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[Ivan]

I know that old thread is old, but I just played this for the first time over the course of the past week and I am completely blown away. This game instantly skyrocketed into the top 3 games I have ever played in my entire life. Maybe it's because I live in NYC and maybe it's because I'm Russian, but this game is mindblowing to me. It transcends the juvenile premise of the past GTA games and stands as a milestone in what is possible to achieve in a video game in terms of story, character development and social critique. That is all.

[reetva]

Niko is not Russian.

[Ivan]

I know, but you deal with alot of russians and theres a bitching russian radio station

[Vagrant]

Funny place to make a second post, but I think I shall.

There are two things that really drove me away from this game, and they're things that I can't - in all honesty - easily forgive.

The first involves the game pandering to the most annoying of current fads and videogame industry memes; The Darkness.  I'll happily admit that I'm no pro at the engine the Real World uses, but I don't think that any kind of shadow can be cast in which no form of light exists.  A shadow so all-encompassing and devouring of every detail that it could earnestly call itself a black hole and get away with it, whilst not irritating its older and more singularity based brothers too much.  In fact, the only time I've seen a shadow that dark was thanks to the Vashta Narada.  Considering this, it's really quite horrible that they're absolutely everywhere in GTA IV.

I'll be cruising along, enjoying a day in the sunlight when suddenly the sun will go out.  I'll instantly know that I've been engulfed and that many crashes of my newly acquired car will follow, as naught but noises in the dark.  It's like an airborn version of Dark Water.

I apologise for the proliferation of references within that explanation.

The second issue I have is the way things control, other people have mentioned this but I think it really needs to be stressed.  Imagine that the roads are covered with oil, and that the main character is sitting atop a gigantic bar of soap.  That's how the movement feels when driving around.  I've played games which handle Cars properly, and Burnout Paradise was one of them (I loved stunting in Burnout Paradise, so I'm used to making vehicles behave oddly), GTA IV could really learn from games like that.

When I play GTA IV, I don't feel as though I'm playing a murder simulator, I feel like I'm playing a Sentient-Soap-Hates-The-Darkness simulator.  Or something.

It might just be that I have poor sight, and that's why the darkness effects me more than the average player, but my roomie - who has nigh on 20/20 vision - seems to agree with my assessment.

I'm okay with a game being gritty and crazy, but when I can't actually even really get into the game due to poorly thought out mechanics... well, I honestly just can't enjoy it.  I have trouble appreciating the aesthetics of my environment if the wheels of my Car have absolutely no friction to them whatsoever and I find myself once again pirhouetting off into the sunset, or trying to find my way out of an obstacle whilst being effectively blind.

It's not that I dislike this kind of game, because I didn't think Vice City was too bad (I liked driving around in that and listening to music), but I think that GTA IV could really benefit from a tag-line like "New Game Mechanic: Avoid the darkness, it's a sentient entity slowly devouring the World and only you can stop it!"  At least then I'd have known what to expect.

(To add insult to injury, I was often reminded of playing Silent Hill, when I had to turn my Car's headlights on in broad daylight just to find my way out of one of the aforementioned shadows.)

[Xion]

what the hell is "the darkness"?

[Gorman]

what the hell is "the darkness"?

'the darkeness' is a disease where your tv sucks and things appear with too much contrast. despite being able to adjust your televisions settings or infact the games own settings you just complain and let it ruin your experience.

[mewse]

what the hell is "the darkness"?

It's a British hard rock band.  Ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Darkness

Apparently they wish to Consume the World, and only we may Prevent That Intolerable Occurrence.   

[Xion]

Also, imo, the Turismo is the best, most handleable car in the game. I just spawn one with cheats whenever I so desire.

[reetva]

It's fun forming a scooter (moped) gang with your friends, especially when your front wheel craps out at full speed, when you were about to hit some railing. It makes for an intense front-flip.

[Sar]

The first involves the game pandering to the most annoying of current fads and videogame industry memes; The Darkness.  I'll happily admit that I'm no pro at the engine the Real World uses, but I don't think that any kind of shadow can be cast in which no form of light exists.

You know, I had been playing GTA4 and noticing the exact same thing. I'd seen it in other games, too - not so much darkness as contrast; there would be an area of stark shadow under a bridge or overpass where it was hard to make stuff out compared to the bright sun everywhere else.

