Grand Theft Auto IV multi-player: sniping from the Empire State Building
Lots of other great sites have detailed "Grand Theft Auto IV's" multi-player, so I'm not going to go too in-depth. But I did get an opportunity to play for about an hour during my visit to Rockstar last week (which will be turning into what I hope will be an in-depth package for Variety in a week or two) and I have a few thoughts I wanted to be sure and note here:
-I counted at least 14 different multi-player modes, though I only got to play 4 of them. I think I agreed not to list all the titles, but suffice to say they appear to range from standard deathmatches to car races to cops vs. crooks to ones that involve controlling territory and ones that actually focus on Hillary Clinton's favorite "GTA" activity: carjacking.
-The coolest moment by far: Starting a team deathmatch on "GTA IV's" equivalent of Liberty island, hopping into a helicopter with my teammates (far more experienced Rockstar employees) and taking the action all the way up to the top of a skyscraper near the Empire State Building. One person actually hopped off the chopper onto the Empire State Building and was sniping from there.
The point: the fact that "GTA IV" doesn't limit multi-player to small maps from the overall game, but uses all of Liberty City, allows for crazy variations. Of course, if you're playing with fewer than 16 people, the ability to run all the way around that relatively large map could be frustrating. You have to be careful about how you design your games. Luckily, "GTA IV" seems to allow lots of customization in designing the multi-player matches.
-Also awesome: Jumping in a boat and being chased by somebody else who's in a helicopter.
-I fell behind in a race and once I realized I wasn't going to win, I decided to have fun f*cking with everyone else. So I piled up a few cars at a bottleneck in the course, climbed up to a point over the the bottleneck, and started shooting at my opponents as they got stuck and tried to work their way around. Maybe not the most gentlemanly way to play, but great fun.
-There's only a few character customization options, but I played as a woman, just to shake things up (no surprise, the match with Rockstar employees and another journalist was a total sausage fest). There's something very unusual and cool about seeing a woman in "GTA." One who's not a hooker, that is.
-The ranking system is based on collecting money, which you get for achieving various goals in the games. But you don't just get money for killing somebody. After you kill them, they leave money on the ground and you have to go collect it. And obviously other people can collect it too. I'm not too sure how I feel about that. It fits the "GTA" aesthetic, but picking up items to get rewards feels a little old-fashioned compared to all the detailed and various rewards -- sometimes to the point of absurdity -- in "Call of Duty 4" or "Rainbow Six Vegas 2."
-Conclusion: There's a lot I still don't know, but based on my hour of playing, I was comfortable enough to e-mail my list of friends I play Xbox Live with (which lately has been all "CoD 4") and let them know: "'GTA IV' is going to be our game from April 29 until at least the fall."
(thanks to Kotaku for the image)






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Posted by: replica handbags | October 24, 2009 at 12:08 AM
Many GTAIV PC fans have contacted Rockstar support over the months
after release of GTAIV on PC in attempts to have the company fix the
"draw distance" bug.. In the GTAIV world pedestrians and cars only get
rendered on screen at an extremely close range (less than 30ft or so)
and this makes snipering and shooting almost impossible, completely
undermining the so called sandbox "open world" of Liberty City /GTAIV
and making much of the potential fun and value of the game totally
pointless and ruined..
http://www.gtaforums.com/index.php?showtopic=385426
It seems R* never fixed it, never patched it, they never even admitted
it was a problem and a hindered to gameplay! So much for transparency
and responsibility I thought!!! Oh well so much for that..
The question begs however, why even on the most powerful systems today
(on PC) we still cannot sniper at more than 30ft away? The answer is
this is due to a hardcoded built in limitation and/or bug/flaw in the
ported PC version of the game.. Rockstar refuses to fix or even
acknowledge there is even a problem, instead giving us the "check your
directx and update your drivers and get the patch" excuses... I
repeat, this is not a hardware specific issue, this is an inherent
flaw in the software game itself!
It seems very unlikely at this point that Rockstar will "fix" this. So
future machines in the future, (for anyone who might still be playing
this game two or three years from now) no matter how fast or next-gen
will STILL encounter the exact same issue/problem/bug... So much for
"future proofing" the game.. yeah they 'future proofed' it alright if
you know what I really mean..
=========NOW for a little demonstration and to put things into
perspective...=====
**Part 1 ..
Nomad in Crysis (Crytek Engine) can shoot and/or sniper over 200X
Times the maximum effective range of that of Niko of Liberty City in
GTAIV for PC gaming!
Distance Niko can sniper in GTAIV : 30ft (for reference that is HALF
an F-22 Fighter Jet)
Video PROOF:
http://www.wegame.com/watch/GTA_IV_Invisible_drivers_peds_still_in_up...
http://www.wegame.com/watch/GTA_IV_PC_Invisible_Driver_Bug/
http://blip.tv/file/1591319
Documentation of the problem:
http://www.gtaforums.com/index.php?showtopic=385426
Visual Illustration of what "30ft" really means.. giving you a
reference for perspective:
http://img9.imageshack.us/img9/8883/f22schem01.jpg
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
**Part 2 ..
Distance Nomad can sniper in Crysis : 5950+ feet!!!!! (that is equal
to about 6.6 times that of RMS Titanic!)
Video PROOF:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UmfgxxLPRA
Documentation:
http://www.crymod.com/thread.php?threadid=35243&hilight=M107
Visual Illustration of what "5950+" really means.. giving you a
reference for perspective:
http://img102.imageshack.us/img102/8191/76080568.jpg
A world away isn't it? Unbelievable!
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Kingie takes it up the arse (and ps3 is just a crippled 360 with non unified memory and a crap gpu)
Posted by: Kingie blows goats | April 30, 2008 at 07:42 PM
Xbox suks Ps3 Rules
Posted by: Kingie | April 10, 2008 at 03:08 AM