Now that you've been playing a while, how is GTA 4 holding up?

The Game Room
21

Most of my points have been covered, but I’ll add some color commentary:

Not many “timed” missions per se, but a lot of chase missions, which I hate. I hate them for two reasons: A) I suck at driving GTA, and B) it introduces the same factor that timed missions do, in that tactics go out the window and it is all about twitch.

As to save-on-demand during missions: I understand their design decision, but reject it. The choices aren’t “save whenever you want” vs. the GTA no-save-until-the-end; a middle ground of “checkpoints” is sound (such as that employed by Call of Duty, among others). There have been several times where I literally threw down the controller in disgust, and just shut everything off for the night, because I was 23 minutes into a 25-minute mission when I: fell off a building/missed a turn/Niko throws a grenade at his feet.

Especially this:

At the end, you have the big shootout in the old building, then have to (depending on your choice of revenge/money) either race the motorcycle and hit the jump squarely and at the right speed, or maneuver your boat under a helicopter, was extremely frustrating. I did the boat/copter one first, and when trying to maneuver under the too-low chopper I ended up bumping the chopper about a mile away. I was pretty pissed.

For offline sandbox play, I prefer Saint’s Row…it is just more fun for me. The available cheats are more fun (homicidal cars, for instance) for sandboxing. In GTA IV, once you get to 3+ stars the cops are brutal; in Saint’s Row they’re more manageable, in that they come in pairs rather than swarms.

22

There were plenty of chase missions, but for the most part, all you had to do was keep up, and they’d eventually stop or crash on their own, then you could kill them. I thought the chase missions were almost too easy.

The only mission I felt that frustration with was the one you mentioned below.

23

I still love it. I have been really busy lately, and not able to do many missions. But, just driving around for a little while is a lot of fun. Doing jumps, flipping cars over, seeing how fast I can go.

When I do the missions I enjoy them. The characters are fun, and so far the story has been interesting. I agree that the lack of a middle of a mission save point is annoying, but I am glad that they added autosave to the gameplay. Which makes saving in IV better than in previous versions.

24

The mission variety gets a 6/10. Too many missions are similar. There are a few that really stand out though.

The storyline gets an 8/10.

The look and feel gets a 9/10.

The overall experience gets a 10/10.

It’s greater than the sum of it’s parts. There’s just so much STUFF everywhere. From glittery Times Square to sandy shores littered with junk to docks to dirty back alleys. So many funny and amazing things happen. There’s so much right that’s it’s easier to talk about what’s wrong.

25

I also bought a 360 specifically for GTA4. However, having played through the entire storyline, I believe that San Andreas is a better game.

I’ll grant that GTA4 has a much better storyline and actually has some dramatic tension; SA’s story was a bit cliche and sort of fell apart at the end (i.e., CJ doing gangsta stuff on Grove Street even though he was a bajillionaire).

However:

  • GTA4 is pretty much all in a very urban setting. Even places like Broker are pretty urban. SA had multiple cities, each with their own style, not to mention a rolling countryside, a desert and small towns.

  • GTA4’s radio stations kinda suck. I really only listen to Liberty Rock, the Journey and talk radio.

  • I hate driving (to get somewhere, not in general) in GTA4. In SA, I could drive from Grove Street to San Fierro and enjoy it. In GTA4, I took a taxi everywhere 99% of the time, which surely caused me to miss out on a lot of scenery.

  • There is no parachute. While there is no jet, GTA4 has helicopters and skyscrapers. What fun is landing on a skyscraper if I can’t basejump off?

  • Somewhat related: No jetpack. It was pretty gimmicky in SA, but actually very useful for exploration, and would be especially useful for things like finding all the pigeons.

  • This is largely due to a lack of exploration, but in SA, I had several favorite places to go and just cause mayhem (my personal favorite being up on the scaffolding at the construction site with the GASH sign, in San Fierro). Nothing really stands out for me, so far… any suggestions?
    There are others, but those stick out right now. A large part of my problems seem to relate to a lack of exploration, but I think that stems from the fact hat the game doesn’t make me want to explore (unlike in SA).

