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

[cbrocious]

I'm no DRM fan (I've been working against it for years, e.g. El Tunes and PyMusique), but there's no reason that it'd cause these problems, outside of the authorization problems. Once the game has started, the most the DRM will be doing is decrypting game code, if it's not decrypted entirely at loadtime.

Re:I'm slightly astonished

[jonaskoelker]

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

Such as C++?

Here's a quick-and-dirty proof: debian has tons of stuff written in C++, and it runs on $BIGNUM architectures. I don't write fetch_to_L1_cache() or kill_instruction_pipeline() calls in my code.

Sure, you can add inline assembly, but you can also ifdef it out and write replacement C++ on incompatible archs.

Re:I'm slightly astonished

[Dunbal]

It's the DRM.

      Is that what they call Christmas now?

      It's not DRM, it's the "we have to get this out the door before Christmas z0mg Xmas sales!!!11" mentality from the short sighted marketing department. Ship now and patch later is typical for this time of year. It probably does not bode well for the franchise, however.

      Yeah, the DRM probably broke the game, but QA HAS to have seen this problem before shipping. Obviously $50 a copy was more important than the trivial fact of the game actually working or not.

Re:I'm slightly astonished

[MrHanky]

And so what? Did you think Microsoft wrote DirectX for note taking?

Re:I'm slightly astonished

[mcbridematt]

The Xbox and Xbox 360 do not run Windows derivatives. They run a custom operating system which implements a portion of Win32 and DirectX API's. See Xbox developers post.

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

[Elrond, Duke of URL]

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.

Re:I'm slightly astonished

[penguinchris]

I guess you've already been refuted, but I'll point out anyway that the PS3's cell processor is Power PC as well, and the PS3 has no problem with GTA 4 and didn't require a year to port to.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

Assembly will only be used for small, high-cost operations. These pieces are small enough that if they malfunction, it's in a way that will be immediately visible.

Nonsense. Here's one counterexample. There is the assembly routine in Excel 2007 that formats numbers for display; it had a subtle bug with some input values. Bug description from Microsoft, Technical explanation (PDF).

Re:I'm slightly astonished

[balthan]

It's the DRM. Many of the crashing problems seem to be Securom crashing, which causes the game client to exit to desktop imediately.

Most of the problems are being caused by the dual online accounts required. The Rockstar Social Club servers initially couldn't handle the volume, which was causing the game to crash on startup. And people were having problems getting Games for Windows live installed right with its dependencies (such as .NET Framework 3.5). My guess is something isn't quite right with the GTA4 installer.

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.

False. I have Vista64 and 8GB of RAM and am able to run GTA4 and GfW just fine.

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:I'm slightly astonished

[sunami]

Right, it makes it an emulator!

Re:I'm slightly astonished

[thepotoo]

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.

Re:I'm slightly astonished

[cbrocious]

Ugh, sad to hear. When will people learn that this nonsense only hurts them?

Re:I'm slightly astonished

[Dun Malg]

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

Those are APIs. Windows is an OS. Two completely different operating systems could use the same APIs, but handle the API calls completely different behind the scenes. That's kind of the point of an API.

Re:I'm slightly astonished

[dintech]

I'm not so sure. One of the more interesting 'success stories', if you can call it that, is the DRM in Cubase. Cubase used to be massively pirated but version SX 3.1 released in 2005 took 9 months to crack and version 4 hasn't been cracked after 2 years.

They achieved this by wiring many types and layers of protection into as many diverse areas of the code base as they could. They made the job of reverse engineering just too frustrating and time consuming. You would effectively have to QA test the entire thing for various use cases and time delays. This obviously has knock on effects in performance for your paying customers of course.

Re:I'm slightly astonished

[tvjunky]

Where in either of these documents did it say that the routine was written in assembly? I believe you were confused by the PDF's use of a disassembler.

Page 11, under the diagrams:

The code seems to be written directly in assembly, since it has no C/C++ style stack frame or register usage. Also, the usage of some rare assembly instructions also points to it being hand coded assembly. This was likely done for performance - converting floating-point values to text needs to be high performance for Excel.

