Rockstar feels "terrible" about GTA IV issues
Category: Industry, Posted: 04/30/2008 at 12:32PM CDT by Frank Ling, Editorial Director
The problems with GTA IV crashing and freezing on PS3s and Xbox 360s are apparently more than just a fable. Internet gaming sites are reporting the instability of the game and Rockstar has heard the cries of the citizens on the streets of Liberty City and elsewhere.
What did Rockstar say? A customer support rep said, "I feel terrible about this." Or for you Charles Barkley fans, Rockstar feels "turrible."
Not exactly a great consolation to those who have hit the wall while playing GTA IV.
The issues occur when certain PS3s and Xbox 360s freeze during the opening scenes of the game or while exiting multiplayer mode. The player then finds that the game prevents any further advancement in gameplay or locks out all game modes altogether. The condition, according to reports, affects some consoles, but there is no determination on why specific consoles are affected by this problem.
Not a good thing.
In the meanwhile, Rockstar is fervently looking into why this is happening. If they don't release a fix quickly, there may be a contract taken out on the testers who let this awful bug slip by them.
[via gamepro]
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My two cents on this topic. I think Rockstar KNEW GTA IV was broken when they released it. They ran out of time and had to ship because they were under pressure to meet the launch deadline. They figured, "Hey, we ship it and work on the patch later."
Before patches were possible on consoles, this sort of thing would have never flown because the final release of games had to be as perfect as possible. But now that the "patch" is an alternative for game consoles, we probably can expect this sort of thing to happen more frequently.
Boooooooooooooo.
Very good observations, Quasar. Another possibility is that development and testing hardware does not fully emulate retail consoles. I know this is true with the 360, but I don't know about the PS3.
I haven't run into these issues myself. I had no idea until just now that they could be terminal. I thought rebooting and playing from the last save were always possible. Yikes.
I had one at the start, but i just turned off my ps3 and turned it back on again and it was fine. I'm slightly scared to go onto multiplayer now. Could it break my game completely ?
just trade it in
And for those who work, be glad it plays stereo :)
another thing to note is that EVERY sports game that i know of from take two and 2k sports has required pretty extensive patching since 2007 (and probably before... but i don't have those games... i started with college hoops 2k7... while most of them did work they all had framerate issues, freezing problems and from what i can remember online lag was a problem as well (though i only read about online lag, i don't play a whole lot of sports games online...))
game of note here is mlb 2k8... that game was nigh unplayable until the first title update (which didn't rid any problem completely except for a few where some people couldn't play certain franchises... like the padres...)...
I hope they release a patch before i get a crash. How can a game with so much polish, a game that craps on just about everything else out there, the first game actually worthy of a 10, have such a huge bug!
I had a lockup last night in multi after many hours of playing. Rebooted, took an invite from the dashboard, was dropped again, and when it put me in singleplayer, it loaded in all the way back at the first mission. Needless to say, I was worried. I restarted, and it loaded right into my old save. Since I got a mission-critical text not 10 seconds later, I don't--think-- my progress has been halted. At least, I hope not. I haven't tried continuing my game since the lockups happened...
I still have not read anywhere else except here that all progress is going to be lost. Obviously, if saves are deleted (as a way to get a freezing game to work again) then progress is gone. But what I read here is something much worse (after a freeze): "The player then finds that the game prevents any further advancement in gameplay or locks out all game modes altogether." Are you sure?
The latest reports are that when the game crashes or freezes, it stops you from playing any further when the bug occurs. But if you reset and are able to get pass the bug, then gameplay resumes as before.
Apparently, this version of GTA crashes more than cars.... HI-YO!!!!!!!!