GTA 'Episodes from Liberty City' Hitting PC, PS3

It's about time.

Hoping for a better port than GTA IV, what a nightmare that was.

i never played the DLC i hope there good...

I just hope we can use all of our GPU's this time around.

How was the PC version compared to the PS3 version? (the only version I got to play for more then a few minutes)

I was thinking about buying the PC one since its much cheaper now, that is if its any good.

At any rate this is good news I guess?

I'll pass. I'm not a fan of GTA IV. I would have loved it if it hadn't cut so much stuff out that GTA:SA had.

I bought GTAIV for $7 on Steam, and I feel ripped off! Its one of the most glitchy pieces of console port garbage I've ever made the mistake of trying. GTA has low detail textures, poor character models, long loading screens, horrible CPU optimization, and graphical glitches galore (like having a boat disappear if looked at from an angle), yet, for some reason it still got glowing reviews for the PC from the likes of online gaming sites (like IGN).

With the track record Rockstar has at this point, I don't know why anyone would think that they'll ever make a decent GTA port. Remember how GTA3 ran on the PC when it was released? With GTAIV, I heard the rumors, but figured that I'd risk it due to the sale price. Never again.

finally!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

About time since I am getting bored of wow. Even more so if I am dusting off old games like Blade Runner then you know after a Lv 80 blood elf pally and a lv 80 warrior tank.

@Bog...
You're kidding, right?

When GTAIV released it was playing at 38FPS at 1280x1024, on a C2Q OCed to 3.6GHz, paired with a GTX 280 for the GPU. Absolutely pathetic performance for the visuals offered.

http://forums.vr-zone.com/news-aro [...] -cpus.html

I have no doubt that you probably can run GTAIV at a decent framerate, but it's probably still under 60, and with a 50% view distance. I'd also hate to see what the min FPS values look like. Even with a complete monster system, with say a 5970 and 4+GHz i7 920, GTA would STILL stutter due to its poor system memory optimizations. Noticeably.

The shadows just downright piss me off. They have this sort of hashing to them, because they were designed to run with a post-processing filter.
Here's an example:
http://img183.imageshack.us/i/newbitmapimagemq7.jpg/

Due to this, if you run with AA on, depending on the AA method, the shadows look especially horrible... and could have a shimmering effect.

Gameplay is the same old stuff from the GTA3 series. Only, a little more story driven. The sandbox environment is actually LESS interesting than in previous GTA titles.

Good game my ass.

It amazes me that people don't realize GTA IV for PC has been patched several times and the performance issues have been fixed.

I bought it in March last year for PC via steam and by that time it was very playable on an old Athlon X2 5600. This is at lower settings with a Radeon HD 4830. IMO the view distance setting and some of the other graphics settings don't make a huge impact on the overall experience, the game is still fun. Upgrading to a Phenom II 940 brought my frame cap from 25 to 45 and sometimes higher.

4890 or better and a slight CPU OC will produce around 60 FPS @ 1920x1080 at higher detail settings.

The only problems I have with the game are
- P2P Multiplayer (Windows Live)
- Not only do you need a Live account, but you must also create a Rockstar Social Club account.

gta has become boring and stale on a pc when its played at such a close proximity. It should be viewed on a huge 40plus inch screen and played from a distance on console.... its not an rpg or a fps, it is not a pc game by heart and as much as I love Pcs and its propriotary games, GTA is a console game...

Sounds like business as usual.

The game's still messed up because the most recent patch that they came out with, 1.0.4.0 is the worst one that they've released so far. You can see the road paint on the tires of your car now, You can only see Niko's shadow on the ground when driving a car now because they did a cheap quick fix for the motercycles shadow issues and the end result was them breaking the car shadows. They screwed up the optimization worse now then it ever has been with this most recent patch as well.

I could sit here and drag out more details but, I've wasted so much of my life trying to get that game to run properly by jerry rigging it with command prompts that "R*" them selves have asked people to do because their patches are shit and it's such a bad POS port that I'm done at this point but, nice try though.. Yeah it runs perfect what ever... The game is a POS.

Sorry to hear that. I don't have such issues with the 1.0.4.0 patch, the game runs pretty well.

Sorry I meant to say the most recent patch 1.0.0.4 not 1.0.4.0, 1.0.4.0 actually isn't all that bad per say..

That in it self is sad to I'll note. When you know what patches you can or can't play the game successfully on, that's pathetic. Half of the people that have GTA IV it's broke. The other half that have i, it works fine but with a catch, you have the road paint on tires glitch and the shadow glitch and that's a fact because every one that is on patch 1.0.0.4 has these glitches and its been proven so don't say you don't because, you do..

My bad, I assumed the June patch 1.0.4.0 was the latest one. Haven't played any games since September (long story).

Anyway, I don't understand why the November update would be numbered lower than the previous one. 1.0.5.0 or 1.1.0.0.or even just 1.1 would have been better. Hopefully the issues will be fixed soon and no new ones will arise because the game worked so well with the previous patch.

Such is the life of a gamer. I lived through BF2 patch hell - when a patch breaks or alters your favorite game you never forget it, and BF2 had plenty of those.

I was so disappointed with the whole exclusivity, and horrible port with both San Andreas and GTA IV. If Rockstar Games wants to do only console content, and then do a half assed port job, to throw us PC games some scraps, they can keep it. One word: BIOWARE.

as long as Platinum games (bayonetta) is not doing the port then the PS3 port will be fine

I apologize as well. I get a little to defensive when people say that GTA IV runs perfect. Yes, the patch naming scheme makes no sense what so ever. Also I really hope they get it fixed too because it's a really good game when it runs right. They've just broke it to a point on the PC to where it's a disgrace now IMO.

