Essays 31 October 2020, 20:30

Crude Classics. Games Full of Bugs that Players Love Anyway

Games are rarely perfect in technical terms. Sometimes, though, it is the least sophisticated productions that win the hearts of players with their history and atmosphere, making us willing to turn a blind eye on even the most ridiculous drawbacks.

Grand Theft Auto IV

Oooh, Grand Theft Auto IV. The first installment of the series released on the seventh generation of consoles. A production in which Rockstar took their story about an American dream turning into a violent nightmare a little too seriously. Critics loved it, and the players – despite some objections – couldn't get away from it either. There was only one problem: the fourth GTA turned out to be bugged enough to make the San Andreas look like an effect of months of grind.

As a result of one bizarre bug, Niko didn't even have to shoot at the cars to blow them up – all he had to do was get run over.

It's not hard to understand – a game of this scale must have had a solid portion of shortcomings. On the other hand, some of the bugs are so bizarre that you can't help but to nag about them. The possibility of avoiding injury when falling down provided you hit an obstacle in the right way, cars exploding after colliding with the protagonist, falling beneath the ground, and teleporting to nearby places... Either Niko Belic's parents were putting something in his breakfast cereal, or one of Rockstar's testers was very dismissive of his work.

But it's not like we're going to dwell on it for too long. In the end, GTA IV is still a GTA game, and therefore an absolute guarantee of great fun. Sometimes rough on the edges - yes - but when you create a simulation of a huge metropolis and give the player the freedom to do whatever he or she wants with it, not everything is bound to work properly. Let's add that the console versions worked better. The developers made it clear that the PC gamers were second-tier players (not the first and probably not the last time in Rockstar's history). And there is no excuse for that.

With the release of Grand Theft Auto IV, PC gamers could actually feel as if the creators couldn't care about them less. The PC version of the game got released several months later, and yet it was perfectly clear that the port from consoles had been prepared in a hurry. In addition to the aforementioned bungles, the PC version of GTA IV also featured tragicomic optimization, through which even powerful computers could experience frame rate drop down to several frames per second. Fortunately, Rockstar admitted their mistake and worked day and night to fix it all... No, I'm kidding – in fact, the developers limited themselves to a few patches that everything together by word of mouth and the game's performance is, to this day, mediocre at best.

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Grand Theft Auto IV