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Grand Theft Auto IV - technical problems surface on US consoles

Wednesday 30th of April, 2008 - 01:38:01 GMT

Kotaku broke the news that GTA IV was suffering technical issues in the early hours of Tuesday morning. The problem was thought to affect American 60Gb Playstation 3 consoles only, when playing the singleplayer storyline. That was before the multiplayer service on PS3 also started to suffer problems and the freezes and lockups which began from the opening cutscene, began to affect 360 gamers too.

Shacknews was another games site whose staff were hit by the multiplayer problems as well, this time on 360.

It's a curious problem considering Sony's perceived higher reliability. 360 consoles were well renowned for falling over at the drop of a hat long before GTA arrived, which cost billions to fix. As such, the vast majority only have to worry about their actual console rather than software. Only one person on our forums reported general technical problems with his 360 which coincided with the purchase of GTA. Everyone else running Live has managed to play and set up games without a hitch and these issues have yet to mushroom in the same way across Europe. Whether there was a greater degree of playtesting in Europe due to non-English language checks, is unclear.

PC Gamers have little to do except wonder how these graphical glitches, crashes and lockups (which we're used to from ports of GTAs III and Vice City) managed to affect the latest generation of consoles, if the previous Playstation and Xbox models handled older GTAs with comparative ease. Plenty of casual gamers and those new to gaming paid up for this hyped movie-beating experience, not the equivalent of a pirate film which might or might not play to the end which must be galling when it's GBP 35-40 spent rather than under GBP 10.

Rockstar will definitely work around the clock to solve these two major glitches. Its job has become much harder beacuse the faults are random and could affect either platform and consoles of any vintage. No two consoles seem to respond in the same manner. Some users who modded 60Gb PS3s with larger hard drives seem to have escaped the issue, others have not, whilst some users taking one disc which wouldn't work in one console, have seen it function flawlessly in a friend's machine. The only official advice to back up save games prior to reinstallation and replay, works for a small group of affected users but not for others.

At least for PC Gamers, everyone waits but receives the same fix at the same time from a games publisher. Furthermore, PC Gaming labels have the help of graphics card manufacturers Nvidia and ATi, whose driver releases also contain fixes for games - Bioshock being one well-known example for a title published by Take Two. The latter service is a resource that's not applicable to console gamers.

We'll keep you posted as news travels across the pond. If you've had problems with either version of GTA IV feel free to email with your experiences to

nethlyn [at] preys-world.com

- Ken

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