It Freezes

Game developers lie, as do game publishers and console designers. It’s an undeniable fact of life that we all grew accustomed to and we don’t pay to much attention to all the bullshit that people from “the business” feed us. We stopped believing Molyneux when he tells us that his next game will be the second coming of Christ sometime after Black & White. We stopped believing Blizzard when they give a release date for any of their games. We stopped believing Guerilla Games that the first Killzone 2 trailer was in real-time. We stopped believing Phil Harrison…well, completely. To be honest I’m all fine with that sort of crap that’s being sent in our way every time something of even remote significance happens – that’s how things work.
What I’m not fine with however is a company that made over 500 million dollars on their game claiming that their product is glitch free when in fact tens of thousands of players can’t play the game at all. Yes, you’ve guessed it; I’m talking about Grand Theft Auto IV.
Since the release on 29th of April numerous reports spawned across the web that the game tends to freeze on some people at random points. Some couldn’t get past the first cut-scene; some (like myself) managed to play a few hours without any issues and then were faced with the problem. Now, for the pièce de résistance – it’s not a unique problem for one system. It happens on both, the PS3 and 360, so everyone that so vigorously tire to convince everyone else that it’s either your 360 getting the Red Ring of Death or that your Playstation 3 is defective should reconsider.
And now an interesting fact. In case of PS3 Rockstar acknowledged that there might be a problem and Son¥ concurred. A patch was conjured that alleviated some of the freezing that was caused by GTA4 code networking like crazy. Still, it only fixed some problems in the multiplayer portion of the game. Now, Son¥ and R* are still trying to figure out what’s going on and are apparently working on a patch/system update to fix the issue.
In case of Xbox the problem is a bit more complex. Neither Rockstar/ Take-Two (the game’s publisher) nor Micro$oft acknowledged a problem exists. Hence there is no info on a probable patch.
I’ve been participating in a discussion on the official Xbox forums about that matter and not only there are more and more people suffering from the freezing issue, but thanks to some who published their e-mails and relations from phone calls to Rockstar/Take-Two/Microsoft support we now have a picture of incompetent, lying bunch of bastards that are doing nothing productive to help the players out.
In the beginning people were usually told that there is nothing wrong with the game, that it’s either a bad disc or their console is broken and they should send it for repairs. As the problem escalated the responses were starting to change - ranging from directing players to the standard Microsoft’s 11-step program to clear the cache and play without theri HDD, to simply admiting that they have absolutely no idea what could the problem be and that the developers probably are working on a way to fix it (yeah, probably getting drunk, and crashing their expensive cars that they bought for all the money they collected from GTAIV sales).
Many theories sprung about what might be causing the freezes. Some even "supplied" by Rockstar themselves. A random R* employee said that in the case of PS3 it’s the Playstation 2 chip responsible for backwards compatibility causing the issue, because they didn’t anticipate it would… So, I guess they didn’t bother to test GTA4 on that particular model. And that was during he period when R* claimed that the problem is exclusive to a small percentage of PS3 owners that have the 60GB launch unit.
I can’t really decide what is more stupid - saying something so ridiculous when there are people with the same problem on a different model, and even on a different system, or avow that you didn’t test your game on all possible models of hardware even after delaying the premiere for 6 months.

The most ludicrous thing happed when the chairman of Take-Two, when asked if there was a problem, said - "No, you know, no, none whatsoever. I'd say the only issue is that someone came up to me yesterday in a restaurant and said my thumbs were hurting from the weekend!"

Congratulations Strauss Zelnich, you’ve been just nominated for the Biggest Idiot of the Year award. Then again, can you take seriously someone who looks like Steve Carell?

It has been over four weeks from the launch without any word on a possible fix. Thousands of players are being screwed by the developers who wipe their asses with cash.
I would understand if they would admit that there is a problem. I would even understand if they said that they don’t know how to fix it.
What I don’t understand is why they decided to lie about it. Have some honour people!

For me, this whole situation is the biggest screw up since 3D Realms announced Duke Nukem Forever in 1998…


You can check out the Official Xbox forums thread here.