ROBBING STORES

Given the fact that Cyberpunk 2077 is set in a dystopian feature where crime and corruption are rampant, you’d think that actually being able to do major crimes in the open world would be a thing. Sadly, that’s not the case. For instance, there’s no way for you to rob a store. While GTA 4 had proper store robberies where you could hold up store owners on gunpoint and take them for everything they had, in Cyberpunk 2077, there is no such system in place.

NPCs REACTING TO CARJACKINGS

NPCs reacting to your actions is probably one of the most disappointing aspects of Cyberpunk’s open world. Even the way they react to something as basic as you robbing their vehicles is disappointing. Most of the times, all they do is crouch down on the road beside their vehicle immediately after carjackings (while some occasionally run away as well). In GTA 4, things are far less predictable, and from NPCs running away to trying to violently take their vehicle right back to even hanging on to car doors while you drive away, they can react in any number of ways.

FALLING FROM HEIGHTS

There’s a lot of high points in Night City to fling yourself off to the ground from, but the results are always disappointingly tame. V’s reaction to falling from heights is almost non-existent, the falling animations may as well not even exist, and the impacts lack that oomph. In GTA 4, Niko will scream his lungs out and desperately wave his limbs in the air as he’s falling through the air, and crash into the ground with crunching impact.

BUMPING INTO NPCs

Here’s another example of how reactive NPCs are to even the simplest of things you do in GTA 4, and how that is definitely not the case in Cyberpunk 2077. Walk and run into them in the latter, and they will have no reaction to you whatsoever- they’ll just stand there and blankly stare at you with dead eyes. In GTA 4, thanks to the game’s physics engine, they’ll stumble, fall over, roll down stairs, or even have some choice words to say about Niko.

SIDE ACTIVITIES AND MINIGAMES

GTA 4, like any other GTA game, is full of side activities and minigames to partake in, from throwing darts to, of course, going bowling. None of that is present in Cyberpunk 2077, though you might spot things like pool tables and what have you in certain locations, there’s no way to actually interact with them.

SETTING YOURSELF ON FIRE

It’s honestly surprising that in an open world game releasing in 2020, the main character doesn’t even react properly to being set on fire. V doesn’t take any damage from standing in flames, and has no reaction to the same whatsoever. By comparison, if Niko does the same, he’ll start screaming and fall over to the ground while taking damage.

BUYING FOOD FROM VENDORS

The way Cyberpunk 2077 handles vendors is yet another one area where its open world disappoints. In GTA 4, you could head to bars, restaurants, and hot dog vendors to purchase food and drinks, and you’d see Niko physically consuming those items in the open world. In Cyberpunk 2077, you can, of course, interact with vendors, but all that does is take you to a menu where you can add consumables to your inventory.

FIRE HYDRANTS

This is a very small and specific thing, but it’s a perfect example of how ahead of its time GTA 4’s physics engine was, and how disappointing Cyberpunk’s is. To be more specific, we’re talking about how the main character reacts to the force of the streams of water shooting out of destroyed fire hydrants. In Cyberpunk 2077, the jets of water that shoot out of the ground are gone in a couple of seconds at most, and don’t have any physical effect on… well, anything. Those same jets of water in GTA 4 stick around for much longer, have a physical impact on Niko, and can even partially lift cars off the ground.

DAMAGING VEHICLES WITH MELEE WEAPONS

This is one of the most basic ways a game can react to what you’re going. Take your fists or a baseball bat and any other melee weapon you can get your hands on, and you’ll see that attacking vehicles with it in GTA 4 will yield appropriate levels, with cars getting bashed up, dented, scratched, and what have you. In Cyberpunk 2077, it’s like you’re swinging at nothing, and vehicles barely even get a single scratch.

ANTAGONIZING DRIVERS

And what exactly do the drivers do when you’re banging up their cars? Well, in GTA 4, they do what you’d expect them to do. They get out of their vehicles and engage Niko in fistfights to try and stop him. In Cyberpunk, they just stay inside their cars, and might occasionally raise their hands in fear.

