The other day I mentioned that you probably shouldn’t buy GTA IV for PC. Well, today I’m upgrading that probably to a definitely.
I made that post before any reports of just how terrible and painful the installation procedure actually was started coming in. My post was mostly related to how Rockstar ignorantly thought adding DRM would protect their game. It was more a commentary on the industry’s callous stupidity and greed as a whole with a little specificity added in at the end to demonstrate potential GTA IV annoyances.
Well, the jury is in and it turns out that GTA IV’s problems go far beyond its DRM. All those extra programs required that bloat up the install have been causing a lot of headaches. In short, GTA IV will install SecuROM, Games for Windows Live, and Rockstar Social Club, and it requires that you sign up for and use the latter two to play. It also requires Adobe Flash and Internet Explorer, and if you’ve bought the game through Steam, you haven’t alleviated any of your troubles. Steam merely tacks on yet another layer of bloated abstraction to the process.
But it gets even better! GTA IV will look at your computer’s hardware and will mandate which graphical settings you should use to play. Many games have done this; it’s usually not a problem. However, GTA IV goes one step further by disabling all of the high-quality settings! GTA IV assumes it was built for some mythical alien computer from the future. They call it “future proofing.” I call it laziness. Even systems that can run Crysis on high or maybe even highest can’t do simple things like enable 2x anti-aliasing, run it at their monitor’s native resolution, or alter the object-culling distance.
To top it off, the game isn’t even stable. Reports of crashes have been coming in just as quickly as people pissed off about how difficult it is to get the game installed and started. My guess is the game is completely unoptimized for PC hardware. That would explain both the crashes and the reasoning behind disabling what should be common graphical settings.
Frankly, this is appalling. It’s exactly the kind of thing that will kill off the PC gaming industry if other developers follow suit. But I guess that’s the point, eh?
Here are a few links that demonstrate some of the issues GTA IV has been causing. I’m sure you could find a plethora of others if you looked.
As usual, the customers over at Amazon are doing their best to give the game a one-star rating. GTA IV, then, follows in the same footsteps as Spore, Mass Effect, Far Cry 2, Crysis Warhead, and others. Corporate greed and idiocy has once again pissed off the consumers. Great job, guys. Really.
Luckily, Valve is proving yet again that they know what they’re doing. Apparently it’s quite easy to get a refund if you’ve bought GTA IV via Steam.
You definitely shouldn’t buy GTA IV.
The other day I mentioned that you probably shouldn’t buy GTA IV for PC. Well, today I’m upgrading that probably to a definitely.
I made that post before any reports of just how terrible and painful the installation procedure actually was started coming in. My post was mostly related to how Rockstar ignorantly thought adding DRM would protect their game. It was more a commentary on the industry’s callous stupidity and greed as a whole with a little specificity added in at the end to demonstrate potential GTA IV annoyances.
Well, the jury is in and it turns out that GTA IV’s problems go far beyond its DRM. All those extra programs required that bloat up the install have been causing a lot of headaches. In short, GTA IV will install SecuROM, Games for Windows Live, and Rockstar Social Club, and it requires that you sign up for and use the latter two to play. It also requires Adobe Flash and Internet Explorer, and if you’ve bought the game through Steam, you haven’t alleviated any of your troubles. Steam merely tacks on yet another layer of bloated abstraction to the process.
But it gets even better! GTA IV will look at your computer’s hardware and will mandate which graphical settings you should use to play. Many games have done this; it’s usually not a problem. However, GTA IV goes one step further by disabling all of the high-quality settings! GTA IV assumes it was built for some mythical alien computer from the future. They call it “future proofing.” I call it laziness. Even systems that can run Crysis on high or maybe even highest can’t do simple things like enable 2x anti-aliasing, run it at their monitor’s native resolution, or alter the object-culling distance.
To top it off, the game isn’t even stable. Reports of crashes have been coming in just as quickly as people pissed off about how difficult it is to get the game installed and started. My guess is the game is completely unoptimized for PC hardware. That would explain both the crashes and the reasoning behind disabling what should be common graphical settings.
Frankly, this is appalling. It’s exactly the kind of thing that will kill off the PC gaming industry if other developers follow suit. But I guess that’s the point, eh?
Here are a few links that demonstrate some of the issues GTA IV has been causing. I’m sure you could find a plethora of others if you looked.
As usual, the customers over at Amazon are doing their best to give the game a one-star rating. GTA IV, then, follows in the same footsteps as Spore, Mass Effect, Far Cry 2, Crysis Warhead, and others. Corporate greed and idiocy has once again pissed off the consumers. Great job, guys. Really.
Luckily, Valve is proving yet again that they know what they’re doing. Apparently it’s quite easy to get a refund if you’ve bought GTA IV via Steam.