Take-Two boss denies GTA IV has glitches

By Tom Bramwell Published 8 May, 2008

As Rockstar confirms and releases PS3 patch.

Take-Two chairman Strauss Zelnick has denied that there are any technical problems with GTA IV. Unfortunately, he seems to have done this the day before Rockstar issued the now-confirmed PS3 patch we told you about yesterday.

Asked about glitches by CNBC, in comments reported by Kotaku, Zelnick said there were "none whatsoever", joking, "I'd say the only issue is that someone came up to me yesterday in a restaurant and said 'my thumbs are hurting from the weekend'."

Then yesterday, Rockstar issued a PS3 patch, which "prevents Gamespy's servers from being overloaded and therefore reduces the impact on those servers that were causing the game to stutter and lock up".

"We continue to monitor the performance of the game both on and offline and will provide further updates as necessary," the publisher added. "We want to assure everyone that, together with our hardware partners, we continue to strive to give our fans the best possible interactive entertainment experiences possible.

"This update will ensure that everyone will experience Grand Theft Auto IV the way it was intended. We apologise for the inconvenience this has caused."

If we were a highly paid executive who hadn't been briefed about that before going on US television, we'd probably be hurting a few more thumbs around the office this morning. With a hammer.

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About Tom Bramwell

Tom is Operations director of Eurogamer Network and Editor-at-Large of Eurogamer.net. He joined the company in February 2000. Follow him on Twitter.

Read more articles from Tom by visiting the Tom Bramwell archive page.

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Comments (21) Latest comment 4 years ago

Comments for this article are now closed, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • Raziel #1 4 years ago

    How about they make a patch for the 360 too, the one that fixes people constantly falling out or not being able to join certain other people.
    GTA IV is a great game, but online is just a joke.

  • Xerx3s #2 4 years ago

    I only had that once (the first time I went online), works fine so far...

    /knocks wood

    Seems like ms's strategy to update the whole network payed off.

  • NumberNone #3 4 years ago

    @Raziel....that sounds like people haven't configured the NAT settings on their router correctly. The only people I know that have had drops from the 360 game are those with strict NATs on the network blade. Forward the ports recommended by M$ and you will probably find these problems go away :)

  • Rrralphster #4 4 years ago

    No glitches?
    I can't really speak of glitches in the MP department. I only tried going online once. Didn't work...

    One thing I noticed is that for instance when I went into the hospital in Downtown Broker there were invisible people in there.
    They appeared and disapeared when I turned, walked etc.
    This is not such a big deal so far. I havn't played any missions in which I couldn't see targets.

    A bit of an improvement in the auto-save department... Having to confirm the auto-save funtion is going to be used in each and every new playsession is rediculous. It even breaks the story (allways some informative or funny conversation afterwards) and can be very annoying when you finish a mission while driving.

    Still, it's the best game in my PS3 collection.

  • Marshall2008 #5 4 years ago

    @NumberNone

    Packie - 'I think you hit the needle on the head..'

    :)

  • homerramone #6 4 years ago

    Did I miss the meeting where BUGS became GLITCHES ?

    Or is GLITCHES the politically correct version of a BUG... :-)

  • RazorObsession #7 4 years ago

    yeah the nat thing is a pain in the arse, almost everyone with a fresh 360 has to fuck about with that shit before it works.
    sorted mine out when cod4 came about, and so far everything seems to be running smoothly. fingers crossed it lasts eh?

  • Moz #8 4 years ago

    No glitches my arse!!! Was chasing someone yesterday in a single player mission (360 version) and for no particular reason Nico started wondering about slowing in random direction with his arms down as though he'd suddenly been struck dumb! When I pulled the shoot trigger it made the sound effect of the gun I was holding but did no animation, all some what frustraighting 10 minutes into a mission that I ofcourse then failed cos the guy got away.

  • Raziel #9 4 years ago

    @NumberNone
    Then I'm afraid I'll just have to give up on MP. I did my own NAT after a lot of messing about. It'll be near impossible to explain to some of my friends how to do it, let alone get the other random idiots on the other team to get them to fix theirs.

    Why couldn't they just have taken a normal way to connect. I heard CoD3 suffered from the same issue. Do developers learn nothing?