DRIVING YOUR CAR INTO WATER

If you’re playing an open world game with cars, chances are, you’ll eventually wind up driving your vehicle into a body of water. If you do that in GTA 4, your car will float around in the water for a bit before it slowly starts sinking to the bottom. Meanwhile, in Cyberpunk 2077, where water isn’t so much of an actual physical force as it is set dressing, your car will simply plop right in and drop right to the bottom with zero resistance.

MOTORCYCLE CRASHES

Getting into massive, bone-crunching accidents and car crashes in GTA 4 was never not fun, owing to the hilarious things that would ensue thanks to the game’s excellent physics engine. Getting into crashes while driving bikes was particularly fun, because of the wildly different ways Niko would go flying through the air or crash into the ground upon impact. Cyberpunk 2077 doesn’t have that kind of a physics engine going for it- or any physics engine, for that matter. Every single crash, regardless of speed or momentum, triggers the exact same animation, and it gets old very quickly.

DRIVING BIKES ON STAIRS

Here’s another tiny little impressive detail in GTA 4 that’s missing in Cyberpunk 2077. Try driving a bike up a set of stairs in GTA 4, and you’ll see its wheels and suspension reacting appropriately to the bumpy surface. Meanwhile, in Cyberpunk, bikes drive up and down stairs like they’re flat surfaces, and if you look closely, you can even see the edges of their tires clipping through the steps.

NPCs REACTING TO RAIN

The relative lack of dynamic weather systems in Night City is another one of Cyberpunk 2077’s open world’s disappointing elements. In fact, even the weather systems that are in the game are mostly just there for aesthetic reasons. For instance, when it rains, NPCs won’t have any reactions to that whatsoever, and will simply keep going about their listless walks around the city as they normally would. In GTA 4, when it starts raining, NPCs will bring out their umbrellas, running across sidewalks to get to their destinations quickly, and even using things they have in their hands (like newspapers or briefcases) to cover their heads.

DRIVERS REACTING TO CAR CRASHES

Finally, let’s end with yet another example of the disappointing reactions NPCs have to the things you do in Cyberpunk 2077. Crash into their vehicles while driving your own, and they’ll do… nothing at all. They’ll just keep sitting behind the wheel and wait for you to drive out of their way (since they don’t know how to drive around you either). Hell, sometimes, they don’t even spawn until after you’ve crashed into them. In GTA 4, NPCs will hurl curses at you if you crash into their cars, get out of their vehicles to inspect the damage, or might even die if you hit their cars hard enough.

BATMAN: ARKHAM KNIGHT

It seems fitting to kick off with one of the most maligned PC launches for a major game in recent memory. Batman: Arkham Knight – the game itself – has a few issues of its own that don’t sit well with a large number of people, but the game’s PC version in particular has become an infamous example of a poorly handled PC launch for a game. WB Games are no strangers to bad PC releases, but Arkham Knight in particular drew all the negative attention in the world for pretty much every reason possible.

Do keep in mind, that though it’s natural to assume that when we talk about big game maps, we might be talking about open world games only- but that’s not the case. Whether its an open world game, or an open ended game that’s not particularly open world, or a huge map that we’ve seen in multiplayer play- it’s all fair game for this list. Also, do keep in mind that randomly generated maps were not considered for this feature.

A final note before we begin- there’s every possibility that we might have missed out on some game you were expecting to see on this list, and if we did, it’s either because the exact sizes of their maps aren’t known to us, or because we simply forgot! If it’s the former, and you know what the sizes are, please tell us! If it’s the latter, please remind us.

So without further ado, let’s jump into it.

#50. ASSASSIN’S CREED UNITY

The open world action by developers Ubisoft has its fair share of issues, sure, but its world is one aspect that can’t be faulted. It’s a joy to explore, and it’s also pretty big. At about 2.4 km2, there’s more than enough space in this virtual world to explore and lose yourself in.

