An interview with members of the development team about problems with its blockbuster action title.
by Charles Onyett

US,  December 5, 2008 - Since the release of Grand Theft Auto IV for the PC earlier this week, users across the Internet, from the Steam forums to our own, have been reporting technical problems with the game. Issues range from poor performance with more than adequate hardware to the more severe, such as textures not loading or the game failing to boot up at all. To get a sense of what's going on behind the scenes at developer Rockstar, we spoke to several representatives via conference call.

On the phone were a number of Rockstar employees, including Lead QA Arthur Chiang, Technical Director Kevin Hoare, and VP of Development Jeronimo Barrera.

One thing to note that Rockstar passed along to us: a patch is in the works, currently in the approval process at Microsoft. According to Rockstar, it's necessary for games that have Games for Windows Live infrastructure to pass through the company before being released. Beyond that, no precise time of release was given. Also, a Rockstar rep let us know that the Steam version of the game initially had a problem with not downloading properly to users' computers, creating an issue related to textures. The problem has since been addressed. Steam is also offering the opportunity for refunds, something detailed over at Voodoo Extreme.

If you're currently experiencing problems with the game, this is a good place to start looking for answers.

IGN: Just to start out could you give us a sense of how widespread the problem actually is because it's difficult to tell from looking at message boards.

Kevin Hoare: I guess that's really hard to determine. The only thing we really have to go on in that regard is support calls we've been getting which have been quite low or as expected, which I think is roughly around one percent?It seems like maybe these forum posters are the more outspoken percentage of the players. That's really the only thing we have to go on as far as numbers go.

IGN: What sort of issues are you hearing about, both expected and unexpected?

Kevin Hoare: We're on the forums ourselves monitoring the issues people are having. A lot of these issues obviously we haven't seen in our testing and we're working to reproduce them and find workarounds for those issues. Many of the issues that we've found so far haven't been a direct result of the game itself but rather configurations of driver installations or power management software causing issues, various things of that sort.

IGN: Can you talk about what you're working on right now, like a patch?

Kevin Hoare: We've never stopped working on the game, we're working on it every day. We haven't had the typical break after it's gone gold. We're continually working on improvements, we're working on a patch right now.

IGN: Can you say what the patch will address and what sort of timetable there might be?

Kevin Hoare: We've done some improvements to the video editor and the rendering engine for the replay editor. We've added, again from feedback from the forums, we initially didn't support direct-input controller devices and people seemed to want that, so we added support for direct-input devices. I think there was an issue with bowling?

Arthur Chiang: We read that some people with sensitive mice were having trouble with the bowling mini-game so we looked into that more and we've got a fix for that. There's a bunch of little UI tweaks because we've come a long way in our video editing prowess and we've been slowly increasing the user functionality to make things easier for what we want to do with it.

Jeronimo Barrera: Let's not beat around the bush here. There's a lot of noise like this game doesn't run at all or there's missing textures and everything else. From what we've gathered a lot of those problems are either out of date drivers or we don't support that type of card or you're underspecced or whatever, it's always a combination of one of those things, it's not necessarily that we don't know what we're doing because obviously we put in hundreds and hundreds of hours of test into this. From what we did and from going through certification with Microsoft and our external QA process we didn't run into the amount of problems that the boards seemed to be saying there are. I know that Nvidia and ATI are constantly?I think they're releasing new drivers pretty soon.

(ATI drivers are coming next Wednesday, according to Rockstar. Nvidia drivers are up now)

Obviously when you start talking about high-end PC games people want to tweak with their drivers and everything else and we've found some situations where people have modified their drivers by going to sites where you can customize drivers, and we've found problems with that. We're seeing some of the things that people are complaining about but they're so peripheral of the target audience.

IGN: Then why do you think this has reached the level of proliferation through the online gaming media as it has because a lot of games are released for the PC and they all have technical issues with various hardware setups but this one seems to be more prominent than most. If it is just an expected volume of user problems, as you say, then why the furor?

Jeronimo Barrera: I think we have pretty passionate fans and they're going to let us know when they're unhappy with something. We're trying to address every issue we can whether it's through our support line or going to forums, we're constantly scanning to make sure we aren't missing something. Obviously we want this to run on everybody's machine. I think these guys can explain a little bit more like what separates us from other games. What we're doing is really cutting edge, there's a lot of stuff going on onscreen.

IGN: Before we get into that, a few questions about general graphics options. Why can't you actually through the graphics menu adjust AA (anti-aliasing), turn off shadows, and why is there a resource usage limitation?

Kevin Hoare: Early on we decided we weren't going to support DirectX 10. We were just going to work on increasing the visual quality with what we had with DirectX 9. If we had DirectX 10 support we could have had the AA in there, but we don't have any. The shadows, at least from the forums and what I'm seeing, I think a lot of people don't understand that the shadow density is only designed for a certain type of light in the game. In the daytime there's a general shadow that covers the entire world. That is hooked up directly to the video mode. It scales automatically with resolution. So the higher the resolution you set the game, the higher your shadow, mirrors, water, reflection, everything automatically scales.