Sad.... I've never had problems or patched any of the precious GTA PC games.

But with all the complaints about glitches and performance, I've not tried out GTA IV, ever.

Even with all of the issues, IMHO, PC version looks FAR better than any of the consoles, provided you have a good gfx card with at least 1GB ram onboard. I have both the PS3 and PC versions (PS3 generally has better draw distance than X360 for GTA4) and after playing it on PC, the PS3 version looks blurry and extremely limited in draw distance. I'm using the old 1.0.2 patch, largely because the cheat trainer I use occasionally doesnt work with newer patches, and I dont play online anyways.

I used to have a c2d e6600 o/c to 3.0 with a gtx275 and 3gigs of memory.

GTAIV ran horribly at only 8-19 fps on no matter what setting I put it on. It even ran like that on 800x600 with lowest settings which made absolutely no sense. What I did find out is that it always maxed out the cpu at any resolution.

Anyway, I recently bought a core i7 920 with 6 gigs of ram and the same gtx 275. I now run it with an average of 50 fps with the highest being 60fps (due to v-sync) and lowest being around 40fps (when it's foggy, raining, and lots of traffic. However, most of the time its really stable at around 50fps.

It's amazing what just the 920 did for frames. I don't even think I was limited by memory, even with only 3 gigs as the benchmark would always say I plenty of system memory left over. Of course, the game is more demanding the benchmark, but still, I think the bottleneck was defiantly the cpu.

This game was defiantly not a very good port and the gameplay is just, alright. The story is good and I do like watching the cutscenes but the gameplay is not as good a San Andreas. There is no role playing aspects that I liked with San Andreas and the world is just as dull as with any of the other games.

Money is pretty much pointless in the game and the only way to spend it is to go on shooting sprees and buy a ton of ammo. Even then, I always have more then enough money.

Next game I hope they add the ability to purchase houses, buildings, businesses, cars, boats, campers?, and actually have some kind of economy and A.I. that doesn't reset itself every few minutes. I would really like to cause havoc in the middle of the city and actually cause havoc instead of everything magically going back to normal once I leave.

I'm going to focus on this one little section of stuff here.

Turn off V-Synch and watch your load times go from when the loading screen song has been over for a minute, to damn near right away. Just another fun little POS bug that they haven't fixed since the game came out..

Your welcome.

[citation][nom]alanman[/nom]It amazes me that people don't realize GTA IV for PC has been patched several times and the performance issues have been fixed.[citation]
I chucked the box in my desk drawer after playing it when I first brought it and the performance was terrible. Just wrote it off as a "Look at reviews before you buy" decision. I might dust it off and see if I can finally play it as I liked the previous GTA's that wern't a terrible port!

I'm going to focus on this one little section of stuff here.

Turn off V-Synch and watch your load times go from when the loading screen song has been over for a minute, to damn near right away. Just another fun little POS bug that they haven't fixed since the game came out..

Your welcome.

Thanks for that little tip! Load times were pretty much cut in half and the max fps's went up quite a bit, obviously. Indoors I am getting max 120fps while outdoors I am getting around 80 fps max standing in place. Not that it really changes things as the average fps is still the same.

Thanks.

Your welcome, if that doesn't tell you I know this game inside and out I don't know what to say.. They need to fix everything in one last patch and then worry about selling us more stuff. If it's still broke when these games come out I'm not buying them and I doubt many other people will either IMO..

True, the only reason I got it is because of the $7 deal on Steam back during Christmas. Good thing I already had my order in for the i7 otherwise I wouldn't have even been able to enjoy the game. I new it was buggy and had performance problems when I bought it but it was a little worse then expected and way worse then it should have been.

Heck with that C2D I should have been able to run it at 60fps easy, especially given the level of graphics. Heck, I was running San Andreas decently with an average P4 2.4 768mb of ram and a Radeon 9800Pro the day it came out. I don't remember what settings I had it at but I believe they were on the highest, or close to it. Probably not full view distance but still...

Defiantly wasn't a high end system at that time, considering the 9800Pro came out in 2002 and the 6800 series was already out which was quite a bit better then the 9800Pro. Of course, the 9800pro was kind in a league of its own back in the day. Second longest lasting card I have ever bought, besides the 8800gt which was also a good long lasting card, heck it still is a great card and can still play a lot of things on decent settings(the 8800gt that is).

In comparison a C2D and an 8800gt should have been able to max out GTAIV no problem had it been made properly. Should have even been able to run on a 6800gt or ultra at medium settings!

I've been playing GTA IV since I got it for $7 off Steam. I have a GTX 295 and i7-920. The load times aren't really that bad to me. (300GB WD 10,000 RPM raptor drive) The graphics are fine except I see flickering shadows in a lot of places which is annoying as hell but I've gotten used to it. It runs very smooth and doesn't ever stutter.

I have the video settings set as high as they can go without the game giving that warning of not having enough video memory (sucks each GPU only has like 850MB each).

I think it was well worth the $7 but it certainly could have been ported over to PC better.

I bought the $7 version also, and it was the best game I have bought at that price. I only play multiplayer and it is just amazing. This is the sort of game I have always wanted to play. I love the GTA mode, nothing better than racing all around the city with no rules to limit your creativity on how to get from point A to B. I want the Downloads just to get better toys to play with in Multiplayer. I hope they will be reasonably priced.