четвер, 8 січня 2015 р.

PC specs for GTA 5 to be revealed next week

The required specs of the PC version of GTA 5 will be revealed next week, Rockstar has promised.

As part of the same Q&A we covered earlier, Rockstar talked a tiny bit about the upcoming PC version of GTA 5.

Answering a fan question about that version, Rockstar said, “We’re presently in the final stages of development on the PC version of Grand Theft Auto V and hope to have confirmed official system requirements to share soon here at the Newswire.
“Please stay tuned for that to be announced in the coming week. Thank you and we’re very excited to bring GTAV to the PC gaming community!”
GTA 5 arrives January 27 on PC.

GTA Online: Snowball fights coming to Los Santos

Rockstar has detailed more info on the Festive Surprise that hit GTA 5 this morning, currently rolling  out across all formats.



 
As well as the new weapons, vehicles, clothes and tattoos already revealed, it confirmed that snow and snowball fights are also on the agenda over the coming weeks, fireworks will return for New Year and there will be special gifts for those logging in on Xmas day.
Here’s the skinny, and a bunch of new screenshots

Those dreaming of a white Christmas are in luck as the forecast calls for the extremely rare phenomenon of San Andreas snowfall to hit on a few special days this holiday season. Be on the lookout and ready to round up your Crew for a friendly snowball fight, but be forewarned, those icy little suckers can pack a wallop.

Those dreaming of a white Christmas are in luck as the forecast calls for the extremely rare phenomenon of San Andreas snowfall to hit on a few special days this holiday season. Be on the lookout and ready to round up your Crew for a friendly snowball fight, but be forewarned, those icy little suckers can pack a wallop.
HOLIDAY SPECIAL CRATE DROPS
Keep your eyes on the sky as Holiday Special Crate Drops will be dropping frequently now through January 5th, stuffed with goodies to collect for your inventory – including a few of the rare vintage GTA tees that you may have missed in some of our Social Club Event Weekends over the past year as well as some brand new ones never before available.
CHRISTMAS DAY GIFTS
On Christmas Day, December 25th, as you’re relaxing in your Los Santos apartment beside your Christmas tree, make sure to check your inventory for a few extra gifts.
SET OFF SOME NEW YEAR’S FIREWORKS
Ring in the New Year with a bang – the Firework Launcher and Firework rocket ammo are coming back and will be available to acquire and use from Christmas Eve until Monday, January 5th. You can score one for free on four special days: Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, New Year’s Eve or New Year’s Day.
FESTIVE SURPRISE SNAPMATIC CONTEST
Take your merriest Christmas Crew family photo or capture the insanity of the New Year’s party you’re hosting in your Los Santos condo – or any other amazing, amusing or beauteous #FestiveSurprise action. In January, we’ll pick our five favorite shots and award the photographers with a GTA$1M prize. Tag your entries with #FestiveSurprise now through January 5th to be eligible

субота, 3 січня 2015 р.

GTA Online: Heists will never work while lobbies remain a ghost town

Thirty-player deathmatches in GTA Online are a myth. Rockstar needs to fix lobbies, matchmaking and online stability before it releases Heists, says Matt Martin.

Grand Theft Auto: Online on the PS4 and Xbox One has the same problem it did on PS3 and Xbox 360. Matchmaking is a crapshoot and the lobbies are a ghost town.

This new version of the game supposedly supports up to 30 players in select Deathmatch, Last Team Standing and Race modes, but that figure may as well be 300,000 players because it's just as unobtainable. In reality it's a struggle to grab upwards of 8 players for any online game.

This is the problem GTA players have faced for over a year. While the graphics have improved and the game enjoys a second lease of life, a significant portion of online play is still lobby waiting, quit-and-restart, and the feeling you're spending more time looking at a spinning loading bar that running around Los Santos. Add in the year-old habit of kicking players out of games at random and the disastrously long load times and you have a great game riddled with daily frustration.

Run the jewels

Rockstar has promised that the next real update for GTA 5 will be the addition of Heists for all formats. Heists is the fabled mode that will have players take on specialist roles to rob banks, steal high-end jewellery, or otherwise engage in co-op criminal activity with multiple objectives. If you look at Missions already in the online game such as Extradition you'll get an idea of jobs that update and flip goals as you play. Extrapolate that out for an idea of what Heists can be.


If we assume that Heists will require a small band of criminals - say, four Crew members taking on roles such as driver, sniper, pilot and muscle - and at least the same number of players acting as the opposing force (if not more), then we're still going to be facing the same everyday problem. Lobbies are never fully populated in GTA Online. The only time they get close to 16 players is during double RP weekends in a game notoriously tight for handing out upgrades. A lobby does not even show the maximum number of invites as being sent out. It's a 30-player match and not even 16 players are invited? As Host, that's soul-crushing.

