Players Furious Over Buggy GTA IV PC Release 384
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."
I'm slightly astonished (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I'm slightly astonished (Score:0, Insightful)
If I had to pick a target to blame it would probably be the DRM.
Fortunately the good people of the scene have provided a quality release that doesn't suffer from such problems.
Re:I'm slightly astonished (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I'm slightly astonished (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Incompetence?, or passive-agressive attack? (Score:5, Insightful)
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? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:I'm slightly astonished (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Ha-ha! (Score:1, Insightful)
It's all part of the "value added" by Steam's DRM ... for the vendor.
Sigh.
Re:I'm slightly astonished (Score:3, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:1, Insightful)
Anyone but me think this is a great strategy? (Score:5, Insightful)
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:I'm slightly astonished (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, Rockstar. (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:Incompetence?, or passive-agressive attack? (Score:3, Insightful)
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:I'm slightly astonished (Score:2, Insightful)
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 could not imagine a Slashdotter coming out of his basement, buying a corvette, conquering ships and stealing shit on the high seas anyway.
Or in other words: Please hand in your geek card right now, or we have to take your internets away. (= Sudden death)
Re:Incompetence?, or passive-agressive attack? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Incompetence?, or passive-agressive attack? (Score:2, Insightful)
Not the old mouse and keyboard thing, the PS2/PS3 have USB ports for a many reasons, one of them is more input options.
Re:I'm not (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't have a credit card, actually I feel pretty good about that.
Re:I'm slightly astonished (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Not so sure about that (Score:4, Insightful)
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.