Rockstar gives PC gamers the finger
Thursday, December 4, 2008 13:12
I’ve been waiting for the PC port of Grand Theft Auto IV for a very, very long time now, but after reading everyone’s complaints about it, it’s looking more and more likely that I’ll be skipping it, at least until it gets a decent patch. Where to start with the litany of complaints?
How about the extremely lengthy and tedious installation process that requires you to sign up for and be logged into both Microsoft’s Windows Live network and Rockstar’s own Social Club network? If you’d bought this via Steam, you’d naturally need to be logged into that as well, though Steam won’t sell GTA4 to customers outside North America. If you’re a Vista 64 user, you’ll be upset to learn that you’ll have a hard time getting it to run due to a Windows Live incompatibility, despite the fact that according to Microsoft, compatibility with Vista 64 is a requirement for the Games for Windows label.
Next, if you actually manage to get the thing running but were hoping to play it using a gamepad, you’ll soon discover that the only gamepads that will work with it are the Xbox ones. PC-only gamepads, such as the ones manufactured by Saitek that I’ve been looking at buying, simply won’t work with the game.
Finally, the one that’s really big for me, is the realization that no current computer on Earth can run this game at max settings. Even IGN had performance issues running the game on a beefy system (Core 2 Quad 2.40 GHz, 2 GB RAM, 768 MB GeForce 8800 GTX with Vista 32) after turning the settings down. I think my poor 512 MB 8800GT will choke on it. Yes, the game looks good, but not that good. As many others have observed, it’s likely that Rockstar didn’t put much effort into porting the game over and optimizing it for PCs. And if you have an ATI card instead, be warned that there has been massive complaints about graphical glitches that Rockstar has said it is aware of and are looking at finding solutions for.
Fortunately for us, the PC port of GTA4′s main competitor, Saint’s Row 2, is due out in January next year. While it’s not as technically impressive as GTA4, plenty of reviewers have named it as the better game. Unless Rockstar cleans up its act and fast, that’s what I’ll be spending my time and money on.
the gamers | Digg hot tags says:
December 4th, 2008 at 2:56 pm
[...] Vote Rockstar gives PC gamers the finger [...]
Deimos Tel`Arin says:
December 4th, 2008 at 4:45 pm
[Fortunately for us, the PC port of GTA4’s main competitor, Saint’s Row 2, is due out in January next year. While it’s not as technically impressive as GTA4, plenty of reviewers have named it as the better game.]
Thanks for the heads up.
I think I saw a trailer for the Saint Row 2 game before. You can hijack a septic tank truck and squirt people with shit or something like that?
I have tried out GTA4 on the Xbox 360 before and I thought to myself, I really need a keyboard and a mouse for this.
Guess I can forget that now. Heh.
Hands of War - Download | ahkong.net says:
December 4th, 2008 at 5:41 pm
[...] Daily Reads PC gamer? Eager to play Grand Theft Auto 4 on your PC? Rockstar gives PC gamers the finger, are you sure you wanna buy and play the game? Article by Wan Kong [...]
wankongyew says:
December 4th, 2008 at 7:05 pm
Check out Kieron Gillen’s post on the topic at Rock, Paper, Shotgun. After he was done with the review version of the game, he moved on to playing the retail version, and promptly got hit by a glitch causing many of the textures in the game to go missing. The comments on that post are a long series of complaints including mysterious crash errors. Just hilarious.
wankongyew says:
December 9th, 2008 at 3:05 pm
For anyone interested, Nvidia has release beta versions of its drivers specially customized for GTA4. Since it’s not available on the main Nvidia, it’s easy to miss so here they are:
http://www.nzone.com/object/nzone_gtaiv_downloads.html
Navin says:
December 12th, 2008 at 5:42 pm
I don’t know why people are having problem with this game. It works perfectly okay on my system.
I’ve core 2 due Cpu and 512 MB ddr2 9600GT PCI express card with 3 GB branded Kingston RAM and 500 GB 10,000 rpm seagate drives. And I run it on my PC.
you are right, gamepad won’t work this game, I didn’t know that it needed MS recommended Xbox gamepad. I’m working on to hack to make my gamepad work on that when it didn’t work whereas other games picked up my gamepad.
wankongyew says:
December 12th, 2008 at 5:57 pm
Do you mind letting me know what resolution you play at and what the clockspeed of your CPU is? I’ve read that GTA4 is much more bottlenecked by CPU speed than GPU speed. I will probably pick this up eventually as I loved the previous games too much, but I’m not in a hurry since there are plenty of other games to play in the meantime. I’ll wait until there’s been a major patch to improve performance or I get a better machine.
I’m also fairly sure that my 8800GT is actually than your 9600GT, so there’s that.
» calltoreason.org » Rockstar gives PC gamers the finger » Grand Theft Auto (GTA) 4 says:
December 20th, 2008 at 4:23 pm
[...] GTA 4 news by wankongyew [...]
calltoreason.org » Fallout 3 Final Thoughts says:
January 22nd, 2009 at 11:27 am
[...] all platforms. This last part is especially impressive given how badly the PC ports of games like Grand Theft Auto IV and Saint’s Row 2 have since turned [...]
An interlude in Middle Earth | calltoreason.org says:
April 30th, 2009 at 8:01 pm
[...] Row 2, and I’m slightly embarrassed that I ended up choosing GTA after having written this post. It seems that the PC ports of both of these games are awful, but Saint’s Row 2 is an order [...]