Another Gta Delay

[mattman603]

just in...





ok, before you get pissed off... what do you the odds are of rockstar pushing the game back til fall of 08'? how often has rockstar games come out in spring? have they? with all the delays of halo 2...i think gta IV will fall on the same path...

agree? disagre? why?

just stating my opinion that it WILL get pushed back

[Blodskur]

I think a delay is unlikely, if it's going to be released it'll come out either before or after Summer. Out of those options I'm going to say it'll be out in Spring because it'd be a bit extreme to wait a year from now for it to come out.

[Shoeless]

To be honest, another delay to GTA IV wouldn't surprise me in the least and I actually half-expect something like that to happen anyway. The delay from October didn't come out of the blue either, that was an *extremely* short amount of time to get a game out and I was amazed they were making the claim they could it out by that period.

Rockstar tends to be pretty obsessive about their games. We're talking about people that went to trouble of sending their own STAFF on planes, out to every major website and publication, to personally hand-deliver review copies of Grand Theft Auto San Andreas to the game journalists. When they start poring over the reviews, they pick apart each and every comment, trying to understand why the sound got a 9.4 instead of a 9.5, or why the gameplay was accused of being "slow paced at times." The core management of Rockstar is shooting for perfection, and they will holler, scream, argue and do whatever they feel is necessary to grab up those last precious decimal points that push their game into an assured AAA rating from the critics.

Even at this early stage, a few people could tell that GTA IV was still in need of some polish. The frame rates were stuttering, and in demos of the game, Rockstar never, EVER showed any actual action such as carjacking or gunplay, they merely showed off the environments and pointed out the diversity of the people on the street.

Whether you argue that it was the PS3 holding back the game's development, or the 360's lack of an across the board hard drive, the fact is this; the demos that were shown on the 360 were very carefully controlled in what they showed of gameplay, no car jacking, no free roaming, just a couple of scripted missions. And this was in July of this year. To have something as basic as the much touted, open world sandbox mechanics not in a playable state 4 months from release would indicate the game still needs a lot of work. And let's not forget the nightmare of licensing music, the enormous amount of voice acting work for main characters, NPCs and DJs on the radio, as well as just creating all that additional content for the various side-missions and... oh yeah, aren't we also supposed to be creating expansions for the 360?

That's a LOT of work. And to have it all done, finalized, bug tested, fixed, polished, rated by the ESRB and then on the shelves by October?

I didn't find it very likely. Spring is a little more reasonable, but again, Rockstar is not the kind to try and get a game out before it's good and ready, they take the id "When it's done" mantra to heart as well. It wouldn't surprise me that they're negotiating with Microsoft to allow for the use of the hard drive as they know this will give the game a technical edge and help smooth out the framerates. It also wouldn't surprise me if Sony is taking some of this extra time to send either staff or better dev kits to Rockstar to help them optimize GTA IV to at least be the equal--if not superior--of the two games, just so that one of the biggest franchises in the gaming industry does not "pull an EA Sports" and have gamers howling--either in fanboy victory or misery--that once again, the Xbox 360 version is the better looking of the two.

While I'm not entirely certain they would go so far as to delay the game 'till October again, it wouldn't surprise me if they pushed it back two or three months to a summer release.

[mattman603]

GTA IV RELEASE DATE...

October... 2008

u heard it here first fellas