Things GTA IV did better than GTA V

[Piggsy pls]

I don't think I would've paid full price for it either tbh, I managed to pick it up on a Steam sale for like $20. I'm only using it for the mods and roleplaying, nothing can fix the story so I haven't even bothered playing through it again. I still a little duped knowing this is my third time buying GTA V, though.

 

I also picked up GTA IV, so I'm looking forward to playing through it with mods.

[jpm1]

i think i have 4 or 5 GTAIV PC, if you count all versions and DLCs. i think i purchased 3 GTAIV PC and 2 or 3 EFLC

[Payne Killer]

I prefer driving into cars and seeing them slide or flip over. Its kind of possible in V but its rare.

[Sonny_Black]

In GTA 4 when I steal a car with an NPC inside and then a bit after I slow down and then stop, the NPC will step out quickly, when he does this I just hit the f*cking gas and the poor ped will stumble and even fall, they can also try to touch the car or the door to not fall.

 

- In GTA 5 they just step out and run away without being affected a single second by the speed of the car, even if you hit the gas as quickly as possible. It's just look weird.

 

In GTA 4 _{(except a few exceptions)} the NPC are always handle by euphoria, that is really cool.

 

 

- It's obviously but, front windshield which doesn't break. In GTA V, it can be break and it will fall into pieces.

This kind of detail can blocks me from playing a game if there is many of them lmao.

 

- The level of tint _{(maybe the timecyc and the reflections play a role also)} on car windows is realist.

 

My issue in GTA 5 is that it is f*cking limpid!:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And in GTA 4:

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited February 27, 2017 by yeahmantiptap

[jpm1]

each time i see a IV screenshot i feel nostalgic. like if i've been separated from my beloved city, and i was coming back to it after few years. in V honestly i don't give a f.. about the place. each time i'm in that city, i think when the f.. will they release a Vice city map addon

[Payne Killer]

In TLaD gunfire will echo through the streets, I noticed this during a gang war. It happens in all 3, never bothered to listen to sh*t in V.

[GtaivCop]

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017-02-12-one-thing-about-gta4-has-never-been-bettered

 

Not sure if this has been posted yet.

 

A fairly recent article done just 3 weeks ago and goes into depth as to why the physics were so severely downgraded. It's another company that helped them do it? Quite interesting.

 

 

Harry Denholm worked on GTA4 as engineering lead at NaturalMotion, the company behind Euphoria. When he started at the company in 2004, he was part of a six-person incubatory team that created the technology, taking inspiration from a piece of NaturalMotion's existing tech dubbed Endorphin and reinventing it so it could be used in real-time. The incubatory team would then work closely with game studios to plug it into their games.

"It was a few years in when the company entered into discussions with Rockstar about the potential to use this new approach to character animation in one of their upcoming titles, Red Dead: Redemption," Denholm explains. "A small team was assembled at NaturalMotion to start work on integrating with RAGE and iterating directly with gameplay and animation teams in San Diego. I was the technical lead of that team, handling the RAGE integration, runtime engineering and engine-specific tools work."

A couple of years later, Denholm created a showreel for the tech the team had been building for Red Dead: Redemption, but transported to a more contemporary action movie setting. The video saw characters being clipped by cars, dragged at gunpoint, thrown down stairs, pepper sprayed, and more, and it was all fully dynamic and interactive, with variable results every time. In a twist of fate, a schedule change saw the team migrate from Red Dead: Redemption over to GTA4, where they would create similar scenarios in Rockstar's urban sandbox.

Euphoria is special because it combines on-the-fly animation with AI, biomechanics, and physics, all without the need for motion capture. The results vary because the CPU is forcing the characters to react - flinching when something comes close, grasping at injuries, stumbling backwards when slightly knocked, and tripping if an object is placed in their way as they stumble. The characters have self-preservation hard-coded into them, so they can sometimes recover from a knock or get out of the way of an incoming threat, but it's never canned, making it unpredictable and exciting for the player. It's why it's so devilishly fun to fly a helicopter up to a Liberty City power plant and let the rotors have their way with the workmen up top, essentially.

