The Grand Theft Auto franchise is probably one of the most popular series of games out there, dominating the sandbox genre for quite some time now. It won over a huge amount of fans with its exciting story and great gameplay, making its developer, Rockstar, one of the most popular in the whole industry.

But, as fans eagerly anticipated the new installment in the beloved series, GTA IV, it seems that Rockstar created quite a few problems. Although the console versions, which were launched in April this year, didn't have that many glitches, with the PC version of the game things were not so much on the bright side, as it would seem that its developers didn't really test it thoroughly enough, as proven by the large number of issues that customers who spent their hard earned money on the game later encountered.

We too reported about the fact that Rockstar released a pretty faulty game, and plenty of our readers expressed their concern and/or disapproval towards the company, which in many cases ruined the whole gameplay experience for quite a lot of players. Although the developer announced that a patch for the game was at the moment going through the approval process at Microsoft, in order to be released on the GamesForWindows service, users are still very angry. So, in order to make things much easier for the development team, we decided to create a small list with the major concerns and problems that users have been facing.

First and foremost, the biggest issue is the fact that the game is poorly optimized and that even with the most high-end computer, a decent framerate can barely be achieved. We received testimonies from users who had bought new PCs or laptops especially for this game, with specifications greatly higher than the minimum ones recommended by Rockstar and found themselves experiencing slide-show-like frames, with the game constantly loading the new parts of the city.

Another quite annoying problem is the fact that even though in the graphics menu screen it shows that there is enough video memory, when players start their game a lot of freezing occurs, rendering the title unplayable for a considerable amount of time. Even players who had top of the range graphic cards, with plenty of video memory, encountered this problem. The fact that Rockstar has commissioned the two main graphics board manufacturers, Nvidia and Ati, to enhance their drivers has not changed anything, as the development teams still needs time to make and thoroughly test these new video card drivers.

Other users have complained about the fact that they can't connect another controller to the PC and be able to configure its buttons in the game. The fact that GTA IV can only support the mouse+keyboard configuration or the Xbox 360 controller scheme has made quite a lot of users throw away their copy or return it to the store where it was bought from.

All in all, these are some very severe problems, which add up to the long list of other errors that the game shows, a list that was elaborated by Rockstar. It's a real shame that such a great title, with a very compelling story that took realism to new heights, is plagued by such bugs that have made a lot of people hate the franchise and, implicitly, Rockstar.

Let's just hope that the development team is doing everything it can to solve these problems. If there’s anything else that you encountered during your GTA IV gaming sessions, let us know in a comment to this story.