We had all those options available and we found that people were confused by so many options so we wound up merging them into the video mode.

IGN: So they're just all merged into the resolution? Ok so?

Jeronimo Barrera: I wish we could go back in time and name some of the settings a little bit differently because when people are playing it on medium, it's actually, I forget how many times higher resolution it is up from the console version, but it's quite significant.

Kevin Hoare: A lot of the settings when I was originally putting them in were based off of what I could actually squeeze into system memory and video memory. In some cases we're just seeing 2 GB video cards come out now. That'd be the only way to really get the absolute highest settings. You don't have to put the game at the highest settings to play it. It seems like a lot of people want to. When we were designing it it was with the intent of having future growth with the game.

IGN: We've been receiving emails from players saying the game isn't running with minimum hardware configurations. You say you've future-proofed it to a degree, but what's your reaction to that?

Kevin Hoare: We've found that definitely with old drivers you'd have major performance problems. Throughout our development cycle we've seen variants in performance and we've had to work with mainly beta drivers mainly to this day with some of the hardware?There's power management issues where your CPU isn't running at the clock frequency that you purchased that can cause major slowdowns. We were able to reproduce that one. We've basically been trying to reproduce any kind of slowdown but when we were testing we were on fairly clean machines and we hadn't seen these kinds of problems?

IGN: When you say these kinds of problems what are you referring to?

Arthur Chiang: I've been reading about the texture drop out problem and I've been seeing what kind of hardware they have and it's usually the Nvidia 7900 series. We saw that problem two or three months ago and it was addressed by a beta driver that we received from them. Everybody was hoping that it would be out for our release but it seems we've just missed it. It has been released today so I think that's going to address a large proportion of those problems. Even right out of the box, as soon as you put that in, if you don't have this driver it's going to appear as there's no textures which is a pretty significant problem.

IGN: Just scanning our boards at IGN some of the more hardcore people have found workarounds like a 'no restrictions' alteration that does away with the resource usage limitation and they're forcing AA and that sort of thing. What sort of message, though, is this sending to the more casual gamer who may have a PC that they want to run this game because it is a high profile title yet they don't have the know-how to go in and tweak all these settings?

Arthur Chiang: Well we've designed that auto-configure option for them?a lot of the testing we did with the auto-configure we didn't see issues on low-end machines. I think when you start tweaking and taking off the restrictions we have that protect you from yourself, you run into problems. It might load up initially, but 10 minutes later things are going to start corrupting, you're going to blow out your memory resources.

Kevin Hoare: Some of those command line options I put in were there with the intention that benchmarking sites could easily go through a large set of in-game settings quickly without having to constantly go into the game, change a setting, exit, and continually re-benchmark manually. So they could automate their benchmarking process.

It's kind of dangerous to use some of those command line options because they allow you to set settings higher than your machine can handle and you can basically crash the game, which can cause more problems. Which may be causing some of the problems people are getting.

Jeronimo Barrera: The other thing you were saying about the more casual player is, if you take a look at the number of times the game has been activated?it was very high. And if you take a look at Social Club TV where people are uploading what people have done with the editor, so it's not like no one's playing the game. There's definitely a lot of people on there. We do recognize that people are having problems with this but it's not the disaster that people have it hyped up to be.

IGN: I think the notion is that people want the game, they want to be able to play immediately with, as everyone does, as few frustrations as possible. We were fortunate enough to have that experience here, but amongst the public it basically doesn't seem to be going that way. What does that say about the nature of PC gaming? A lot of people are concerned about how PC gaming has become too complicated or convoluted. You see GTA on 360 and it doesn't look as nice, but it runs.

Jeronimo Barrera: Right but again it goes back to how many people are playing the game right now versus how many people are having the problems. We love the PC as a platform, we've done incredible things with it. GTA was already quite a powerhouse on the consoles and we were able to go in and do so much more on the PC so for us it's exciting to develop on it and we wouldn't want the PC market to go away. It is cutting edge if you want to make it cutting edge and that's what we're trying to do with this. There is a bit of growing pains but the end result is consumers are going to be very happy. The majority I think are happy with it.

IGN: It's difficult to tell, as we both say we're both browsing message boards.

Kevin Hoare: One thing I guess we should mention that we're including in the title updates. A lot of these startup errors are giving just error codes. What we're actually doing is putting in the text of what it actually means. So a lot of them are simple things like you need to have Service Pack 1 installed, Service Pack 3 for XP. Just little things, and right now the messages aren't there so it's more frustrating than it needs to be. We've addressed that in the title updates that we're working on.

IGN: In the meantime you've got these people online who are pretty angry at you, to say the least. Is there anything you'd like to say to them?

Jeronimo Barrera: We stand behind our product and we'll get you help and it's easy to reach us. We do find the forums to be a very useful resource for us to identify problems that everyone's having?The game has been out less than a week and we are trying to address everything. In the long run we're going to keep supporting the title. It's not a one-shot deal. As much as people don't like to hear the word future-proofed but it is future-proofed and there's a lot in store for gamers.

IGN: Thanks for your time.