This is not because of it’s fabulously successful and lucrative online mode though. While GTA Online has served as much more than just the cherry on top that most probably expected it to be, people generally hadn’t bought these games for online experiences. Gamers generally buy Grand Theft Auto to experience a massive, enthralling trip into organized crime with gritty, realistic characters and unparalleled freedom to unfold the story the way they see fit.

GTA 5 has arguably satisfied that particular need for gamers more than any other entry to the series and perhaps more than any other game, as evidenced by the massive, unprecedented profits that the game has raked in over the years since its release that are well into the billions. Out of all of the benchmarks that the fifth entry in the Grand Theft Auto series has broken, one of the more intriguing ones is the amount of online content that the game offers. Rockstar is no stranger to online modes that offer a fair amount of fun and longevity, but GTA 5’s online mode is an entirely different beast altogether.

In microtransactions, and microtransactions alone, GTA 5 has pulled in over 500 million dollars. The success of the ever-growing online mode for the game is not too surprising to those who have been playing it for a while, as they have seen the beefy list of options grow steadily with new content being added on a regular basis for a long time now. There’s no two ways about it; GTA Online is an incredibly successful endeavour in it’s own right, and due to this the amount of players engaging with it continue to fuel its expansion with their multiple purchases.

One question that seems to be inevitably barreling towards us, however, is whether or not Rockstar is losing sight of the essence of Grand Theft Auto at this point. It is a question that many are starting to ask, and understandably so. It’s true that the online modes are wildly popular and successful, and of course there’s nothing inherently wrong with Rockstar continuing to support it, but what is just as true is that many fans of the franchise are in fact single-player offline gamers, who have by now exhausted most if not all of what Los Santos has to offer, and are understandably starting to wonder about the next major entry.

After all, GTA 5 did come out in 2013, which is over a whopping 5 years ago. Granted, this is also roughly the same amount of time we had to wait between GTA 4 and 5, but even then, by 2011 we at least knew that GTA 5 was coming. Which was just 3 years after the launch of 4, so if Rockstar had any interest in sticking to that timeline, we would have had at least some sort of official word on Grand Theft Auto 6 by 2016 or so.

But here we are in 2019 without so much as a peep about another game. You could say that Rockstar is just focusing on Red Dead Online right now, but that doesn’t really explain the absence of 6 being on the way. Remember, Rockstar put Red Dead Redemption out in 2010, between GTA 4 and 5, and surely was working on both for a fair amount of time, so either Rockstar has lost the ability to multitask since the release of Grand Theft Auto 5, which is stupefyingly unlikely, or they are purposefully holding off on a new game in the franchise. This is counter to what GTA players have grown to expect from the series up to this point, and does add some fuel to the suspicion that perhaps Rockstar is indeed more interested in squeezing more money out of the current iteration for several more years.

Another noteworthy about-face for the attitude that Rockstar seems to have about it’s flagship series is the lack of offline DLC expansions to the main game. For a game that has been out for this long and seen this much success to not have gotten any major offline expansion to the stories of the characters is pretty weird. In fact, Rockstar has gone so far as to officially clarify that they are intentionally focusing on GTA Online because of how well it has exceeded their expectations, and that single-player DLC for the game was neither “possible nor necessary”.

Great news for fans of the online mode, not so great for everyone else. There are many possible reasons for this, and to be fair the fact that the console generation changed right after the initial launch of the game, forcing Rockstar to devote a fair amount of resources to immediately get next-gen versions of the game running, potentially setting other plans back, is worth considering. But at the end of the day what we are seeing here is a focus on microtransactions and online content, which until recent years would never be associated with Grand Theft Auto games this heavily.

Is Rockstar truly changing how they view GTA? Are they no longer interested in supporting single-player experiences with that particular franchise? The suspicions that GTA is headed for an online future don’t seem to be as concrete as some may think, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have merit. It’s hard to imagine any developer turning away all of the money that can be made with microtransactions, which basically have no overhead compared to what they bring in when comparing that to the cost and benefit of adding stories and offline content.

