A few days went on since Rockstar released their grand or maybe not so grand Grand Theft Auto IV. A lot has happened since then. Not.
Only new issues and bugs coming around the corner. You think all this crap I’ve written one post below was already enough, think twice. Oh it’s only getting better and better. Threads, forums and user reviews at amazon etc. are exploding with the rage of the (now former) fans of Rockstars Grand Theft Auto.
The Crack
Ironically, the same stuff that should keep those evil software pirates from copying (!= stealing) the game keeps the loyal paying customer from playing it.
Seems like a lot of those problems – like the game crashing at startup for instance – is only a feature in the uncracked, original version of GTA IV. Hence it’s pretty much sure, that all that anti-piracy crap like SecuROM and God knows what other dirty code R* included in the official version is the main reason for all those problems. However besides all that heavy warmachine of anti-piracy software R* included, GTA IV was successfully cracked after only two days. So all the evil pirates can enjoy the game without any startup crashes, while the happy paying customer possibly can’t even start the game. Thank you Rockstar. Great success. Maybe some pretty day game, film and music publisher will learn, that those anti-piracy techniques only punishes the loyal customers, while those downloading stuff from the internet don’t give a shit.
The Steam Patch
A day after GTA IV was released, there was a minor patch on steam, guess to solve some of those exclusive problems, steam users have. Well it didn’t do anything good. But it do some bad. The game still crashes in most cases. But now the workaround to go offline in Rockstars social thingy while starting doesn’t work either. Grand!
Prime 95
What has a piece of software that calculates prime numbers to do with GTA IV? Nothing. Well in a world based on logic. So not in this town… some clever or maybe retarded (I’m really not sure how someone had the idea to try this) guy had the idea to solve prime numbers while starting GTA. Solving prime numbers takes the CPU usage somewhere to let’s say: 100%. Not a good idea if you want to play a game under normal circumstances. But this is GTA IV. So funny thing is, and I tried this several times: If you start a prime test and then start GTA IV, something odd happens, GTA IV starts to the menu without crashing. No matter if you are online or offline in the Rockstar for Socialists thingy. A lot of people state the same. When the menu successfully loaded, tab back to Prime 95 and stop the calculation. Then “enjoy” the game. If you can. Thus: if the CPU usage is around 0% GTA IV doesn’t start. If it is somewhere around 100% it will load. That makes a lot of sense, really.
Textures, Textures, Textures
A lot of people have problems with missing textures. Me too. If I change texture resolution to medium or higher, there won’t be a lot of them. Why? Oh don’t ask me. Doesn’t make any sense. Seems to appear on random computer configurations.
But that is not the only trouble involving textures. Even if I see all textures every third time or so I start the game, textures fade in to late. So I am driving over a bridge for example, and crash my car against nothing. Why would I do such a silly thing? Because the concrete wall I crashed my car against just appeared after I killed my car. Greeeaaat. Fixes: I have no idea. Restart the game until the issue doesn’t occur.
Settings Config
Me and myself has another top-notch challenge. Every time I (now thanks to Prime always successful) start the game, it totally fucks up my former settings. Everything I set is gone and down to zero. Even the resolution is at 800×600 in the setting. Funny thing is: on my LCD it is still in 1680×1050 res. Totally weird and damn strange. Only solution: I have to delete the settings file in /User/AppData/Local/Rockstar Games/GTA IV/Settings. After deleting this I have to reset every thing but after that it works. Grand.
Multiplayer
Playing this game online against or with others could be fun. Only problem is: a lot of players including myself get kicked from servers after a 
few minutes. Reason: Game message tells us, that our systems are to slow. Kiss this server good bye. Another awesome feature brought to you by Rockstar. I can play the game okay, it’s not running like a dream but yes, I get more then 1 frame per second, thank you. Why not let me decide if this piece of shit awesome game is too slow. Needless to say the multiplayer characters appearance is not saved after closing the game and restarting. Such small issues are more feature- than bug-like.
Complete denial by Rockstar
IGN featured this little interview with the almighty, holy developers from rockstar, mostly about the bugs (omg what bugs, are there any??) some tiny, little minority of gamers are complaining about: http://uk.pc.ign.com/articles/936/936304p1.html
I will quote some highlights and let them speak for themselves:
“The only thing we really have to go on in that regard is support calls we’ve been getting which have been quite low or as expected, which I think is roughly around one percent “
“We’re on the forums ourselves monitoring the issues people are having. A lot of these issues obviously we haven’t seen in our testing and we’re working to reproduce them and find workarounds for those issues. Many of the issues that we’ve found so far haven’t been a direct result of the game itself but rather configurations of driver installations or power management software causing issues, various things of that sort. “
“Let’s not beat around the bush here. There’s a lot of noise like this game doesn’t run at all or there’s missing textures and everything else. From what we’ve gathered a lot of those problems are either out of date drivers or we don’t support that type of card or you’re underspecced or whatever, it’s always a combination of one of those things, it’s not necessarily that we don’t know what we’re doing “
“A lot of the settings when I was originally putting them in were based off of what I could actually squeeze into system memory and video memory. In some cases we’re just seeing 2 GB video cards come out now. That’d be the only way to really get the absolute highest settings. “
“If we had DirectX 10 support we could have had the AA in there, but we don’t have any.” […] “When we were designing it it was with the intent of having future growth with the game.”
“I’ve been reading about the texture drop out problem and I’ve been seeing what kind of hardware they have and it’s usually the Nvidia 7900 series. We saw that problem two or three months ago and it was addressed by a beta driver that we received from them.”
“I think when you start tweaking and taking off the restrictions we have that protect you from yourself, you run into problems “
“It’s kind of dangerous to use some of those command line options because they allow you to set settings higher than your machine can handle and you can basically crash the game, which can cause more problems. Which may be causing some of the problems people are getting. “
“We do recognize that people are having problems with this but it’s not the disaster that people have it hyped up to be.”
To sum up: It’s not our fault, all those stupid gamers use old drivers, and that stupid power management of this windows thingy, and we didn’t know people would try to play this game on an Nvidia or Ati video card. And we thought no one with less then 2 gig of video memory would try to play this game, because our game is future proof even if it does not support DirectX10 and has no AA (all those fancy screenshots of GTA IV before release had AA btw). And we have to protect the gamers from themselves. Those stupid lil silly lemmings. Command lines are evil. That’s why we made them not to work. Bwhahaa.
So don’t except too much patch-wise. Because it’s the gamers fault. Not Rockstars. And thats why all those hundreds of other windows games don’t run either, NOT.
“it’s not necessarily that we don’t know what we’re doing” – I am really, honestly not soooo sure about that one.
Goodbye Cruel World 