram of what each button does. You can press R-stick left and right but all that does is show you the mappings for on foot, in vehicle, etc.
Like previous GTA ports, the PC version will let you play your own music on one of the radio stations (Independence FM here). They've even improved it for GTA4 and one of the modes will automatically insert fake commercials and DJ banter between your music if you like. But... it doesn't support Ogg (my preferred format) or many others. I do have some MP3s, though, and could always transcode if I wanted. The game specifically says that you can put shortcuts to your music or music folders into the user music directory. But... it doesn't work with networked mounts. I keep all of my music on my server and access via Samba from Windows or NFS in Linux. But not for GTA4... it just ignores any shortcuts that access another machine. Lame!
Still, despite these issues, it's been working far better for me than it has for most people and I've certainly been enjoying it so far.
Elrond, Duke of URL
"This is the most fun I've had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"-Sam&Max
Actually, this DRM is special. I think it could be responsible for the bugs people are seeing. Rockstar has gone out of their way to add in extra crap: dozens of little "easter eggs" like a spinning camera, missing textures, similar stuff, to copies that don't validate. It's more than a simple one time Securom check, there's at least a dozen different hooks that check to see if the version is legit.
This might be why the scene is having such trouble cracking the damned game. FeDOR may have finally cracked it, but it's taken more PROPERs than your average release.
Note/Disclaimer: I'm not going to pirate or buy this game, I'm nowhere near the minimum system requirements, and I don't generally pirate stuff anyway. I'm just following the scene releases so I can be the first one to laugh at Rockstar's "uncrackable, no really this time" DRM.
Obligatory Soundbite Catchphrase
You can in the UK at least - the Sale of Goods Act (1979) requires that goods sold are of 'satisfactory quality' and demonstrate 'fitness for purpose'; the GTA 4 release admirably fails on both counts and GAME/HMV/Currys/whatever are breaking the law if they won't give you a full refund with the same payment method you used. Law of the land > Company policy