You might be wondering, then, why other triple-A studios didn't pick up the tech straight after GTA4's release. "Euphoria was quite an unusual business proposition," explains Denholm. "It didn't exist fully-featured off-the-shelf in the way a physics engine does - what we were essentially

selling was an office full of smart, dedicated people and the promise of a unique feature that no-one else would have.

"Our process was usually to visit an interested company - such as Rockstar or LucasArts - and an engineer would spend some time, often on-site, building a bespoke integration with their existing game code and physics engine. In the background, our behaviour engineers - programmers with backgrounds in physics, biomechanics, robotic control theory and/or AI - would begin sketching out basic behaviours on top of that integration. We would demo some project-specific behaviours and, if the deal got done, the engineers would shift to working solely on that in-step with the game's own schedule."

It was a bespoke, costly service. All Euphoria projects were built from scratch, taking on a laser-focused approach to suit the game they were integrating with. NaturalMotion found this delivered the best results. It's also why you can throw Euphoria powered ragdolls around with the Force in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, while the ones seen in GTA4 are more likely to grab at their car's door handle as you speed away in their recently-nabbed vehicle.

"The effort required was substantial and sustained," Denholm tells me. "Also, a Euphoria licence was a pretty expensive investment that involved long-term commitment from both sides, not a casual one-off upfront payment that just drops into your game. That model simply isn't a workable fit for a lot of developers."

Rockstar was focused on creating a simulated world, from the AI routines of its NPCs the nuances in how they move, all ruled by lifelike physics and generated in real-time. To help achieve this, NaturalMotion was provided full access to the physics source code for RAGE, so the entire thing was a full-on collaboration.

RAGE was a capable physics simulation on its own, but Rockstar was also working on a specialist simulation feature called the 'Featherstone articulated body method', which allowed more accurate simulation of a biped. Bipedal ragdolls are assembled from a collection of rigid collision shapes, almost like an artist's pencil outline, capturing the human form with crude cylinders and boxy appendages - a blank slate, ready for the details to be added later. Joints are placed between each shape, allowing each part of the ragdoll to move independently, with elbow hinges, ankles, knees, and even flex points along the torso. Motors are added to these joints, mimicking human muscles.

No doubt you've seen physics go wrong before, with appendages getting trapped in terrain, characters stretching out of shape, or vibrating on the floor. That's because conventional physics engines treat each part of a ragdoll as a separate entity. These gruesome contortions are the result of the motorised joints trying ferociously to put it right again when things go awry.

"The difference with the Featherstone approach is that the whole skeleton is treated as an indivisible collection of objects," explains Denholm. "We're not updating the forearm, then the upper arm, then getting the joint to try and ensure those two parts are still stuck together - instead the whole biped is processed as a complex hierarchy of parts that are, in theory, impossible to break apart. All the joints are considered as part of the whole, rather than in isolation."

This behaviour worked well with the 'Dynamic Balancer', some tech created by Tom Lowe, lead behaviour engineer at NaturalMotion. The

Dynamic Balancer allowed GTA4's characters to stand up and balance autonomously. "It had to take rapid, accurate stabilising steps to level the

character's balance, as well as handle the rest of the skeleton being balanced on top of the legs, constantly compensating for gravity, centre-of-mass shifts and external impacts," says Denholm.

"We didn't request [Featherstone] from Rockstar, they had already been developing it," Tom Lowe tells me over email. "They employed a professor there who built it." You see, the problem with bipeds handled by in-game physics is that they walk on their weakest point - essentially a small box attached to the ankle joint - so they require joint strength, which Featherstone supplied. "Featherstone allowed better control of the character, joint strengths that matched what you set them to (not weaker), good friction and it avoided foot jitter," explains Lowe.

