bit-tech.net | Grand Theft Auto IV PC

LeMaltor 4th December 2008, 14:15

Quote:

Originally Posted by CardJoe
Quote:
Originally Posted by LeMaltor
I think you have been too kind giving this a 7 (or is that a 1? :p )

You have to remember though that the game is actually pretty good when you do get it working and if you overlook the log-ins and so on.

I got the game yesterday and yes when it plays it is quite good but; I want honesty from you about the whole package to be reflected in the final score. The PC version has been released 6 (?) months after the consoles, there was also a two (?) week delay onto of that. The game has no AA and even forcing it on in gfx card drivers it doesn't work - I've not spent hundreds of pounds on PC equipment to then not utilize it to the fullest! You talk in the review about getting 20fps on a 280 - what the hell!?!? How can any game so badly coded or with problems get 7/10 when your dream machine plays it at 20fps with conservative settings or 16fps with everything maxed. You could say we have been spoiled by Crysis but damn surely there is something wrong with the way it looks (it's not the best now is it :p ) and the fps gotten?

I wouldn't recommend anyone buy this game in the current state it is in. It deserves no more than 4/10 until patched with problems fixed.

7/10 to me says OK but a bit dull game (Last NFS got 7/10 for instance), you should be hitting GTA:IV with a stick for all the problems, but then again Farcry 2 got 9/10 - and that was one of the most repetitive, annoying and dreary games we were blessed with this year :p so I shall ignore scores in future >_<

perplekks45 4th December 2008, 14:16

So you basically rated the game content 9-10 and then subtracted 2 or 3 only for what might be the world's worst "copy protection" mechanism ever invented? :|

I'd say, if gameplay is a 10:

-2 for graphics
-2 for copy protection
-1 for buggy release

Leaves me with 5. Let's give them +1 purely because of nostalgia.

6 (and that's nice in my eyes)

CardJoe 4th December 2008, 14:29

Quote:

Originally Posted by LeMaltor
Snip

As the score guide says however a 7/10 is a good game with a few fundamental flaws, which is what this is. I agree that if you just look at the score and judge it like that then you may be mislead into thinking that we quite liked the game. As it is you have to take the whole review into account which mentions and critisices everything you mention. With a release like this it's also worth comparing the 7/10 to the 9/10 the original got.

Here's the thing; the actual game has a lot going for it. A lot. The system the game runs with doesn't, which results in an average game. For the vast majority of consumers who sit down to play this game they'll be totally pissed off by the login stuff for the first ten minutes as they set it all up and they'll be annoyed by it all - but ten minutes in a single hour or so gaming session isn't much.

We didn't like any of the DRM stuff either, but it's important to keep the successes of the game in proportion to the failures and not just say "Rockstar Social Club - sod that!" and bitchslap a 4/10 onto it, not when the game is actually very fun to play.

Hardware problems are there admittedly, but as we mention in the review even if you run the game on the lowest settings then you're still getting an experience on par with the consoles.

Taking all that on balance with the negatives made us think that 7/10 is an honest and fair score, especially in balance to all the 10/10s the game is getting from other websites. It isn't as simple as -1 for DRM, +1 for prostitutes. Still, everyone has a different opinion!

LeMaltor 4th December 2008, 14:46

Quote:

Originally Posted by CardJoe
Quote:
Originally Posted by LeMaltor
Snip

As the score guide says however a 7/10 is a good game with a few fundamental flaws, which is what this is. I agree that if you just look at the score and judge it like that then you may be mislead into thinking that we quite liked the game. As it is you have to take the whole review into account which mentions and critisices everything you mention. With a release like this it's also worth comparing the 7/10 to the 9/10 the original got.

Here's the thing; the actual game has a lot going for it. A lot. The system the game runs with doesn't, which results in an average game. For the vast majority of consumers who sit down to play this game they'll be totally pissed off by the login stuff for the first ten minutes as they set it all up and they'll be annoyed by it all - but ten minutes in a single hour or so gaming session isn't much.

We didn't like any of the DRM stuff either, but it's important to keep the successes of the game in proportion to the failures and not just say "Rockstar Social Club - sod that!" and bitchslap a 4/10 onto it, not when the game is actually very fun to play.

Hardware problems are there admittedly, but as we mention in the review even if you run the game on the lowest settings then you're still getting an experience on par with the consoles.

Taking all that on balance with the negatives made us think that 7/10 is an honest and fair score, especially in balance to all the 10/10s the game is getting from other websites. It isn't as simple as -1 for DRM, +1 for prostitutes. Still, everyone has a different opinion!