I would love to hear tips on how to make my GTA4 experience as enjoyable as SA.

26

Here’s one: There’s a park on one of the two East islands, near where Packie lives. In the center is a big round fountain, and there’s a path that goes all the way around the fountain. Take a car out there and drive around and around the path, hitting pedestrians. Then see what happens when the cops come.

27

I just got off work and stopped at Gamestop for a copy. I bought new, because used was only $5 cheaper (WTF?) Gotta wash the car, eat dinner, do a little housecleaning, work on my book, and then…the rest of the night is gaming. I think this is gonna look sweet on my 96" screen (digital projector).

28

Boy somebody is probably gonna get about 4 hours of sleep tonight! :wink:

29

I also preferred San Andreas, for mostly the same reasons as Dilton. In addition:

– The driving physics seem just slightly off. You skid on dry asphault and get airborne a little too easily. In another game this would barely matter, but what makes or breaks a sand-box game like GTA is whether or not just getting from Point A to Point B is fun.

– In San Andreas there was always something to do – fight turf wars – that was pretty easy, but just challenging enough to be interesting. In GTA IV, the busy-work they give you – taking friends and girlfriends out to dinner and making them like you, etc. – mostly seemed like a chore to me.
Anyway, I still like the game, but San Andreas was better. Also, I just went back and bought Vice City, which I never played. Looking forward to it.

30

You don’t have to do much taking people out. It does pay to go out a time or two with each person, because they will often have mission or good benefits (and I’m not just talking sex.)

What bugs me is you constantly get calls from people wanting to do stuff. If you turn the person down, they like you less. So you have to accept, then call them back and say you can’t make it. That gets tedious. You can put your cell phone in sleep mode, but I always forget to do that.

Sometimes they even have special dialog like “Brucie, I’m right in the middle of something right now, can I call you back?”

31

I liked IV better than San Andreas. SA was just too big for me. The only thing I miss from that game is the gang warfare, which was big fun. I hate the flying in all the GTA games, and my crappy flying skills kept me from finishing Vice City and SA. So I’m glad they got rid of most of the flying.

32

I think, actually, that this evinces a school of game reviewing that saw the original Black and White ranked, IIRC, at a 96 by PC Gamer and, incidentally, saw its decline as the preeminent gaming mag out there. IMO at least.

The point, as I see it, is that a game has to have a solid core of, well, gaming. What you’re describing is, pretty much, awesome scenery where doing stuff gets somewhere between a 6 and an 8, depending on what exactly you’re looking for.

Imagine this: some folks go out and digitally scan every square inch of New York. Not just for inspiration, but to include it in a game. That guy in the suit you pass? Actually coming out of Penn Station the day they scanned him in. The deli you can walk into? All the patrons were really there. Dimebags that litter the ground, crushed out cigarette butts, the titles on the shelves at the porn stores near Port Authority Bus Terminal? All totally 100% accurate.
But, you can’t do anything, at all, other than walk around the city. It’s the ultimate tour in the history of cyber-tours, awesome in its detail and clarity, complete down to the last giant rat scurrying along the streets by Washington Square Park.

But it’s not, even a little, a game.
It’s a tour simulation.

Now, granted, GTA IV isn’t that bad. It gets a lot of gaming details right. But, at heart, it’s just not a very good game. It is pretty good for catching the vibe of New York, and it’s a prototype for the tour-simulator, but just like the tour-simulator wouldn’t be a good game because its location was rendered well, GTA IV isn’t either.
It’s impressive as all fuck in a bunch of ways, sure, but that doesn’t make for a good gaming experience for a lot of people.

33

Have you played it? It’s definitely a game. It has driving, flying, hand to hand and firearms combat, grenades, Molotov cocktails. Physics, explosions, everything. It has a storyline, better than many movies I’ve seen. It’s definitely a game. My point was just that the missions are a little repetitive.