"The upper body didn't sag or collapse; the legs, kept stiff and would just naturally provide full-body support. Just like real legs!" adds Denholm. "Driving one to take a load-bearing step and not have the hips pull apart or pitch the torso over... this was a serious improvement. We could have our sims grab onto fast moving objects or take a high-speed car impact to the torso without all the body parts scattering like Lego. Plus, being able to work without the simulation instability meant our behaviour team could then focus on creating more realistic looking behaviours that required fewer hacks and cheats to work or look good.

"By the end of GTA4 we had characters that could be shot, grab and react to the wounds, stagger about over uneven streets while still firing their weapons back at the player - with realistic gun shot recoils being fed back into physics - all entirely dynamically simulated. And this was then being applied to every NPC in the whole game. It was a huge deal - and phenomenal responsibility - for us. By comparison, another project using Euphoria on a different physics engine was constantly fighting instability and had to use layers of additional - and sometimes unpredictable - cheat forces to achieve a level of control."

Edited March 5, 2017 by GtaivCop

[Payne Killer]

I liked the ammo limit, like how you could have only 570 rounds for an Assault rifle/Carbine and have 1000 rounds for a Pistol/SMG. 70 for shotguns and 25 grenades/molotovs. V went back to the old school style but you cant have lots of thrown weapons for some reason, only 25 of each same as IV but you can 9999 LMG and Sniper rifle rounds.

 

Also, its more satisfying launching Niko off a motorcycle at high speeds just to see him ragdoll and wonder "f*ck, will he survive the fall?"

Edited March 5, 2017 by Payne Killer

[wapster]

The main reason I suspect many people don't like V as much as IV is the differences between how the game worlds are presented; Liberty City, while a smaller city, is much more vertical, dense and packed with interiors and little alleyways to explore that really add to the experience. Los Santos, on the other hand, has huge avenues that frankly seem fake and too small for the city it's trying to represent. In addition to this it's the feeling that many aspects of the game have been dumbed down from IV. The weird physics system, arcadey vehicle handling, storyline focus on big explosive set-pieces and 2d characters are all detrimental to the experience. It could be said that it's all intentional to how the games are trying to evoke a particular medium; IV is presented as something of a gritty TV crime drama, whereas V is more of a big dumb Michael Bay explosion movie. I for one look forward to OpenIV releasing the Liberty City V project so I can explore it in updated graphics though.

[Official General]

I for one look forward to OpenIV releasing the Liberty City V project so I can explore it in updated graphics though.

 

I don't understand why you're waiting around for that.

 

There are plenty of superb ENB mods that can make IV look so stunning that it can even rival (or better) the current-gen console and low-end PC versions of V in the graphics department, depending on visual preferences. If you want to explore Liberty City with highly advanced graphics, just download one of the best ENBs out there, CryENB v3 is ideal.

Edited March 5, 2017 by Official General

[Sonny_Black]

 

I for one look forward to OpenIV releasing the Liberty City V project so I can explore it in updated graphics though.

 

I don't understand why you're waiting around for that.

 

There are plenty of superb ENB mods that can make IV look so stunning that it can even rival current-gen versions of V in the graphics department, depending on visual preferences. If you want to explore Liberty City with highly advanced graphics, just download one of the best ENBs out there, CryENB v3 is ideal.

 

 

Try this one

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited March 5, 2017 by yeahmantiptap

[B Dawg]

I for one look forward to OpenIV releasing the Liberty City V project so I can explore it in updated graphics though.

I'd rather we get V's map for IV, but Citizen IV is dead and not sure if anyone's even working on trying to make it work in singleplayer with the help of limit adjuster or something

Edited March 5, 2017 by B Dawg

[CometGT]

Bowling

Edited March 9, 2017 by SentinelXSVCS22

[RoscoeHussein]

Just the environment.

More pedestrians and drivers roaming around the city.

It makes HD San Andreas feel smaller.

 

(edit)

It also makes me wish that R* waited till PS4 & XB1 came out just for the possibility that San Fierro and/or Las Venturas were also featured in V.

Edited March 10, 2017 by epidemick92

[Algonquin Assassin]

Cutscenes.