GTA Online is not lacking players. The game is one of the biggest sellers of the last generation and is likely to continue to perform well this gen. There's plenty of people playing online, they just all seem to be playing in tiny little pockets of comfort, no doubt put off by a year of endless waiting to play with more than a handful of others.

If Heists require teamwork and planning in the same way Destiny's Strikes do, to expect a smooth, working experience in the current state of GTA Online is a pipe dream. We organised an online session last night that had seven players in it. Could we get player number eight - the minimum required to start a 30-player map? Not on your nelly. Five minutes of waiting for just one player to drop in after invites have been sent to Crew, Friends, randoms, strangers, dogs, tramps and anyone else within a 20 mile radius and we still had no luck.

Play any other online console game in the past year and you'll see there's never a drawn-out struggle to populate lobbies. Destiny, Call of Duty, Titanfall and more all fill lobbies within seconds and well under a minute. It's clearly a priority. In GTA Online we sit watching a half-full list and it feels like a ghost town in comparison.

Get fresh crew

Maybe it's the fact that players need to accept a job invite in order to play unless they're on call for a Random Job. Random Jobs are the quickest, easiest way to play GTA Online with other people. The downside is you're just as likely to end up in a dreadful Creator match as you are a bonafide classic like Salty Snatch.

Rockstar needs a better solution to herd players into lobbies and get them playing together. Crews are a great idea in theory and it's fairly easy to organise four of five of your friends online, but any bigger numbers and you're faced with the same problems as before: the tiresome wait for lobbies to fill, the dashed hopes as players quit out of boredom.


Heists have been promised for 12 months and delayed often. We all want to get involved in the Big Job, snatching huge payouts and RP as a reward for taking massive risks. But as we've seen so many times with many other online games this year, the promise falls flat when the service is not up to scratch.

Rockstar needs to fix matchmaking and lobbies in GTA Online before it releases more content. We've been struggling through the same threadbare support for the past year. A lot of us have bought the game twice now, and we're staring at the exact same problems we had on day one, 2013 If Rockstar does not fix the weak online infrastructure Heists are going to be over before they've even begun.

четвер, 1 січня 2015 р.

There’s a fun little secret stashed away in latest GTA 5 release


Here's something fun: a little secret thing added to the current-gen versions of GTA 5. Do not read past this sentence or look at the video if you wish to remain unspoiled.


According to the video posted to YouTube by taltigolt, players can eat Peyote in the desert, start hallucinating, and think they have turned into a chicken.

Because of this, the player "actually" turns into the fowl for a short period.

Watch below.


GTA 5 is out on PS4 and Xbox One today.

Here’s a map showing 17 of the peyote locations in GTA 5

Consuming peyotes is all the rage in GTA 5 at the moment. To satisfy this need, some have mapped the locations where you pursue such intoxicating adventures.


Eating peyotes in the new release of GTA 5 has been proved to have some inebriating effects. For instance, you can turn into a chicken, a seagull, and plenty of other animals and birds.

There are 27 locations of these plants.

Thanks to the smart folks over at GTA King, we now have a map of 17 of those 27. Still, that’s a pretty good portion.

Follow this link for a detailed look on how to get to each of them.

вівторок, 30 грудня 2014 р.

GTA 5 is something else at night


Rockstar's attention to detail in the GTA games has always been a major point of praise. The new-gen version of GTA 5 elevates that even further with its upgraded graphics and increased NPC count.
The short below by The XXI captures the life in GTA by night. All those NPCs going about their lives, all of which you've probably missed in your pursuit of a new gun or a fast car.

The city looks best at night, but what adds even more weight to all the scenery is how NPCs act like how you'd expect regular pedestrians to act.


GTA Online: Rockstar will still support Xbox 360 and PS3 with new DLC


Rockstar has said it will continue to support the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions of GTA Online with new content after Heists.
Answering questions from players on the official site, the company said it had no plans to drop support for older systems although it admitted there will come a point when it just will not be technically possible.

Some players have expressed concern that now the game is on PS4, Xbox One and PC soon, support for the older versions released in 2013 would dry up. But time is not up for the Xbox 360 and PS3 yet - more content will come after the release of Heists in early 2015.

"Players on PS3 and Xbox 360 can look forward to Online Heists and other updates that are in the works coming soon," said Rockstar.

"We are incredibly thankful to our original generation of GTAV and GTA Online players on those systems and wish to continue providing content to them for as long as we can.

"Of course, at some point in the future, there may be a point where we reach the limits for the previous generation of consoles as there may be some updates that are only technically possible on the new hardware - but we do hope to continue delivering as many updates as we can for all four consoles for as long as possible. "

The next update for all four versions of Grand Theft Auto Online will be a "Christmas gift" to keep players busy over the festive period.