It's official! (allegedly)

For some odd reason, everyone at Take 2 and Rockstar Games has been busy pretending that GTA IV on PC was a big secret, even though it was always obviously going to happen.

http://row.bc.yahoo.com/b?P=2rCcA1f4...834467%2fV%3d1Well, it's happening, and it's official now, so we can all stop pretending to wonder if it's going to happen - GTA IV will hit PC on November 21. The Americans will get it two days earlier, on November 18 (and most people at least a week before that ;)). By November 22, it will have happened. It'll be history and you'll still be tweaking the graphics settings.

It'll be interesting to see what the game looks like on PC. Previous 3D GTAs, built for the old and rather power-lite PlayStation2, always ran vastly better on PC (depending on the power of your pc), boasting larger draw distances, more dependable frame rates plus, of course, the usual PC performance hacks to get everything working better still, post-release.

With GTA IV pretty much maxing out PS3 and Xbox 360 (Maxing out the consoles??? No way were they maxed out), it might be a tougher job getting it running smoothly on your four-year-old Dell. We'll see. In November.

The 360 version was pushing the hardware to the limit. There are clear signs of graphical slowdown and glitches in places and some compromises to the graphics. In contrast the PS3 version was just not optimised, and I have the feeling this was due to it being developed on the 360/PC and then ported over to the PS3. There is no way the PS3 version was hitting the maximum limits of the system. Developers just don't yet know how to code to get the best out of it (look at the PS2 and the difference in the quality of the games released as time progressed to show this).

The PC version should in theory have better graphics that either console version thanks to DX10.1 graphics cards. Particle, light, shadow etc effects especially.

I still get the sense that a lot more could be squeezed out of the 360 (in a similar way to how people got so much out of the PS2 in it's later years, although that has changed somewhat now, due to the presence of it's bigger brother). One of the problems for the 360, as discussed in another thread, is M$'s habit of dropping hardware at the first announcement of their replacement.

Another problem for the 360 is that the same M$ charges companies far more for the use of the 360 gaming engine if the game being produced is going to be multiple disks. Which, as games start to utilise the BD format more effectively, is something that could be a cause for concern with regard to possible multi-format games (why buy a multi-disk version when you can have the same game on a single disk). Newer PCs and the PS3 will have a long way to go before multiple disk games come out on Blu-Ray (oh, but how I long for the day that happens :yesyes:).

In the end though, it will be the mods that make the game, rather than the game that makes the game!