To be sure, we’ll have to wait and see how Grand Theft Auto 6 turns out. Surely some clues as to where Rockstar is headed was in Red Dead Redemption 2, but to be totally sure where Rockstar wants to take GTA, we’ll have to see what they do with it. GTA 6 is coming, it’s just a question of when. If they choose to focus on online content with the next game primarily, surely the essence of what makes those games great will be gone to some degree.

Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, GamingBolt as an organization.

CAMP CHORES (RED DEAD REDEMPTION 2)

The van der Linde gang’s camp, for a large part of Red Dead Redemption 2, is an excellent place to just hang out. From picking up quests and side quests, to playing some mini-games, to picking up various side quests and acivities, to just chatting with your fellow gang-members, there’s a lot to do in the camp. One other thing you can do is… chores. Picking up a loft of hay and slowly walking across the camp to to it back down in the horses’ feeding spot. Filling up a bucket and water and bringing it to Pearson’s table. Chopping a bunch of firewood. It’s all the very definition of mundane, and really, doesn’t require much activity on your part as a player- but for some reason, every now and again, it feels oddly fun to just do a bunch of chores around the camp. Of course, the Dead Eye bonuses – for whatever reason – are an obvious boost.

It’s a bit hard to believe, but Grand Theft Auto 4 first came out ten years ago now. Ten years is a long time, even though it feels like the last decade just swept past us in a blur. Maybe that’s why Rockstar only licensed a lot of the music in the game for the period of 10 years. Those 10 years will be up at the end of this month, and a lot of Rockstar’s licenses for music featured in the title will be expiring.

At that point, Rockstar will begin to remove the songs from the game—definitely from any new copies of the game that are produced (or sold digitally) from that point on, but they may also decide to patch the game to remove the songs (which they did with Vice City and San Andreas). All of which is to say—if you like GTA4’s soundtrack as is, don’t update the game after April 26.

GTA4 is available now on PS3, Xbox 360, and PC.

[via Kotaku]

Boom Boom!

Ask most Grand Theft Auto fans, and they will tell you that while GTA4 itself may have been a tad underwhelming after San Andreas (and especially in hindsight, considering it was followed up by the superlative Grand theft Auto V), its DLC was sublime. Two full length playable single player story expansions, The Lost and the Damned and The Ballad of Gay Tony, collectively referred to as Episodes From Liberty City, are arguably among the best GTA releases.

So it would be pretty nice to have them playable on our current generation machines, too. Happily enough, it looks like that may be happening- Episodes From Liberty City has been re-rated by the ESRB for the Xbox One (via NeoGAF), which suggests that it may be coming to Microsoft’s new console. Whether it will be via Xbox One Backward Compatibility, or via a full fledged re-release (in which case, one has to ask, why was the game not rated for PS4?) remains to be seen.

The original GTA4 and Episodes From Liberty City can, for now, be played on Xbox 360, PS3, and PC.

Dedicated group of gamers and fans alike toil for hours if not months to create the prefect mod and that to many times free of charge, and these mods are nothing less than spectacular. Mods over the past 5 years or so have really come into the spotlight, because it shows just shows how innovative and awesome a dedicated fan can be. From Deus Ex to Half Life 2, these graphical mods are nothing less than spectacular. With that said here are some of the top PC Graphic mods of all time.

(Warning: read the instructions carefully before you try to install any mod)

For more exciting features and lists, please click here. Stay tuned to GamingBolt for more news and updates.

Note: List is in random order

Half Life 2 Enhancement Mod

Let’s face it, even without the mod Half Life 2 looks absolutely gorgeous and we are always looking for a reason to once again step into the shoes of Gordon Freeman. This mod gives the updated skins for players faces in the Half-Life 2 Enhancement Mod. And to be honest it looks really good, I mean you really have to pay attention to notice the difference, but all I can say is, damn that looks good!

No matter what had happened with the first game, the series has developed immensely over time and proven its worth with the recent games in the series. Sailing through a flood of praises and critical acclaims, the latest instalment in the series had come to us in September last year. Grand Theft Auto upon its release had even been hailed as the greatest game of the seventh generation of consoles, save the Wii. And there’s the catch. It’s only for the seventh generation consoles, namely the Playstation 3 and the Xbox 360. Long have the adopters of the new generation of consoles and PC users been crying foul over this, and it is proper on their part. For there’s a lot that developers can utilise to make the game better on all three platforms.