 

When I watch a cutscene in GTA IV it feels like I'm watching a blockbuster like Goodfellas, The Godfather etc. The camera cuts/movements are so clean and crisp.

 

With GTA V it's like watching a reality TV show like Cops and it feels like there's a cameraman constantly following around the characters. It feels a bit amateurish IMO.

[Claude_Lib]

^ Exactly. Whenever I watch a cutscene in GTA V, I can't help but notice how constrained and unnatural they all look, like the actors were hampered by their mocap suits.

Edited March 11, 2017 by Claude_Lib

[Piggsy pls]

I remember zuckmeslow pointed this out in a thread a while back, but GTA V's cutscenes are shot in a way that's more akin to reality tv shows, like MVC said, with this "shaky cam" effect that feels less sophisticated than the way cutscenes are shot in IV, RDR, and MP3. The close-ups to Niko's face while he's shooting the assassin's corpse in the Deal ending were amazing. It's a shame, because the fluid transistions between cutscenes and gameplay were a huge step up from IV. I'd love if the next GTA had cutscene presentation on the level Rockstar reached with Max Payne 3.

[ViceBoy69]

I think the way the peds react to different situations makes the game, it really feels like they are alive. I was playing the other night. just random stuff, stealing cars and walking around, i remember crashing a car into another one and getting out as the car was on fire, i ran down an alley and there where 2 peds sat on a bench, as i came upto them you could hear the car exploding in the distance, they both got up and ran away, Its just things like this that make the game, peds react as if thinking for themselves and run away.

Also like someone else said when you steal a car sometimes the ped will try to grab hold of the car and be dragged along, getting thrown off as you go past another car, just so many little things that make the game, its missing from 5 and its a shame.

[Eugene H. Krabs]

Progression.

 

The first few missions in IV require very little shooting, and the climaxes take place later on in the game, so that's a good thing.

 

On the other hand, you're pulling someone's mansion down by the time V's sixth mission rolls in. That ruins the excitement.

[Algonquin Assassin]

Progression.

 

The first few missions in IV require very little shooting, and the climaxes take place later on in the game, so that's a good thing.

 

On the other hand, you're pulling someone's mansion down by the time V's sixth mission rolls in. That ruins the excitement.

Yeah. I really like GTA IV's slow burn. Niko arrives in the country and we slowly work our way up to more exciting missions.

 

Though to be fair to GTA V it's not a "fish out of water" type of story where we arrive to this strange new place. The protagonists are already settled, but this has a negative effect also IMO when you're thrown into action from the get go.

[Journey_95]

Cutscenes.

 

When I watch a cutscene in GTA IV it feels like I'm watching a blockbuster like Goodfellas, The Godfather etc. The camera cuts/movements are so clean and crisp.

 

With GTA V it's like watching a reality TV show like Cops and it feels like there's a cameraman constantly following around the characters. It feels a bit amateurish IMO.

 

Noticed that too, no idea why they changed the style. Even 3D Era games had better cutscenes & were more movie- like than GTA V.

Progression.

 

The first few missions in IV require very little shooting, and the climaxes take place later on in the game, so that's a good thing.

 

On the other hand, you're pulling someone's mansion down by the time V's sixth mission rolls in. That ruins the excitement.

A lot of people whined about IV's slow beginning so thats why they went all out with V from the beginning.

 

I prefer the slow burn too, hell I think the first arc of IV is my favourite. I really like the russian vibe, Niko settling in and doing small time jobs etc.

Edited March 14, 2017 by Journey_95

[Cheatz/Trickz]

I understand the approach of dropping the player in at the deep end, and that can work if the pacing is good, but of course V's isn't. The following missions focus too much on being cinematic, so any prospect of what's next, the tension and intrigue is lost. You've already been in a massive gunfight or two, a high speed car chase, seen ten explosions, and destroyed at least two buildings. And that's in the space of four or five missions.

