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."

Comments

I'm slightly astonished

[James_Duncan8181]

One would think that the Xbox 360 port should come right over...I'm just not sure where all the extra bugs would arise. The actual game logic and assets should be identical.

Re:I'm slightly astonished

[ModernGeek]

An easy port have been the case with the original xbox, as it was just a pentium 3 computer running a windows varient, but the new xbox 360 uses a power pc chip (used in macintoshes from the mid 90s until 2006) with an os that is based off of an early version of windows nt that supported power pc prcessors. I imagine the differences in modern pc architecture and the modern xbox actually make porting a game quite difficult if it is not written on a common platform that runs on all systems, which I assume because of it's nature, gta 4 is not

Re:I'm slightly astonished

[MrHanky]

As a modern geek, you should realise that CPU architecture doesn't matter a lot when coding in modern languages.

Re:I'm slightly astonished

[Amphetam1ne]

It's the DRM. Many of the crashing problems seem to be Securom crashing, which causes the game client to exit to desktop imediately. It also needs you to upgrade to the latest Games For Windows release, which doesn't support Vista64 at the moment. So that's all the hardcore gamers with 4GB+ of ram out of the picture.

Only cost them $200k to inconvenience players to such a high degree.... I hope everyone who's having problems returns it to the store. High levels of returns make the distributer very uneasy, which in turn should send a message to the publisher.

Re:I'm slightly astonished

[AuMatar]

Debian doesn't have the performance constraints of a game. While ISRs need to be fast, everything else can take up gobs of CPU without really noticing it. Games don't have that luxury. Talk to actual game programmers- they do use assembly, and they do have to worry about CPU and system architecture. I have a few friends who worked as recently as the PS2, they still have examples of hand rolled assembler for the shaders.

Re:I'm slightly astonished

[erroneus]

How is anything based on Win32 and DirectX not a Windows derivative?

I once wasted close to an hour watching a Microsoft guy give a history of "big icons in a tool bar at the bottom of the screen" before he demonstrated the Mac OS X panel on Windows 7. They can claim all day long that it isn't what it looks like. But when you see it, it looks pretty obvious as to what it is.

And I suppose WindowsCE isn't a Windows derivative either for the same reasons stated by that developer's post?

People have hacked into and examined the XBox and XBox 360 code extensively and they rather disagree with the assertions of the developer. And to make a car analogy, I would rather trust the word of a mechanic than a salesman. "Oh no! A Lexus is not a Toyota!!" Right...

Re:I'm slightly astonished

[Zarhan]

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!

Does the old "Map network location to a drive letter" standby work? That way the shortcuts would refer to e.g. E:\Music instead of \\FILESERVER\MUSIC...?

Re:Incompetence?, or passive-agressive attack?

[anomnomnomymous]

And you tell this because?
There are numerous (high profile) games I've been buying the past years which didn't give me any problems, and even added the advantage over consoles of being able to tinker with it (for example, mods).

The past few GTA releases on the PC were also nearly flawless, so don't know where your advice comes from. I guess you conveniently forget about the PC-games that have no problems whatsoever.

Anyone but me think this is a great strategy?

[meist3r]

Seriously, so many developers and publishers have been complaining about the huge rate of PC title piracy (e.g. http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=20567 or http://www.videogamer.com/news/18-10-2008-9693.html) and how much more they love their locked-down consoles. Isn't this move the smartest thing Rockstar could have done?

I mean If I made 400$m with my latest game on the consoles alone and I feared I wouldn't sell as many PC copies as I could have I just make the PC version the shittiest experience you can have. Horrendously high hardware requirements, terrible online components, cluttered with spy/mal/adware. That will turn off as many PC customers as possible and make it less attractive for pirates.

I bet the console sales figures of GTA IV will go up again now that many PC gamers have realized that they'd rather buy this for their console than deal with all the crap. Watch for the spike!