Re:I'm slightly astonished

[aesiamun]

Wine Is Not an Emulator

Re:I'm slightly astonished

[AndrewNeo]

The reason this works is because XNA games are written in C#. The .NET environment then JITs the code to native on the target system (Windows, Xbox, Zune, etc.) All the hardware interaction parts are written into the platform-specific side of the .NET framework.

Re:I'm slightly astonished

[AndrewNeo]

Apparently during E3 when the 360 was first coming out, companies were demoing their games on G5 towers.

Re:I'm slightly astonished

[skroops]

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.

I see this suggestion sometimes, but every time I've ever tried to return an open pc game I've been told more or less to fuck off. What's you're secret?

Re:I'm slightly astonished

[Hurricane78]

What you did not mention was, that the cracked (actually decrypted/compiled are better words for it) version ran much faster.
What they did was crazy. They decrypted the whole GUI code and only encrypted it right before use. Even the mouse was sluggish in the "original" version.
After cracking it, it ran nice and smooth.

This is easy to crack as soon as you know how to call the decryption for every piece of code needed. You have to follow the calls down, until you have a decrypted version of everything.

It's so stupid that it hurts: The CPU has to execute it in a un-encrypted form. So it has to lie in ram in that form some time in the execution. So you will always be able to get the raw machine code. But tell that to a PHB who can't tell the difference between 0.002 dollars and 0.002 cents... *sigh*

Re:I'm slightly astonished

[Carlio]

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

Re:I'm slightly astonished

[IndustrialComplex]

I fucking am. Fuck these game publishers with their shitty products that don't work worth a damn--why would I pay for that abuse? These asshats are just like Ford or GM.

I would normally prefer to see posts such as yours marked down as flamebait, but every now and then it is good to have one come to light so that everyone might see how your rationale is actually hurting your cause.

You contradict yourself in your own post. You feel the game is worth playing, but at the same time call it a shitty product that doesn't work worth a damn?

If you really wanted to make a point, a better approach would be to not purchase the game, and not pirate it either. By pirating it, you just give them ammunition to keep pushing DRM as evidence that it isn't yet good enough.

It will never be good enough, but you won't convince them of that by pirating it.

Re:I'm slightly astonished

[thepotoo]

Please. I prefer the term piracy. Calling it copyright infringement makes me feel like some loser sitting in his mothers basement trading 1s and 0s with other losers. Who wants to do that?

Piracy be nothing like yer copyright infringement, it be totally badass. ARRRRGH!

Re:I'm slightly astonished

[FuckTheModerators]

I downloaded the torrent for the new 'vette, and unfortunately it's a rip.

It's a bunch of 3d model files connected to a hacked shapeways account. The first rip had no assembly instructions, and so far the PROPERs and REPACKs are still missing everything to the rear of the drivers seat.

Re:I'm slightly astonished

[eulernet]

The QA never test the DRMed version (I know I have been a long time game programmer), they work on the non-DRM version !
Protection is added at the last moment, and expected to not break the game.

Also, they have been in a hurry to ship the game, so the QA were probably told to skip testing the DRM.

Re:I'm slightly astonished

[Beardo the Bearded]

You never played GTA3 for the PC, did you?

It had the same problems, and the only way to fix them was to get the no CD crack. It was so rampant that the only fix for Rockstar was to patch the game with a no CD crack of their own. What happens is that it's checking the CD so ridiculously often that your PC is now only as fast as your DVD drive. That's a HUGE bottleneck.

I mentioned this a few weeks ago. They haven't learned anything in the last five years.

Apparently, neither have the consumers.

Re:I'm slightly astonished

[billcopc]

It ended up biting Steinberg in the ass, because the crack was no simple EXE patch, it was a full-blown dongle emulator. By making Cubase SX3 hard to crack, they directly encouraged H2O to write a universal crack for all their dongle-infected apps.

To make things worse, the protection was so invasive, many layers of just-in-time decryption, that it significantly slowed down the app and led to all sorts of weird timing issues. As a result, a staggering number of people stayed on the previous version, which was quite similar in features.

The same nonsense is happening with Cubase 4. They've added a handful of crap features few people care about, so all those in the know are sticking with their existing version. You obviously can't go out and buy an older version in-store, so new folks wind up with C4 simply because they don't have a choice.