I didn't mention DRM though? I skipped social and live signups got ingame and found myself unable to save without a live account leading me to now have the Live name - Canijustsave :) Sure it's stupid and annoying, but there are other bigger problems, missing textures, crashing (- there's a news post on BT about all this), all the GTA and Steam forums are rife with complaints. Turning off the clip saving gave me an hour of play with no crash last night :D

But I want you to bitchslap the game to 4/10 because you get 20fps "on a PC that packed 3 GB of DDR2 memory, a Core 2 Extreme X6800 overclocked to 2.99GHz and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 280" when you scaled back the settings to use half the resources available. And because they have cocked it up even with a massive gap from console release, I was expecting a L4D-style polished version with the extra time taken, just as the previous GTA PC games have been (or is that my rose tinted specs?).

edit: and no AA!

B1GBUD 4th December 2008, 14:51

Me thinks I'll pass on this rather poor port.... cheez, the hardware required just to get this game playable at a steady frame rate pushes the game out of most peoples reach. Shame on you Flopstar.

naokaji 4th December 2008, 15:13

Quote:

Originally Posted by Burnout21
You seriously telling me that the GTX280 cant run this game at 1920x1200 smoothly?

Could this require a driver update to suit the game?

Or could this be a fail by the developer?

If todays top end GFX's cards cant run this game, i am selling the GTX280 and buying a Xbox or PS3.

It has to be developer fail, it's rather simple, if all but one game work just fine, it's not the pc's fault but the games fault.

Xtrafresh 4th December 2008, 15:16

Quote:

Originally Posted by CardJoe
As the score guide says however a 7/10 is a good game with a few fundamental flaws, which is what this is. I agree that if you just look at the score and judge it like that then you may be mislead into thinking that we quite liked the game. As it is you have to take the whole review into account which mentions and critisices everything you mention. With a release like this it's also worth comparing the 7/10 to the 9/10 the original got.

Here's the thing; the actual game has a lot going for it. A lot. The system the game runs with doesn't, which results in an average game. For the vast majority of consumers who sit down to play this game they'll be totally pissed off by the login stuff for the first ten minutes as they set it all up and they'll be annoyed by it all - but ten minutes in a single hour or so gaming session isn't much.

We didn't like any of the DRM stuff either, but it's important to keep the successes of the game in proportion to the failures and not just say "Rockstar Social Club - sod that!" and bitchslap a 4/10 onto it, not when the game is actually very fun to play.

Hardware problems are there admittedly, but as we mention in the review even if you run the game on the lowest settings then you're still getting an experience on par with the consoles.

Taking all that on balance with the negatives made us think that 7/10 is an honest and fair score, especially in balance to all the 10/10s the game is getting from other websites. It isn't as simple as -1 for DRM, +1 for prostitutes. Still, everyone has a different opinion!

First of all: +1 for your last remark
I think i agree on your rating though. Its important to remember that under those layers of crap there's actually a good game.

One real strong request for you guys: can you please request an interview with somebody relevant from R* and ask them the obvious questions:
- Why did they choose to require all those registrations, as opposed to just one?
- Why is RSC not optional (but still mandatory for making videos?)
- What reason can there be for disallowing savegames for anyone not connected to GFWL? Data mining?
- Why brag about extra content, and then only deliver an extra radio station and larger multiplayer limit? It sounds almost as bad as Vista Ultimate extras!
- Why is the massive fanbase that GTA has on PC being forced to jump through so many hoops, why consoles are being favoured?

djDEATH 4th December 2008, 15:24

Quote:

Originally Posted by Xtrafresh
First of all: +1 for your last remark
I think i agree on your rating though. Its important to remember that under those layers of crap there's actually a good game.

One real strong request for you guys: can you please request an interview with somebody relevant from R* and ask them the obvious questions:
- Why did they choose to require all those registrations, as opposed to just one?
- Why is RSC not optional (but still mandatory for making videos?)
- What reason can there be for disallowing savegames for anyone not connected to GFWL? Data mining?
- Why brag about extra content, and then only deliver an extra radio station and larger multiplayer limit? It sounds almost as bad as Vista Ultimate extras!
- Why is the massive fanbase that GTA has on PC being forced to jump through so many hoops, why consoles are being favoured?

hear hear

airchie 4th December 2008, 15:59

+1 to xtrafresh's comments.
Get some rep on and grill the sh*t outta them for their stupidity!

Mankz 4th December 2008, 16:05

I've just got this and loaded it up, with the following hardware:

E2200 @ 3.3Ghz, 2Gb o RAM, Enough HDD space, and Overclocked 8800GT 512Mb and it won't install becuase my hardware isn't good enough.

