November 5th, 2008

Kikizo's Hands-On GTAIV PC Preview

Published at 10:41 AM PST

Kikizo recently got a chance to sit down and play Grand Theft Auto IV for PC at Rockstar's NYC office. We have summed up the preview below.

  • The game is being ported by Rockstar Toronto, developers of the GTA 1: London 1969 expansion pack and The Warriors. They have also ported some of Rockstar's top games such as Oni for the PS2, Max Payne for the PS2, and more recently the Wii versions of Manhunt 2 and Bully.
  • Texture quality choices range from high, medium, and low.
  •  Other things that can be changed are shadow quality, texture filter quality, reflection resolution, and water quality. They all have 4 different settings low, medium, high, and very high.
  • View distance, detail distance, shadow density, light distance, and even  vehicle density (which was only set to 33 in the console versions!) can all be set from 1 all the way to 100.
  • Rockstar's was not lying when they said the draw distance was much better than the console versions. The previewer stated that when they were in a helicopter they could see the entire map and even saw individual traffic. No paint filtering effect, no lighting cover up and no wobbling, just pure and sharp scenery.
  • The textures have been improved greatly.
  • The reviewer loved RAGE so much as he went on to say "It's further evidence that RAGE is one of the best bits of technology in gaming right now."
  • Multiplayer now has custom search filtering. For example, you can filter out games that have auto-aim on and vice versa.
  • The number of players for online games have been expanded, however, Rockstar didn't provide the new number.
  • If you are used to video editors, you are going to love Rockstar's replay editor.
  • The game will render out videos in WMV format ranging from 720p to 1080p resolution.
  • New artwork at the loading screen

 The PC version comes December, 2 2008. Be sure to reserve your copy!

Source: Kikizo