In this situation, one has to wonder how much money they've lost due to the DRM. It has taken a lackluster upgrade and made it worse, so a bunch of people are jumping ship to a competitor's product, such as Ableton, Sonar or the extremely popular Reaper. They all do pretty much the same things, support the same plugins (or more), and often provide more efficient interfaces (Cubase is kind of backwards for some things). How long until Cubase gets pwned by its own copy protection ?

Re:I'm slightly astonished

[spyrochaete]

...your rationale is actually hurting your cause.

...a better approach would be to not purchase the game, and not pirate it either. By pirating it, you just give them ammunition to keep pushing DRM as evidence that it isn't yet good enough.

I disagree. I'm sure GTA4 is totally worth playing, but having to deal with SecuROM, Games for Windows Live, and Rockstar Social Club is a hell of a lot of baggage.

I argue that pirating the game states very clearly that the product has value but the terms are unacceptable. I think the last thing any gamer wants is to discourage Rockstar from making more GTA games!

Re:I'm slightly astonished

[Goldberg's Pants]

I'm sorry... What?

You're saying "Games for Windows", the Microsoft initiative to brand PC gaming as something akin to the consoles... Doesn't work on a version of their own operating system?

That's awesome. Nice one, Microsoft! Nice to see you're so firmly committed to this you're ensuring compatibility across the board.

Thanks for that info. That shows what a farce this "Games for Windows" nonsense is.

And you're absolutely right about Securom being behind the issues. What's hilarious is Rockstar just a couple of weeks ago claimed that the protection for GTA IV was going to be LESS harsh than the one used in Spore.

Re:I'm slightly astonished

[paeanblack]

A registry tweak will fix this:

First, move anything out of the "My Music" folder on the local machine. If you don't have one, just create an empty folder under "My Documents" and name it "My Music"

Open regedit and browse to:
HKCU\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders\Personal

Edit the key named "My Music"

Change the value to "\\yourservername\pathtoyourmusic"

If this key doesn't exist, then create it.

Log out, log back in.

Add a shortcut to your "My Music" folder in the GTA music folder.

Re:I'm slightly astonished

[Hurricane78]

The best experience ever, relating R*, was when a friend bought GTA San Andreas.

It did not run. And there was no patch. Even days after the release.
I took a quick look on gamecopyworld, and there were already patches avaliable for at least five different bugs!
The crackers fixed the bugs for R*, before they even could react

There were four points where the game could die. Before the intro, after the into, in the menu and while loading the city.
The fifth bug was that polygon points could be randomized all over the place for nVidia graphics cards. It looked horrible.

After that, he never bought something from R* again. I just pulled it straight from a Torrent tracker.

Unfortunately, R* does not seem to learn from this. I bet they will still make others responsible when they don't exist anymore.
And I hope I can buy the game designers and developers out for my company by then, for they are truly rock stars. :D

Re:I'm slightly astonished

[drinkypoo]

Sources inside Microsoft said again and again that both Xboxes in fact did run ports of Windows. You can find numerous supporting sources (who outside Microsoft would know better than people writing an Xbox emulator?) for this claim. Sorry, but I simply do not believe your reference.

It is even less likely that Microsoft wrote the operating system for the 360 from scratch. If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, odds are it evolved from a duck - though it is not certain, it is the way to bet. Windows 2000 ran on the PowerPC until SP3 and was designed for portability - at least, it was redesigned for portability when they ported from the N-Ten to the x86. This is why they were able to port it to both DEC Alpha and IBM PowerPC in such a relatively short time. The Alpha port was the more commercially successful of the two since the Alpha was the more capable processor, and you could pay just as much for a PPC machine that would run NT with zero benefit, but the PPC port was probably the more capable of the two in another way - since it ran on standards-based PowerPC systems, it would run on a broader range of hardware including systems from IBM and Motorola.

PowerPC support alone is not sufficient reason for my prejudice, however; that lies in Windows NT's multiprocessor support. Anyone who has followed operating system history to any significant degree knows that multiprocessing has always been one of the most complex features to support. SMP has certainly been one of the most contentious issues in *BSD-land for just this reason. The idea that Microsoft just tossed off a new operating system with multiprocessor support which provides the Win32 APIs and is stable enough for a games console is not an impossible one, but it does seem highly unlikely to be true given Microsoft's track record, which is poor to say the least.