" The game looked almost immaculate. Save a few things wrong here and there, there was almost nothing that could be put against the game. The game had a great character driven story just like its, predecessor, GTA IV, a vibrant and sprawling city to roam with almost unlimited scope and realism padding along with a beautifully rendered script which has a solid appeal to it and seems appealingly structured. "

Hands down, GTA V is the largest game that Rockstar North has created till date and they have done a brilliant job if it. It’s not just big, it’s splendid. The developers have taken care to fine tune everything in the world to make it resemble the real world. It had introduced a plethora of new game elements, a triumvirate of awesome protagonists, some polished gunplay and an intricately crafted world.

The developers at Rockstar North had claimed that they had finally learnt to utilise the consoles to the fullest and we’d be damned if they were kidding. The game looked almost immaculate. Save a few things wrong here and there, there was almost nothing that could be put against the game.

The game had a great character driven story like its predecessor, GTA IV, a vibrant and sprawling city to roam with almost unlimited scope and realism padding along a beautifully rendered script which had a solid appeal to it and seemed appealingly structured. These reasons all the more support the rationale behind bringing the game to the new gen consoles and the PC. GTA IV & V alike had pushed the graphical boundaries of the consoles.

The worlds in both the games were humongous and appealing to say the least. You could roam about the world and hardly find things amiss. GTA V had truly pushed the boundaries of console gaming. Even after incorporating so many elements into a game of such titanic proportions, the developers had left no space for complain and dexterously provided the smallest of details to the world.

The visuals looked awesome, the reflections were neat and tidy, so was the bloom and the depth of field just let you sigh in awe. There were half a hundred small things in the game, from your clothes getting wet only where the water touched, your car gleaming a little more when out of a car wash, to situation based mission fail messages, that had you cared to notice, would have ended with you truly admiring the efforts of the developers.

"There has been a lot of apprehension about having GTA V on the PC for many reasons. First and foremost is the system requirements. In light of the PC version of GTA IV - which had pretty high system requirements - GTA V may yet be even more demanding than its previous iteration. But that doesn’t serve as a very acceptable deterrent."

With so much being achieved on the Xbox 360 and the PS3, there’s no telling what the developers can squeeze out of the Xbox One and the PS4. Both the consoles are more than twice as powerful and capable as their forerunners in almost every conceivable way. ‘Almost’, is of essence here but that’s not the point. The massively powerful new microprocessors throbbing in the new consoles can provide a lot of new untrodden ground for the developers.

First and foremost would obviously be the graphical ascension in the game. The Playstation 4 obviously has more shaders than the Xbox One in addition to having a larger number of shaders in the GPU, but that doesn’t mean that the Xbox One is any less capable. Besides, Microsoft has been working on their cloud services to make the Xbox One more capable, although latency could be a bummer.

Both the consoles are still very much capable of churning out 1080p display in 60fps. With ample RAM and powerful processors, both the consoles can easily handle GTA V without breaking a sweat whilst providing us with some serious eye candy.

The same story goes for why the game needs to be on the PC too. The PC market has always been big for the GTA series and it came as a surprise to may when it was announced that the game will only come to the to consoles.

This had caused quite a furore that had manifested itself into a petition that had acquired the signatures of more than half a million people in a short time. But nonetheless, the game hasn’t been ported yet.

There has been a lot of apprehension about having GTA V on the PC for many reasons. First and foremost is the system requirements. In light of the PC version of GTA IV – which had pretty high system requirements – GTA V may yet be even more demanding than its previous iteration. But that doesn’t serve as a very acceptable deterrent.

"Most of the PCs - if not all - are round about as capable as the eighth generation consoles from Sony and Microsoft and hence would be perfectly able to handle games like GTA V. Besides, Rockstar can compromise a little on the system requirements to make the game more accessible to people who don’t really shell out their money for gaming rigs."

