How the hell did GTA IV get a 98 on Metacritic?

It was amasing when it came out, and still is pretty good besides missing features that GTA V has.

Altough some things are just better in GTA IV then V

Also the multiplayer was awesome. Much better then GTA V, make your own lobby, just the vannilla things of the game and done. Not all that crap and having to pay money to get money in game.

@jg4xchamp: The game is a mess and a half, and every part of me should have it in disdain due to how uninspiring the missions are and how unresponsive the controls can be. But at the time, in the midst of its flaws, there was something about it that just clicked. Could be the physics engine. Could be Liberty City itself. In any case it's the best worst game I've played.

GTA IV was essentially the nail in the coffin for me when it came to GTA games. The controls are terrible, the on foot mechanics feel terrible, the shooting mechanics are about 3 generations back - mainly clunky and clumsy is the best way to describe the entire feel of the game.

GTA is the epitome of overrated. Excellent production values though, interesting concept, and the multiplayer addition in GTA IV was the highlight for me - doing missions with your buddies (one is sniping from the bridge, one is swimming from the back, two are rushing). That was fun.

it was a great game for its time. **** off

no other open world game at the time approached the level of immersion and detail that IV had. it was like a 1:1 recreation of new york

Ok, but seriously though it was extremely impressive, just not nearly that impressive lol.

We're nowhere near having a game world like that, and we likely never will, at least not in our lifetime. Even if the tech gets there, the manpower to create something on that level would be insane. This would have to be a government project, no game studio could even begin to afford an undertaking like that.

Personally, I'm not on board with thinking that, but whatever. It's all subjective.

Thing is, would you say that this is one of the greatest games of all time? This goes beyond being good or great. OP is talking about the Metascore which has this game sitting at the 3rd highest rated game EVER. Do you personally feel that this where the game should be sitting? Personally it wouldn't scratch my top 100.

It's not even about GTA4 at this point though, it's more about the overall futility of gaming scores and the end result that is a Metascore.

It doesn't have to be up to scale. It just have to be a reasonable representation, even in miniature. GTA V did a good job representing the Los Angeles basin and up the California Central Coast and alpine country. It really felt like I was driving on the real Highway 101 along the California coast.

@jun_aka_pekto: "It really felt like I was driving on the real Highway 101 along the California coast."

GTA 4 wasn't a good representation of New York?

Oh I understand, they're great at selling the sense of place and the feel of massive scale and variety. What Rockstar pulls off is extremely impressive, they have no peers in that regard.

It's just that "1:1 recreation" is a very literal thing to say. Realistically delivering on the detail and variety of just a single avenue in New York would be crazy.

He was talking about GTA5

@ConanTheStoner:

That's why I should mind my own business.

@ConanTheStoner:

lol alright, so" 1:1 recreation" is a massive exaggeration, but i think you get my point: that GTA IV's rendition of new york captures the feel of the city and some of its boroughs incredibly well. many iconic landmarks, roads, and avenues are recreated with astonishing attention to detail, albeit within the constraints of 2008 video game technology.

i've talked a lot about GTA IV before and i don't really want to repeat stuff i've already said. obviously the game feels dated by modern standards (but which old GTA game doesn't?) and even back then the repetitive missions and fiddly controls were legit issues. but looking at where open-world games were in 2008, i think the high scores were justified: GTA IV set the benchmark for open-world games on a new generation of hardware. ign calling it "the best game since ocarina of time" is pretty cringe-worthy but i can't imagine how the open-world genre would have progressed without this game.

and on a personal level, GTA IV was always a game where i got a simple pleasure out of just driving around and looking at the city--and fucking around with the absurd physics engine.

(i deeply resent that you can't do this kind of stuff in V)

@princeofshapeir:

Yeah bro, I was just being an asshole, I know what you meant and I agree. It was extremely impressive. Even by todays standards with all these open world games we have, GTA4s world still holds its own.

GTA continually raises the bar for open worlds and other games have a hard time catching up to their past works.

-

And yeah, as for the scores, again it's not for me, but with that said it's nothing against GTA4 either. I just think score culture in general is kind of dumb and I detest that gamers look to Metacritic as some holy grail lol.

That's my only beef here.

Yeah, that's me too. I enjoyed taking it all in and doing random shit more than I enjoyed actually progressing the game.

That's like the only thing Rockstar's games are actually exceptional at: The tech, although I think their liberty city is a fairly unimpressive version of New York City, but that's my bias to the greatest city on earth.

I never played GTA4 (I might if there's a first-person mod) for it. But, based from the screenshots I saw, it looked like GTA4 depicted NYC well enough. GTA V did a superb job representing the California landscape in miniature.

Just leave it like that, some scores are...plain aberration!!!

And this shit sold more than 65M, this is even harder to believe!!!

@sovkhan: GTA4 sold 25 million.

I was very addicted to GTA5 when it first came out. I really must play it for my YouTube channel again...

Pembo loves you.

.. Well yeah? It was a sequel to a game in which they never had any real experience in doing up until this point.. GTA4 was their first attempt into the 360/ps3 hardware era so they not only dealt with new much more powerful hardware but they also were introduced to the online portion of the console for the first time.. For it's time it introduced tons of new stuff and it is says something when people have to compare it to the sequel in the series instead of another game in the genre as a improvement over it.

IV was a terrific game and far more enjoyable the instant-fail missions of San Andreas. San Andreas had so many odds and ends, as though Rockstar thought they could throw anything into the mix and call it depth.

The reason GTA4 got so many top scores was that, when it launched, it blew a lot of people away. Not in game play, physics or graphics but in story and tone.

While it's hard to understand today, GTA4 felt like something that had never really been done in gaming before. It looked and sounded like a serious game whereas games before it had always been kinda silly and goofy and 'unrealistic'. It felt like a Martin Scorsese game in a world that had previously only had Michael Bay type action games.

I think that feeling of this taking the game medium to a place where it'd never been able to go before impressed reviewers so much that a lot of them were somewhat blinded to the games flaws.