In summary, though Windows NT tends to have a lower penalty for thread creation than Unix and thus has some inherent advantages when it comes to multiprocessing and therefore even indicates that some people who work for or who have worked for Microsoft have some idea of what they are doing, I would not expect Microsoft to be capable of writing any operating system capable of providing a sizable portion of the Win32 (even though it is much less capable than Windows 2000, either operating system is a significant piece of software) from scratch at this point. If they were capable of doing this, they would certainly already have done so in order to replace Windows NT, which is long past the "showing its age" phase. Vista in particular is a mishmash of just about every computing model Microsoft has ever used. By far, the most logical explanation is that the Xbox operating system is based on Windows 2000, and so is the Xbox 360 operating system, but Microsoft's gaming business model is dependent on convincing people that they are not being sold a PC, and so they must deny any similarity unto their graves.

Put another way, YHBT by Microsoft.

Re:I'm slightly astonished

[drinkypoo]

Therefore porting anything from the X360 to a general-purpose computer requires a major rewrite.

Here's what's wrong with your analysis:

• The Grand Theft Auto engine is already built at least partially from a single codebase, which in former incarnations has already been reworked to run on (for example) Playstation 2, Xbox, and Windows XP. This demonstrates a certain amount of portability.
• The PowerPC cores in the Xbox 360 run at a very high speed but they are not necessarily exceptionally powerful.
• The Xbox operating system, whether it is based on Windows or not, behaves in much the same way. The way you would make use of multiple processors on a Windows system is to spawn multiple threads. Guess what happens if you spawn multiple threads on a PC with one processor? Yep, they all run on that processor. Thus, significant tuning would need to be done, but not necessarily much else.
• The game already runs on the Playstation 3, which is dramatically more different from the Xbox 360 than a PC is. In order to do any heavy lifting on the PS3 you have to break processes up into vectors which can be dumped to the seven active SPEs in the Cell, each of which has a very small amount of dedicated memory. If you can make the same engine run on the 360 and the PS3, then you had better be able to get it to run under Windows - especially since both Windows and the 360 use DirectX ("Xbox" is short for "DirectX-box".)

Re:I'm slightly astonished

[Com2Kid]

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

WinCE is not a Windows derivative. It is a completely separate OS kernel that happens to have had a good deal of the Desktop's CRT and other APIs ported over to it some years back.

Is it possible to have very carefully written code cross compile on WinCE and the desktop? Sure. But the same can be said for Windows XP and Linux. Stick to API libraries that exist on both platforms, and make liberal use of IFDEFs to cover any platform differences. E.g. WinCE Windows, your screen size is almost an order of magnitude different, so you'll probably want to redesign the entire UI. Your input options are significantly different, need to take that into account. Your audio output options are different. How your app handles networking is (should be) different.

Heck, the directory where you save user data at is different. The file system is laid out differently (in places).

For both XBox 360 and WinCE Microsoft has taken steps to try and make writing cross platform code as easy as possible, but it is by no means consists of a single "hit recompile" step.

And as apparently demonstrated by Rockstar, companies can screw up cross platform releases really bad.

Re:I'm slightly astonished

[Uberbah]

Visa/Mastercard doesn't give a shit about a store's return policy. Buy with a credit card, and tell them you'll do a chargeback if they don't refund your money. You'll get your money back and the store will have to eat an additional chargeback fee.

Re:I'm slightly astonished

[Elrond, Duke of URL]

Normally, yes. However, in this case, because Steam launches the GTA "Social Club" launcher which in turn runs a command window which in turn actually runs GTA4, the options get lost somewhere along the way...

Maybe it will get fixed with a GTA or Steam patch, but right now the only way to pass options in is to create your own shortcut to LaunchGTAIV.exe and add them to that and then run it *after* you have already started the Rockstar Social Club app. It has a big play button, but just minimize it and use your shortcut instead.

"Please do not turn off the system"

[Tojo-Mojo]

The port is very faithful to the console versions. My favorite part is the "Please do not turn off the system" message when saving. I was just about to hit that big 'ol power button, too!

Re:"Please do not turn off the system"

[PhilHibbs]

This has become a running joke in my friends' house. When someone's playing a console game and that message comes up, they will usually interrupt everyone else doing whatever they are doing (playing cards, playing on a PC game, making a cup of tea) and say "Hey, don't turn off the console!"

