GTA IV (PC)

Now, this was not what I expected from a Rockstar game. The previous GTA titles were brilliant, on consoles and on PC. This one seemed to be quite good on the consoles - I didn't have it myself, but judging from thousands of reviews and comments, it did really well. And now comes the PC version... Well, to put it in the words of this forum:

"That's not gone well"

I got it on the day it came out in Germany. First game I purchased in quite some time - and, possibly, last one too. More than an hour waiting for the thing to install. Total of three restarts while installing the required crapware and updates and everything, another hour spent for that and registering on all of those services (found out later that I didn't actually need that to play singleplayer... well, hm). Then it refused to start and crashed all the time. After another half hour I occasionally got it going, and ran straight into the problem of restricted graphic settings, that won't allow me to use the power of my laptop because it would only see 256mb of video ram, while the thing has double that. Only after loads of time spent on the internet and having found a site supplying unofficial patches to get the most recent nVidia drivers to work with laptop cards, I managed to get it going somewhat properly.

The game itself seems OK - well, it's GTA after all. The graphics are alright (even though I'm quite sure my laptop can render a better picture than that), the gameplay is as brilliant as expected, and once get going, it seems stable - didn't crash once while playing yet. But I'm not quite sure that it's really worth the money I paid for it plus a whole afternoon spent to get it going. Hopefully patches will arrive soon and improve performance together with some of many issues reported online - then it might return to the level a GTA game should deliver.
 
It's not too bad guys... it has one or two issues, but the game has been out for 2 days!

Give it some time and I'm sure a patch will take care of things. All I know is the gameplay is as fun as ever... though, the game seems harder. Is it just me or is there a hell of a lot more cops patrolling the streets than did in VC or SA?
 
Smurfen said:
use -norestriction & -nomemrestriction to remove the GFX restrictions ;)
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Dumb question, but how exactly do you do this?

I added that to the target of the shortcut GTA's installation put on my desktop, but I still get the same ghey limits.

The main thing for me is I need to have it output at 1080p. It's now limited to 1768x992 which results in black bars on all four sides, although I can see the option for 1920x1080 (it won't select though).

Edit: The fatal error problem is now gone, you can load while logged into Social Club!
 
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yeah, you add it to the shortcut
read something that it only works if u r logged in to social club too... i dunno havent gotten my game yet

"C:\Program Files\Rockstar Games\Grand Theft Auto IV\LaunchGTAIV.exe" -NoRestriction
 
In order to make a point about the shittiness of the release, I'll crosspost my stuff from WSGF:

Jupix said:
Wow... This sucks.

Stick in your brand new ?43 GTA and the very first thing you see:

autorun.png


Nice. On some forums I go to lots of people from my country are having the same issue.

Then installing the thing takes close to an hour and sucks up 50% more space than the whole of my Crytek software folder, which includes Crysis and Crysis: Warhead.

And all the R* internet community-weirdo and Windows Live network bloatware things MUST be installed for my new single player game. They can be skipped during installation, which renders your new installation useless until you install the bloatware manually.

All installed, you click on your GTA shortcut and wait ages for securom checks and activation. After which you're presented with another startup utility with 75% some weird dynamic online content and 5% "play" button. At first I thought I misclicked and started something totally different. I think third time starting the same loader I found the play button and clicked it.

The couple of minutes of R* logos and screenfuls of warning babble for the American of us are, naturally, unskippable.

Then you get ingame, where you head into the options windows to set up your game. You define your controls and close the options window. Then you're greeted with this.

It took them 9 months to release a PC version which they explained with wanting absolute polish and quality. Yeah, real polished...

Oh, and did I mention the [I have a limited vocabulary and resorted to profanity to make my point] startup window nags about me not being "logged on" every time I fire the game up. No, there's no "don't nag again" checkbox.

Speaking of firing the game up again - when I did, I got this. IE 404 in my GTA. Hilarious.

Despite bearing all this shit I still had energy to actually start a new game. Watch the startup demo, rather. See, from a technical point of view, it looks pretty much like GTA 3 with a San Andreas level of detail. And runs about as smoothly as Crysis: Warhead, or worse, actually. In short, it sucks. At this point I've had enough and will shelf the thing until, uh, later. When I was quitting, though, I saw there was no "save" option. WTF is that all about. I'm told by unreliable sources your progress isn't saved unless you're registered and logged online. I'm really having doubts it can really be that broken of a design.

