In this classic feature, Kieron Gillen declares the real crime would be to not give GTA 4’s multiplayer a shot. (Oh, and car theft. That’s a real crime too.)
We’re digging into the PC Gamer magazine archives to publish pieces from years gone by. This article was originally published in PC Gamer issue 197, February 2009.
What am I supposed to do? The only response I manage is blinking, laughing loudly and then trying to work out how to activate the firehose. Some bright spark decided that the next game should be a race with trucks. 32 trucks. Of which about 25 or so turn out to be fire engines.
As you may expect, the result is chaos. Glorious chaos. Glorious never-had-anything-like-that-before chaos.
It’s one of those dark secrets of videogaming: if you want to play a GTA game and you’re willing to wait a few months, the PC version is always the best way to go. Always. Back in the day of GTA 3, the PC’s generally more potent hardware led to a game that dealt with the cities better, included custom soundtracks and even worked as a shooter.
And now, as the next-gen consoles start to get long in the tooth, the PC is building towards something else. Two relevant points here. First that there’s a degree of future-proofing in GTA’s hardware settings, with options that will only become practical to turn on when PCs catch up. Secondly, the upping of the multiplayer limit from 16 players on the consoles to a 32 on the PC.
While it’s easy to dwell on increased scale of the multiplayer and how that impacts the experience, it shouldn’t overshadow how the addition of multiplayer to the GTA series is—in and of itself—a major step forward. Previously, to experience such a thing you had to turn to mod projects such as Multi Theft Auto.