Re:"Please do not turn off the system"

[elrous0]

Just once I'm going to turn it off during one of these messages just to see what happens. If I don't make it out alive, tell my wife I love her.

Re:"Please do not turn off the system"

[lupinstel]

My brother died that way you insensitive clod.

Ha-ha!

[Dunbal]

Makes you wish you could have tried it first before buying it, huh? Oh wait, thanks to "copyright infringement" laws making YOU the criminal and DRM, you can't.

      Enjoy being ripped off your $49.99. I guess eventually they'll get a patch out. But remember to support the industry! They obviously want your money more than you do.

Re:Ha-ha!

[Mascot]

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.

Re:Ha-ha!

[Mascot]

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.

Re:Ha-ha!

[Joe U]

If you think otherwise you don't grasp the DRM in Steam very well.

I think I just did. The solution is to create a new steam account for every game. If you have to chargeback one, you'll still have the others.

Re:Ha-ha!

[wild_quinine]

This page contains the plain facts of Steam's 'Zero Tolerance' Policy.

Yes. They have the balls to call the rightful, legal recovery of your money 'payment fraud'.

Re:Ha-ha!

[infoslack]

I purchased and returned mine to Best Buy. They insisted that I couldn't return it but it seems when you get loud they give the money back. This was THE WORST game I've seen in a really long time and it was rather offensive to me that a company I had so much faith in (Rockstar) would sell me such a pile of dung.

I'm not

[Mascot]

The Xbox version does not have SecuROM. But, while certainly a factor, that does not account for all of these issues. I'm guessing the rest is down to insufficient testing on a variety of configurations.

And let's not forget that Chrismas is around the corner. It wouldn't be the first time a release was rushed to make a holiday season.

Personally the game fell off my radar when they confirmed they'd use SecuROM. Hopefully they'll release a non-restricted version in the future. Not to mention a bug fixed one.

I would like to point out that this version of SecuROM has some FADE type functionality in it. That makes it even more difficult to separate bugs caused by the restrictions software gone haywire from the actual game code.

Deciding to never buy titles with SecuROM and similar draconian schemes was the best decision I ever made I think. It saved me from the mediocrity that was Spore, and now from this bugfest.

Re:I'm not

[EpsCylonB]

I don't have a credit card, actually I feel pretty good about that.

You know you really fail when...

[Anonymous Coward]

Pirates can't even fix your game.

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.

Re:Incompetence?, or passive-agressive attack?

[CronoCloud]

Money! They're going to sell a lot more copies, sometimes it might even be 10x as many. Ever hear of a game called Summoner? It was a simultaenous PC/PS2 release. The PC version sold 50000 copies, not bad for an actiony RPG type game. The PS2 version sold 500000. You can imagine what happened,the sequel, Summoner 2, was PS2 only. Something similar probably happened to CoD.

Bought this POS.

[juuri]

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.
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. ... 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.

Re:Bought this POS.

[mike2R]

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.

This really annoyed me as well - Startup Guard caught it trying to register that community crap to run at startup. Denied it but it still keeps itself running after closing the game. I mean why? What chance is there that I want that crap running 24/7 on my PC? Reminds me of the last time I installed Real Player. Right click on the tray icon and you can uncheck "run at system start" so at least you can turn it off, but it is still out of order.

Not had any of the other problems you mention though - well except the 15GB (!!) download from Steam, I'd have bought a physical copy if I'd known it was that big.

Re:Bought this POS.

[Degro]

Games for Windows is a load of crap. I thought it was great at first because Crysis and Fallout 3 both had full support for the USB XBox 360 controllers out of the box. All I had to do was plug it in. Great, I like to relax and sit back with a controller at my PC like I do at with actual Xbox. Then I rushed out to buy Call of Duty: World at War for my PC because it also had the logo. No controller support whatsoever. WTF? What does Games for Windows even mean then if it's not going to be a coherent Xbox like experience for windows gaming? The whole effort feels very much like scam now.

Re:Bought this POS.

[The Moof]

Games for Windows is a good idea done wrong, and only if you have an Xbox360. I thought it was nice to have a cross-platform friends and all that. However, it's very poorly implemented.