This irritated me at first, until I noticed one day on my way home from work that as I'm going around a particular roundabout at a particular time of day, the sun and then the contrasted shadows (the roundabout is underneath a major road) conspire to produce more or less exactly the same visual effect. My pupils were contracted right up so I could see OK in the bright sunlight, then when I drove under the bridge I could barely see a thing 'cause there was such a difference in the available light.

So briefly, I thought it was pretty neat for a videogame to have captured this effect. Then I realised that I'd been doing this day after day for weeks and never felt for a moment out of control, or unable to sense vehicles around me... and I'm pretty sure this is due to a combination of spatial awareness/memory, positional hearing and very minor visual cues which combine to give a fairly precise understanding of where everything is. And of course, none of that happens in a videogame, 'cause spatial awareness is a lot harder on a flat TV and the audio direction isn't so precise and the minor visual cues are lost amongst the GIGANTIC CLOUDS OF BLOOM and so on. So then I got a little annoyed again.

[Vagrant]

Gorman: I have a HDMI television which is capable of 1080p.  I know I'm not cutting edge or anything, and I don't have a home cinema system, but I wouldn't think that my television is responsible for something that occurs in... uh, one game out of the entirety of the PS3 library I own?

Mewse: Well done!

Sar: That's basically how I felt, though I have to say that I've never actually seen that kind of contrast to be honest.  The thing is, I live in a rural area of Wales, so I've never really seen anything where the sun hits something so powerfully that the shadow it creates blocks out my ability to make out the shape of things.

I think that's what you might be getting at with spatial awareness though, and you do make a good point, there.

I suppose it might just be that we have other senses to compensate, because even in the darkest of shadows here, I'm still able to quite accurately perceive the shapes of things, general outlines, the greyscale of shadow.  Vimes called it night eyes, and after one's had a moment to adjust, darkness really isn't that dark at all.

Of course, in GTA, one goes from (as you say) a cloud of horrid bloom into complete blackness.  Unlike the real World, the game offers no ability to get any kind of spatial awareness, and the darkness doesn't lighten up after a time.  This, I think, could have helped.  In fact, I've even seen games which perform the aforementioned adjusting of darkness/light, depending on how long the character has been in the dark.  And that works well.

The problem I have with GTA IV though is that it's just black, so very pitch black.  It's almost as though the television has been turned off.

I'm sure the GTA fans will jump on me about this and make claims about my television, but I had no issues playing darkSector.  And when something is lilterally that much darker than darkSector, something has to be wrong.

[shinygerbil]

The darkness problem also happens at night, or in dark places. It's virtually impossible to see what is going on at night without radically increasing the brightness - there is no simulation of your eyes adjusting to the darkness, despite the fact that these dark places may be perfectly well-lit streets in which you should have no trouble seeing.

Yes, it's lovely that we have all this fancy HDR lighting for realism, but when these shadows contrast with the sun or another strong light source in real life, the effect is temporary as our eyes adjust.

Not to mention that simply changing the brightness and contrast only serves to make the game look really washed-out no matter how you do it, which is obviously not what Rockstar intended.

[skaldicpoet9]

The darkness problem...

Hmm, so basically you go from this:



to this:



Man, that must suck.

[Gorman]

Gorman: I have a HDMI television which is capable of 1080p.  I know I'm not cutting edge or anything, and I don't have a home cinema system, but I wouldn't think that my television is responsible for something that occurs in... uh, one game out of the entirety of the PS3 library I own?

i dont think resolution or sound system has anything to do with it. i'm just suggesting that perhaps you could have adjusted a setting, either in the game or on the tv, to improve your $100 experience. i mean if your having trouble driving, then somethign is wrong, obviously no one deliberately designs a driving game where you can't see. personally i could see where i was driving, and everyone else i've talked to could too, the only variable in this equation is the tv. the game is the same for everyone, the console is the same, only the tv changes.

the devs could use more midrange so that it looks palletable under every given tv and it's showroom settings. anywya, if you cant tell, i loved the look of the game, especially the lighting.

[Hideous]

im playing it on my friends ps3 and i love it.


they complain about me driving too slowly though