R* Screws PC Gamers Yet Again, Noone Is Surprised

[Too-DAMN-Much]

well... anyway, the GTA 4 release dates rapidly approaches for PC, preorders are phoning in to gamestop and EB to be sure it hasn't been pulled again for another half year of wasting time doing exactly nothing but sucking the dick of the allmighty dollar, it's that time of year again, rockstar has made quite a tradition out of screwing the fanbase of originals royally.

on top of that, i've been seeing news articles saying that the PC version soon to be out have horrid performance on even top of the line reviewer's computers, one article even seems to suggest R* released a buggy half finished version on purpose to combat piracy.

i'm glad i didn't pre-order or ever plan on buying this shit at all, i'm not going to shell out money just to tell rockstar "yes, take my money and screw me into waiting another half year or year for a game you had very nearly finished cause you're too busy shoving your nose up sony's ass"

R*, i hope you see this, you've got one good series of games in your entire career and what do you do with it?

you show us all you care about nothing past my wallet with every single half assed sequel, go fuck yourself.

[P$ycHo™]

if its not on the webz a few days before the release date, then it was not the release date :P

[Psythik]

Runs just fine on my $1100 rig.

[deeder7001]

Runs fine on my 360(most of the time).

[Too-DAMN-Much]

Psy - i haven't got it yet, so i'll give you that, it probably is just the normal noob crying, happens for every game now when someone's 486 gives them the finger.

deeder7001 - i hope it gives you the RROD too

[deeder7001]

I'm pretty sure it will eventually.

[EfaustuS9]

runs fine on my ps3 all the time

[P$ycHo™]

never crashed on my m8's ps either and we played all night in summer in a hot room :P

[Psythik]

R* added a feature that lets you enable the same effects that are used on the consoles to make it look better. So at the cost of looking slightly grainy/blurry, the game looks cleaner and the motion blur masks framerate drops.

GTA IV officially looks and runs a lot smoother than it ever could on the consoles...

[P$ycHo™]

but isnt the settings directly connected to your GFX ram? so a way faster GTX280 with 800mb can enable less than an older/slower card with 1gb.

[Too-DAMN-Much]

yes, unless you add command line switches to your shortcut to basically tell it to fuck it to fuck off and go to hell, when it assumes since you're not running a quad core pentium extreme with a 9800 GTS with 512MB of ram on the video card, you have an ancient dinosaur computer that should be kept in a museum and can't handle any texture that doesn't look like the crayon scribblings of a 5 year old having a seizure.

oh, did i mention? it restricts the display size for you too, unless you use the command line switches, i'm sorry rockstar, but i didn't spend over $1,500 upgrading this computer barely past a year ago to play games that aren't going to lag like hell and try to baby sit my settings for me, to be honest, sure, nearly everyone who plays this game at all on PC is a noob, that's a given, but i think even noobs finally get the hang of trial and error.

oh and using command line switches, i run this shit 1280x1024 @ 75HZ, texture sizes set to use high in game, rendering medium, draw distance 50, detail distance 45, car density 20, and it still runs well above 35+ FPS, that's the other idiotic thing about this, the game forces Vsync by default, which is nearly always redundant unless the game also uses triple buffering (this doesn't), so that's another performance hit right there, all that and your last gen game engine doesn't even support anti aliasing?

it's blindingly obvious that the extra time to put this on PC, was for one reason and one only :

to waste $200,000.00 on a bloatware DRM copy protection scheme that uses activation and disk checks, not to mention most of the stuff they actually did "add" is just excuses to force you to leave open the launcher application so it can phone home and verify your license every minute or so.

i admit, multiplayer finally is cool, but it's pretty obvious from the first game in the fucking series this game isn't meant to be multiplayer friendly to be honest, it was implemented decently, but still feels decidely half assed at best, the replay saving thing is a cool idea, but it'd be a hell of a lot better if it didn't record the entire time the game is being played "in case" something happens that you'll want to save a clip of to the R* website, i don't know about the rest of you, but i think, at least personally, having a video host to upload your replays to in the first place is just pointless and nothing else, and even if i did want to show people my replays, i'd prefer generic file naming to local disk, i think i can handle youtube uploading.

anyway, the latest GTA, yeah, it's shit, but it's still GTA and R* said a patch could be expected sometime next week to fix the most major bugs.

i honestly wish they'd stop milking one series for all eternity at this point.

i mean, come on, table tennis and bully must have sold a few million copies on each system right?

oh right, sorry, forgot, R* is a one hit wonder developer trying to milk they're only successfull series for every cent.

[P$ycHo™]

im a gta fan, but i think ill stay away from this one...

[Too-DAMN-Much]

eh, it could be worse (theoretically), but yeah, unfortunately, i'm not going to care about GTA after this shit either.

[P$ycHo™]

the massive drm alone is a reason

[Too-DAMN-Much]

easily, apparently you can use the video editing thing whether you're profile is online or offline, but it's incredibly slow to encode it, a cool idea kind of now that i know you can at least save it to local disk to upload where ever the heck, but it took like an hour for a near 3 minutes clip i took trimmed down to around 30 seconds to encode to 720p.

personally, i know i've said fallout 3 was a large deviation from the past titles, but that had a good copy protection scheme, simple, non invasive, not full of bloat, installer checked for legitmate DVD to complete installation and you needed a key to make a windows live account for it, that is the kind of copy protection noone will mind, and it doesn't make the game too easy to pirate either, then again, i really doubt hardly anyone not on noob consoles gives a fuck one way or the other about windows live achievements, i can tell you for positive right now, i don't and i couldn't think of anyone who does off the top of my head either.

point is, there's no bloatware needed running while you play the game saturating your performance and using internet for shit i'll never care about.

the bloat here is around 16MB memory footprint while running, definetly not huge, but hardly small either, especially for vista users since 64 bit is hardly supported at all for gaming and when it is from what i've heard you're better of not bothering, 16MB of memory being used for something that's not whatever game you're playing is a slightly hefty chunk considering vista 32bit can only handle 4GB and i'm fairly sure that's INCLUDING video memory, not positive, but i think it is.

[P$ycHo™]

yea, XP/vista 32 bit is 4gb max including video ram so i had to take out one 1gb of my ram as it was unstable.
and no, only some console kids probably care about the achievments. (i dont)