 

Russian Revolution is really the first "big" fight of IV's story, and itself is a turning point of the story. It's hard to explain but I remember the first time I finished that mission, there was an unnerving sense of urgency. This huge event had just happened as the payoff for a slower build-up. It had a lot more impact because of that.

Edited March 14, 2017 by Cheatz_N_Trickz

[Official General]

I understand the approach of dropping the player in at the deep end, and that can work if the pacing is good, but of course V's isn't. The following missions focus too much on being cinematic, so any prospect of what's next, the tension and intrigue is lost. You've already been in a massive gunfight or two, a high speed car chase, seen ten explosions, and destroyed at least two buildings. And that's in the space of four or five missions.

 

Russian Revolution is really the first "big" fight of IV's story, and itself is a turning point of the story. It's hard to explain but I remember the first time I finished that mission, there was an unnerving sense of urgency. This huge event had just happened as the payoff for a slower build-up. It had a lot more impact because of that.

Very true indeed. Being thrown in the deep end at the start of the story is not a bad thing if it's paced well, and one example of that is San Andreas. Right from the start CJ is caught up in the middle of an raging gang war between rival street gangs, but it was paced and structured very well. CJ still had to get used to being a gang member again, he still had to do small missions and odd tasks here and there to prove himself as a worthy gang member once again - the most crazy stuff you had were simply explosive shootouts and gunfights between rival gangs, drive-bys and a few chases.

Edited March 15, 2017 by Official General

[AmigaMix]

Not to mention that the physics in IV were way cooler than Vs. The first time you got the glock (from Jacob), after beating up albaniens and smashing windows, and you saw euphoria in action... f*cking epic!

[Sonny_Black]

I would have say "the physics is way better and that's a fact."

[Gnocchi Flip Flops]

When I play some IV after hooning some very fun cars around Australia in Forza Horizon 3, I still feel comfortable and driving around Liberty City is still fun and engaging. However when I go for a cruise around Los Santos in V after playing Forza, it feels like I'm driving a somewhat slow/underwhelming go-kart with a very hard suspension and that's almost the case with every car.

 

I mean this must mean something right?

 

As arrogant as this may sound, I'm kind of the most critical video game driver I know. I blame my OCD. Funnily if you looked at me driving in every game it all looks the same. I'm very avid on following road rules (ignoring the speed limit and some stop signs/lights lol I don't have time for that) but I do things in a very orderly fashion when it comes to driving. So it's not that I don't know how to drive or I'm not doing it right, etc. It's all in the feel.

 

I'm not dissing V's driving physics 1) because if I avoid IV and Forza and play GTA:O often I get pretty comfortable and 2) the newer cars feel more complex than past ones. But I'm sorry, all it takes for me is a couple of hours of getting used to IV physics after playing some GTA:O and all of a sudden I'm just simply having a lot more fun driving around. TBoGT especially, where the body roll was reduced to normal levels.

Edited March 15, 2017 by Scaglietti

[HansPeter]

Some of the textures in V look to clean and "sterile" (as we would say in germany)

You can notice it in the subway-stations, some buildings and the cars (inside and outside)

It looks strange and artifical to me.

 

In GTA IV EVERY texture i remember was dirty like it would be in real life.

 

And the handling in V sucks, way to much arcade. IV handling was perfect

Edited March 19, 2017 by HansPeter

[Payne Killer]

Free roam feels more cinematic, I was playing with the HUD and Radar off having a shootout with the cops when I end up getting blown up and the screen turns black and white, way better than that "WASTED" sh*t.

Edited March 19, 2017 by Payne Killer

[Niobium]

Free roam feels more cinematic, I was playing with the HUD and Radar off habing a shootout with the cops when I end up getting blown up and the screen turns black and white, way better than that "WASTED" sh*t.

yeah. even dying is better in IV than V. in IV it lets you watch the whole scene while in V it just cuts it off, which means you can't see your guy ragdolling or whatever.

Edited March 19, 2017 by Niobium

[Sonny_Black]

And that WASTED sound holy sh*t :|, it feel so dumb, make me cringe.