  • OnlyMe #10 4 years ago

    Actually, GTA IV is the least buggy 3D GTA I've ever played, and that includes the clones. I've seen glitches, but it's mostly extremely polished and problemfree. Even the framerate is not so bad - San Andreas is the worst offender of the 3D games on framerate, but this has the best framerate yet. Framerate suffers when a lot is happening at once, but it doesn't stutter like many of the others.

  • thedaveeyres #11 4 years ago

    Try climbing a ladder out of a swimming pool.... you get irretrievably stuck.

  • MaxiSleep #12 4 years ago

    I have had the "Freeze" glitch on the ps3 where the game refused to load my saves. In the end turning off flicker reduction/network access and the notification news thingy on the desktop fixed it and my game loaded again.

    No glitches my ass

    (60gb euro launch ps3)

  • DivideAndCombo #13 4 years ago

    It's true, there are some technical issues with the game. But with a map this huge, it's very very difficult to iron out absolutely everything. The multiplayer hangs and crashes are 99% of the time to do with gamespy. The singleplayer glitches.. yes, there are some, but as I say, the scale of the game.. it's pretty much impossible to get everything ironed out. We should be greatful rockstar are doing a patch. As for the exec, I guess he's got to keep up a front.

    Question is.. are these technical hickups enough to warrant less than 10/10? ... time will tell.. and then we can really see in hindsight if the hype completely made people lose objectivity.

  • Mr_Brown #14 4 years ago

    They need to fix the Ranked MP lobbies on the Xbox 360 version. They kick you out automatically after "too many people have disconnected". It makes playing ranked matches almost impossible and can only get one or two matches every hour or so because of it.

  • mikew1985 #15 4 years ago

    Yeah, i have my ports forwarded (did it only two motnhs ago so should be fine) and I keep getting kicked from lobbies or getting stuck in a lobby on my own but can here other (idiots) "chatting"

  • Hypercube #16 4 years ago

    Well, I was watching my friend playing his XBox 360 version, and when some characters that he was supposed to kill became alarmingly invincible... I'd say that was a glitch.

  • Bulbatron #17 4 years ago

    MrED209, that's EXACTLY what should have been said.

    On my Xbox 360, GTA IV crashes regularly, while my other games continue to run fine. Even the ones prone to crashing aren't crashing as much as GTA IV! It's not very good, really.

    On the other hand, I have to admit that my Xbox 360 is not in the greatest of condition. It's been coughing up blood for a about 18 months now - so it's hard to tell whether the hardware or software is at fault. Probably a little of both.

  • Ryze #18 4 years ago

    Yes, there are flaws.

    Ladders don't work properly, for one.

  • Grayvern #19 4 years ago

    The most annoying glitch is that sometimes when Nico gets thrown from a vehicle, mostly the fact i can drive the cars well but not the bikes, he starts spasming on the floor and loses his hat, rebuying hats becomes a major pain in the arse.

    Ive had it freeze once but then my PS3 60gb is faulty its frozen 1 time in resistance, Uncharted, Motorstorm etc. And a few in Lego Star Wars complete saga.

    I know its heat because it only really happens after extended play and a few times with lego star wars I got the exact same planing of graphics i got with my first 8800 Gts on my pc, which had a faulty fan. I had to turn the PS3 off for 15 minutes.

  • SomaticSense #20 4 years ago

    "Asked about glitches by CNBC, in comments reported by Kotaku, Zelnick said there were "none whatsoever", joking, "I'd say the only issue is that someone came up to me yesterday in a restaurant and said 'my thumbs are hurting from the weekend'.""

    The bloke can fuck off. Fuck off and catch a particularly virulent form of herpes.

    I had to delete 40-odd hours worth of saves because of a game-ending GLITCH. Obviously a game this large and with such ambition it's going to have the odd problem, and that I can accept, and it is definitely the least glitchy of all the GTAs to date. But to deny it despite CLEAR evidence to the contrary, just makes you a massive twat.

  • Rrralphster #21 4 years ago

    Walk up to a public phone and it get's "vandalized" by Niko.
    Ok, that's no glitch but a bug... anywayzzzz.....
    [edit]No game breaker either.[/edit]

    Edited by Rrralphster at 13/05/08 @ 22:14