I'm so pissed I spent a full tank of gas' worth on this. The customer experience so far has been absolutely appalling. It's worse than Far Cry 2, seriously. Had I just tested it on a warez copy I wouldn't have bought it.
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Jupix said:
Paradigm Shifter said:
To be honest, if I was Jupix, I'd be writing to Rockstar demanding my money back. If that didn't work, I'd drop them in the shit with any official agency I could that would give me a chance of getting my money back, and them fined. Bear in mind that it is against Trading Standards to provide a product which is fundamentally flawed. And with those issues... it looks fundamentally flawed.
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You're right, but personally I'm still battling over whether I should return it. I probably won't, since after all, I want to play the thing.

In all likelyhood I'll just post a real smelly message on the R* message boards, assuming they run such a thing.
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tl;dr: it's broken until they patch it.

They never properly patched San Andreas, so I'm not really expecting a patch for this. I shall be positively surprised if they do fix it.
 
Whoa, that's bad.... this sounds so bad I wouldn't even want to pirate it!
 
The drunk driving is awesome!

One thing that's pissing me off is that Vlad keeps calling everytime I go to pick up Michelle for a date. :p
 
Goose+ said:
92% downloaded on Steam.
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Why didn't you just buy the boxed version?

You get the booklets and the Liberty City map. I got two since it has two sets of everything for English/French. :cool:


Edit: I got the graphics working properly finally! I was putting the no restrictions tag in the Social Club shortcut. :wall:

It says it's using 700+mb of a total of 488mb of video memory, but meh, I have 1080p goodness now! Now that I got that working and the fatal error is gone, this is just great. It's a shame so many people are dissatisfied with this game... I'm reading a lot of angered teenagers threatening to get a refund or some stupid shit like that.
 
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Shawn said:
Why didn't you just buy the boxed version?

You get the booklets and the Liberty City map. I got two since it has two sets of everything for English/French. :cool:
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Yeah, I'm an idiot for buying it on Steam, not only did I forget about the booklets, but the pound is now worthless against the dollar and I've paid way more than I would in the shops..


Oh well... :lol:
 
This game is so fun. I love it!

Click to see me play in HD. :rolleyes:
 
I don't really understand the Video Memory Limit. I have an EVGA 9800GX2 SC with apparently 1GB (says 2289MB in my dxdiag) of GFX power. And it limits me to 500MB of Memory Usage. Im not sure why, maybe it has something to with something else in my PC?

Also, would upgrading to a Quad Core Processor from an Intel E8500 Core 2 Duo 3.2GHz (Dual Core) be worth it?
 
Just use the two tags or whatever posted above.

The limits seem retarded anyway, I easily went past them by quite a lot,
 
Yea, i did the -norestriction thing, it has made it run slightly better.

The only thing that need fixing now is the random crashes and error code RESC10 i get. It usually happens when i open the map, then close the map. Also when i go to save the game in a safe house, i press F at the bed, Niko goes to sleep, the screen goes black and it brings up the error. it never actually gets to the save screen, so ive had to put faith in the Autosave.
 
SUCKS! I can't play the game.. Crash to desktop with a memory read error at the GTA4 logo.. what a waste of $50.
 
You know i've just realised something, the game actually sucks.

It looks better than any other GTA, more detailed and stuff but not good compared to any other AAA project of 07-08.
Even without taking into consideration problems with ATI videocards the game runs pretty badly on my brand new PC (GF 280, Core i7, 8 Gbs DDR3) and it still looks like a console version, no anti-aliasing at all, rough edges, and detailed viewing range is kinda bugged, as there's no middle level, there's detaled and far-blurred, nothing in between so it feels even more fake that Vice City.

Speaking of the game itself it's of course just as good as it was on consoles, except you dont have to use autoaim, that's about it.
Storyline is by far underdone and linear, and for some reason it's not fun anymore to just jump in a car and drive around town, probably sucked it all out with physics and stuff.

The only fun you can have with it is just try to kill all the pigeons using the map (as it would be madness to search for them without a map) and see what's gonna happen after that.
I am quite disappointed.
 
Jupix said:
They never properly patched San Andreas, so I'm not really expecting a patch for this. I shall be positively surprised if they do fix it.
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There were issues with SA? I played through the whole thing and never* noticed that...

*except for the godawful plane-flying keyboard controls
 
ViperVX, what do you mean by AAA project? Like the best looking games of 2007-08?

GTA IV doesn't look anywhere near as good as Crysis or CoD4, I just figured that was the best they could do with an open-ended sandbox game.

The story is a bit more boring than Vice City or San Andreas. I was playing last night and I had no missions... nothing from Roman, Vlad, Little Jacob.
 
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