• They tie settings and saves into your profile and you have to be signed in (either locally or on Live). There are workarounds for this, but I'm not so hot on extra work to play your save game files.
• If you want to compare achievements with your PC version and someone's Xbox version, you can't (without pen and paper). Live thinks that a version for windows and a version for the 360 is two completely different games.
• When it opts to update your games it sometimes offers no feedback that it's working, or that it has completed successfully. It usually just dumps you back to the desktop when completed.
• Sometimes, it's the culprit for game crashes and BSOD's.

They should've added it as an optional feature instead of making it a requirement to use. My first experience with it was in Fallout 3. At first it was nifty, but after coming across all of the problems mentioned above, I'm not so sure it's worth the hassle.

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!

Re:Anyone but me think this is a great strategy?

[Psx29]

I think you're forgetting that pirating Xbox 360 games is ridiculously easy.

seriously, rockstar fucking knows better.

[DragonTHC]

This is either a strategy or a colossal fail. Since there is G4W live shit and FailRom drm installed bundled, I'm leaning towards strategy.

I own every GTA game ever made. I opted for GTA IV on 360. I actually got a 360 for it. That being said, I'm a diehard PC gamer. I prefer PC for every game.

I could have waited, but when I heard GTA IV was a 'G4W live' only release, I knew rockstar had fucked up.

The others have all been flawless PC releases. They just know better.

Yes, Rockstar.

[crhylove]

Yes, Rockstar, please tell us: Why is it so hard to write good Windows code? How is the PS3 so much easier? Why don't you let us play the games at much higher resolution on much better hardware? Is it really that important to sell mediocre crap and scrape every miserable penny? Is that also the motivation behind the DRM? Why don't you just sell a good product at a good price and stop trying to coerce the market. It won't work. Eventually some other game house will make your type of game, only better, and with better graphics and performance. And people will buy that instead.

But why are they so upset?

[LarsWestergren]

I mean, you get 4 programs on your harddrive for the price of one -
1) SecureROM
2) Games for Windows LIVE
3) Rockstar Social Club
4) An early Beta version of some game

Sounds like a great deal to me.

Re:But why are they so upset?

[Svippy]

I mean, you get 4 programs on your harddrive for the price of one - 1) SecureROM 2) Games for Windows LIVE 3) Rockstar Social Club 4) An early Beta version of some game

Sounds like a great deal to me.

With four applications, you can understand some of them might not work. As far as I can tell, Rockstar Games made sure 3 out of 4 of these applications worked! Brilliant!

I wouldn't know - boycotting

[snarfies]

I was really looking forward to buying GTA4 for the PC. I am the proud owner of GTA3, GTA:VC, and GTA:SA. But I can't buy GTA4, and this was so deeply dissapointing I actually sent Rockstar/Take2 a physical paper letter (which I am sure they will laugh at, ball up, and throw in the trash).

The problem? Mandatory online activation enforced by SecuROM. It isn't so much the latter I object to (though I DO object to it) as the former. I sometimes actually go back and install a game 5, 10, or even more years later and replay it if it was any good. What happens 10 years from now when the machine I am required to connect to no longer exists? Sure, I'm sure I can download a crack, or a patch, or something by then, but I want to own a fully working game right out of the box, not crippleware.

I know that the same applies to MMORPGs as well, but guess what? I have never, and never will, buy one of those, either.

Re:I wouldn't know - boycotting

[Mascot]

I don't see why you draw a comparison to MMOs. It's not in the same ballpark.

It is understood that no MMO will keep running forever. Those servers aren't an activation scheme. They are *the game*.

It is not understood that a single player game will refuse to run in ten years time (assuming you have the antiquated hardware and OS to run it still).

Anyways, I totally agree. I never buy an application anymore without first contacting the developers and asking them whether it has any kind of online activation scheme. It helps me avoid the trap, and it serves the dual purpose of informing them it cost them a sale.

Re:I wouldn't know - boycotting

[Jim Hall]

I was really looking forward to buying GTA4 for the PC. I am the proud owner of GTA3, GTA:VC, and GTA:SA. But I can't buy GTA4, and this was so deeply dissapointing I actually sent Rockstar/Take2 a physical paper letter (which I am sure they will laugh at, ball up, and throw in the trash).