The PC market is still flourishing at large. The PC version of GTA IV had featured double the number of players in the multiplayer mode but had suffered a little due to the lack of dedicated servers. Porting the game to the new consoles and the PC with dedicated servers would be a move much appreciated.

There were many a reviews for GTA IV that claimed that the PC version was actually less fun than the console versions. That may have been so but there was this little something that more than covered up the flaws. Modding. Modding practically has endless permutations and combinations to change the game. Sitting in a Lamborghini Veneno looking like ‘V’ from ‘V for Vendetta’ while all the cars around you are flying in swirlies is a different kind of fun after you’re sore with all the roaming, killing, skyscraper jumping and rioting.

There isn’t much that can be compared to clearing away a traffic jam and the denizen of the place by shouting ‘Fus ro Dah’ from the roof of your car. Some modders had been so desperate to get GTA V on the PC that they introduced a mod for GTA IV that can make the game look like GTA V. Of course they only replicated the game’s maps, visuals and mechanics and not the missions. But this just showcases the vast capabilities that modding can have.

Whilst it’s agreed that modding can a butthurt to implement properly, it’s not always the case and once you learn to do it properly, there’s no end to the possibilities of it and besides, there are hundreds of tutorials telling you how to successfully implement mods in games. Console users may argue that they get enough from DLCs but modding open up a whole new world of possibilities and fun. Because consoles don’t allow you to manipulate game elements like modifications let you.

Then again comes the point of graphical fidelity. Most of the PCs – if not all – are round about as capable as the eighth generation consoles from Sony and Microsoft and hence would be perfectly able to handle games like GTA V. Besides, Rockstar can compromise a little on the system requirements to make the game more accessible to people who don’t really shell out their money for gaming rigs.

"With the PC version of course, we will have mods to further our gameplay experience. With unfounded rumours floating about here and there, it’s hard to say what Rockstar is actually planning for the game. But we do know that at the last E3, Rockstart had made a last minute decision to not present 'something'. "

It seems quite a misguided step on part of Rockstar that they would fail to keep up with changing trends. The new consoles may be something that they are ‘slightly’ un-accustomed to but that presents no cause as to not release GTA V on the newer consoles or the PC for that matter. It has almost been half a year since GTA V was launched on the seventh generation consoles and the ardour of PC and the new generation console users has only grown.

With GameStop listing ‘GTA V for PC’ for a short while before taking down the page, people have taken to pushing their demands to introduce the game to the new console generation and the PC even more emphatically.

Introducing the game to these three platforms would allow Rockstar to improve upon their game even more, for example, with dedicated servers, even slicker graphics and smoother performance at higher resolutions and frame rates .

With the PC version of course, we will have mods to further our gameplay experience. With unfounded rumours floating about here and there, it’s hard to say what Rockstar is actually planning for the game. But we do know that at the last E3, Rockstart had made a last minute decision to not present ‘something’.

That ‘something’ could have been the ported/improved version of the Grand Theft Auto V. But we can never be sure. All we can do to allay our doubts and apprehensions, is to wait for the E3 2014 and hope that Rockstar hasn’t forsaken some of its fans.

Grand Theft Auto has been one of gaming’s most recognized franchises. Started way back in 1997, it spawned a series  of controversies, issues, and not to mention a huge profit that was made with these games. For those of us who played any of the GTA games, will have some fond memories, be it certain missions, side quests, trying out a new vehicle, or just causing random chaos.

All of these things carries with them a sense of nostalgia and it does make us want to go back and relive those moments again and again. We take a look at some of the very best moments in the GTA timeline from the original through Grand Theft Auto V.

Note: This list is in random order.

100. 5 stars police chase (GTA 5)

It is something that every player must attempt at least once through their gameplay experience. There is something awesome about the entire police force trying to take you down by any means necessary. After causing considerable chaos and destruction, the Los Santos police department goes all Rambo on you and what ensues is a very high speed, high risk police chase. The video is quite awesome so do watch it all the way.