Pish. Back to Steam you go GTA4, until you actually work properly.

Mankz 4th December 2008, 16:07

Also, I seem to remember this game was delayed by about 3 weeks. Surely they could have sorted out all of these issues in that extra time? Its a little rediculous.

Haramzadeh 4th December 2008, 16:15

This is so shameful of RockStar. GTA was born on the PC. I've been playing GTA since it was a 2D top-view game. They have betrayed their roots and chosen to shaft the PC not only by skipping us for the original release but then - to add insult to injury - totally screwing over the most basic aspect of the PC version: installation.

I'm very dissappointed with what seems to be a nightmare installation. I was really looking forward to this game, now I'm completely turned off.

Zut 4th December 2008, 20:59

Bottom Line: I don't have a console and find game-pads impossible to use.

Despite its flaws, I look forward to enjoying this game.

salesman 4th December 2008, 22:34

i like the placement of the bit-tech logo in the graphics pictures.

:)

Cupboard 5th December 2008, 00:16

What have they done to it? It is more of a resource hog than Crysis and doesn't look anywhere near as good. The fact that they don't provide AA support is rather moot because no one would be able to enable it anyway.

I love the positioning of your watermarks in the car wheels :)

ParaHelix.org 5th December 2008, 01:07

I just ordered Grand Theft Auto IV on Steam and am now downloading. One thing I really hate Rockstar for is taking flyable planes out of the game, we now only have helicopters, that is what killed the game for me, 99% of my time on Sand Andreas and SA:MP were flying around in planes.

Iuoptra 5th December 2008, 01:38

All of you people blithering about rockstar patching the game and fixing all these issues are DREAMING.

http://www.rockstargames.com/support/req_support_patches.php

Just look at thier patching history.

Not impressive at all.

Hamish 5th December 2008, 01:44

the performance of this game is absolutely hilarious

consider my system can run crysis 1920x1200 very high no AA and get about 30fps
i can only run gta4 at medium settings?
i wouldnt mind if the game looked spectacular and the higher settings are there to enable future hardware to make the game look even better

but it looks like ****.

its GTA so i never expected or wanted fantastic graphics out of it and i expected poor performance given their track record
but this is just so bad i cant help but laugh

vice city is still the pinnacle of the GTA series as far as im concerned

edit: btw, noticed it using 70-80% of my 3.5ghz quad while playing
thats insanely high! the only other game i've seen come close was FC2 and that was around 50% with spikes up to around 60%
most games are ~30%

n3mo 5th December 2008, 02:48

The game might be good, but the flaws make it not even worth torrenting. Come on, 1 gig of textures that are so bad it's almost impossible to read any road sign? Those guys never even heard about things as "optimisation" or "texture compression". For me it's a worst-written game I have ever played.

bogie170 5th December 2008, 04:07

Sounds like a really crappy port to me. Coded by monkeys. I'll stick to my PS3 version. Another lost sale.

Why do all these companys put running apps in your tray? All they are doing is hogging system resources and slowing down our PC's. There should be a law against it!

Anyone wants to turn off these proggys goto the 'Run' command box, type 'msconfig' and clik your 'startup' tab and delete all the crap in there!

PhenomRed 5th December 2008, 06:52

What if you lived in the dark ages and didn't have internet to logon to all sorts of crap that i don't want on my computer? I think Rockstar got lazy once they didn't have to worry about Jack Thompson

Nature 5th December 2008, 07:43

I have a good question! Is it more gpu or cpu influenced?

oasked 5th December 2008, 09:01

To all those moaning about internet activation, you can actually activate the game without one - I just have:

http://activate.rockstargames.com/?c=GTA4

Its a right PITA though - I had to phone someone up and get them to enter the code on the internet. I've been waiting a very long time to play GTA4 now and I'm enjoying it so far - shame performance is so poor though. :(

Can't wait to play it again over the weekend. :)

perplekks45 5th December 2008, 10:31

You might be able to activate it over the internet, but are you allowed to save without a connection to GfWl? Don't think so.

Bauul 5th December 2008, 10:39

There is still a bit of me that can't help but think the frankly stupid system requirements are down the things like the draw distance. If you put the draw distance to 100, you're practically rendering the whole city on the fly. Remember the console versions only had it only at 10%. The engine was never designed to be played realistically with draw distance at 100, I imagine the poly counts are off into the multiple millions, far higher than even the best cards can handle.

Maybe if Rockstar had never even included an option to tweak the draw distance people wouldn't be complaining nearly as much. Just to play Devil's advocate.

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Grand Theft Auto IV PC

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