Take it from someone who's actually played GTA4 (on the PS3) - you aren't missing much. Gotta say, this version isn't as interesting or exciting as the GTA3 or GTA:SA.

Re:I wouldn't know - boycotting

[Uberbah]

I hate to beat the dead horse of debate, but this really is just one more nail in the coffin of PC gaming.

I hate to beat a dead horse, but self-important console fanboys have been talking about the death of PC gaming as long as there have been consoles. I have news for you buddy: a bad PC game is just a bad PC game, just as a bad console game is a bad console game.

Your phone outperforms a PS2?

[Nick Ives]

Just because your phone runs at a higher clock speed doesn't mean it's more powerful than a PS2. No phone, not even an N96 or an iPhone, is currently more powerful than a PS2, though no doubt they'll get there within a couple of years.

The PS2 is a weird system, I'd recommend reading this technical overview of the Emotion Engine. There's also a link in there to another Ars article comparing the PS2 to PC style platforms.

I think that article shows why Sony thought the Cell was a good idea for the PS3. The PS2 gets most of its power from two vector units so having a PPC core linked with seven directly programmable vector units (one of the two VUs in the EE was linked into the geometry unit) probably seemed like a natural progression.

Re:Incompetence?, or passive-agressive attack?

[Nick Ives]

DLC isn't the main thing for FO3, user mods are. The reason I bought it on PC, in fact the reason I upgraded my graphics card is just so that I can spend the next three years or so playing user-made FO3 mods.

The mods are what made Oblivion and Morrowind into timeless classics.

Re:Incompetence?, or passive-agressive attack?

[Goldberg's Pants]

Playing FPS titles on the consoles is like eating soup with a fork. Sure, you can do it, but it's a tedious experience if you've ever used a spoon, and there are much more suitable tools for the job.

Not so sure about that

[Weaselmancer]

I think the last thing any gamer wants is to discourage Rockstar from making more GTA games!

Well, maybe. I know of two people who have GTA4 for the Xbox. Neither one likes it. They took the fun bits out and replace it with realism is the complaint I hear.

San Andreas had a lot of silly crap in it, but IMHO that's what defined the series. Jetpacks in a secret military base, climbing on board a Navy carrier and somehow being able to kill everyone and steal a Harrier, falling off a motorcycle at 200mph and being ok, beating someone to death with a dildo while wearing a gimp suit - that sort of stuff. Things that definitely say "yeah, you're in a videogame". Goofy fun.

GTA4, by all accounts is missing this.

Re:Incompetence?, or passive-agressive attack?

[CronoCloud]

but the fact is you take a console and start hooking a mouse and keyboard to it... That's starting to look a lot like a computer,

They are computers, special purpose ones, though these days they can also do more general purpose things. I have Linux on my PS3, for example.

so why not just USE a computer instead if you have to use those for a decent experience?

But you don't HAVE to use those, but you can if you want (and if the developer gives you the option). Personally, I like mouse aiming in a PC to Console FPS port, but I can't stand WASD. So If I can, I use the mouse to aim, but the dual shock to move. It sounds awkward but works very well for me.

You also have to remember that there's more game genre's than FPS. and in most cases a dual analog joystick works adequately for those genres (and works "okay" in FPS's)

Let's take one of my favorite PC to console ports, the PS1 version of Diablo. It's a pre dual shock game, You can enable "Advanced" combo button controls, in that case holding R2 and hitting the "shape" buttons and the other shoulder buttons does different things, let me double check my manual so I get em right:

D-Pad = movement
Select = In game menu
Start = Pause
X = Attack
Square = Activate item/pick up item
Triangle = Cast active spell
Circle = use selected belt item
L1 = Quick Health
R1 = Quick Mana
L2 = Speed Spellbook
R2 = Combo button
R2 + Square = Inventory
R2 + X = Character info
R2 + Triangle = Toggle spell between the two enabled spells
R2 + R1 = Quest Log
R2 + L1 = Full Spell book
R2 + L2 = View Automap

Those controls are VERY fast to use, the game plays much much faster in the PS1 version than the PC version. The controls are also very comfortable for longer periods of time compared to the PC version which is VERY tough on the wrist and fingers. In other words, Diablo makes a better console game (for single player at least) than a PC game. It's all about the overall experience