34

You’ve mixed up the pronouns.
“It” refers to the thing I described in the preceding paragraph and specifically echos the sentence that came right before.
At the start of the next paragraph, “GTA IV isn’t that bad” shows that GTA IV is different than what “it” was referring to.

And in post 14 I said "Heck, after beating it… "
It’s hard to beat a game I didn’t play.

And simply for the record, the hand to hand combat was laughable, the shooting and cover mechanics made Gears of War look elegant, the flying controls were rage-inducing and the molotovs-grenades-explosions weren’t anything that hasn’t been done much better many other times. The mission themselves were generally annoying (the above mentioned ‘drive around and chase a guy for 24 out of 25 minutes, take a wrong turn, start from scratch’ spring to mind). There were, perhaps, four or five missions that actually had any visceral impact. The game’s story and mission structure peaks with the bank robbery and never even begins to approach that level again.

The actual game part of GTA IV is simply average.

35

And San Andreas was worse. The driving was blood-curdling, the shoot-fights atrocious and rudimentary, the turf-war gameplay laughably flawed and it had so many chores, it’s ridiculous. (If anyone thinks GTA IV’s dating sim is a bad chore, go back and give San Andreas’ weight-lifting button-mashing competition another try.)

The GTA series left “pure gameplay” back in GTA III and Vice City. (And that on the PC) These days, it’s all about the packaging, the humour, the storylines, the details and the characters. It’s far more a theatrical experience than a game, per se, but that’s the price of being ambitious about scope. I found San Andreas and GTA IV refreshing for being more than a thing foil of storyline wrapped around a gameplay gimmick. (Like Gears of War’s cover system) It’s more like MGS4 than anything else.

36

And yet it somehow made half a billion dollars and gaming magazines give it an average rating of 98/100, so your opinions seem to be in a very extreme minority.

I guess some people are just picky like that. Instead of obsessively nitpicking every aspect of the game, I spent that time sitting back and enjoying it. This is why I could never be a game reviewer.

The poster early in the thread who returned the game and the system because he couldn’t save anywhere he wanted is just… wow, I don’t even know what to say on that one.

My opinion, as someone who gets very bored very quickly with at least 95% of video games (I’m picky in a different way), is that GTA IV is one of the very best games ever made, and the only serious competition it has for that title are San Andreas, Vice City, and, to a somewhat lesser extent, GTA III.

37

Yeah, MC Hammer and Debbie Gibson raked in cash too.

I used valid logic to back up my position and I stand by it, I don’t really need a bandwagon.
The game is merely an average game. If people are looking for something other than an excellent game, they may find it in GTA IV. If they expect to find actual top flight gaming, they’ll be sorely disappointed.

Who in this thread has “obsessively nitpicked” anything?

Why does that baffle you?
Someone bought a console to play a game. They found that the game wasn’t fun for them (‘sitting back and enjoying it’) because the save system sucked. So they didn’t want to keep the console or the game.

38

It’s just such a minor, minor, minor thing, is all.

39

Several people have described how it significantly raised their frustration level. Several have described how it helped ruin their enjoyment of the game.

I don’t understand your position. You’re against analyzing a game on its merits and only care about whether or not it’s enjoyable to you personally, but then when others state that it wasn’t enjoyable for them, you don’t grok.

For what it’s worth, I just hope that some people reading this thread might realize that the game is horribly over hyped and wait until they can get it for much less than 60 bucks.

40

You know, I really don’t think the gameplay is a minor issue. I’m with FinnAgain. Mediocre combat and a driving model which is simply broken are not minor problems - aren’t they the heart of the game? I thought GTA4 was merely okay, as well.
And for the record, I’m capable of wholeheartedly loving games. Call of Duty 4 was damn near perfect, as was Civilization 4. But those games worked so well because they built on a foundation of great gameplay and worked from there, not the other direction like GTA. GTA feels more like an interactive movie to me than a game.