December 6th, 2008

GTA 4 PC Version – Still In Trouble

In less than a week, RockStar's GTA 4, PC version managed to gather a lot of user reviews, but most of them bashing it to the wall, as we were able to see yesterday. Now, we just bumped into the first official reactions from the game maker, whose Lead QA Arthur Chiang, Technical Director Kevin Hoare, and VP of Development Jeronimo Barrera spoke to IGN about the early issues of GTA 4, PC version.

Regarding the arrival of the first patch to GTA 4 PC version, Kevin Hoare said "We've never stopped working on the game, we're working on it every day. We haven't had the typical break after it's gone gold. We're continually working on improvements, we're working on a patch right now," so problems could go away pretty soon,

although it's not improvements that GTA 4 PC version needs, but FIXES...

When it comes to the "textures not displaying" issue, Jeronimo Barrera said " 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 From what we've gathered a lot of those problems are either out of date drivers or we don't support that type of card or you're underspecced or whatever, it's always a combination of one of those things, it's not necessarily that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 because obviously we put in hundreds and hundreds of hours of test into this. From what we did and from going through certification with Microsoft and our external QA process we didn't run into the amount of problems that the boards seemed to be saying there are. I know that Nvidia and ATI are constantly…I think they're releasing new drivers pretty soon."

At last, here's what I consider a funny lie from Mr. Barrera, or maybe that's just the reality through his eyes - "There is a bit of growing pains but the end result is consumers are going to be very happy. The majority I think are happy with it."

Just for the record, I checked again the Amazon page of the game - now, there are 94 user reviews, of which 78 rated the game with a single star, while 6 gave it 2/5, so...