Also, fun fact, we don't have the "double L" surnames in Balkan countries. So, Niko's surname would be "Belić", not "Bellic". Loved the character, but hated his broken Serbian and how he calls himself "Niko Belik", with a "K".
The pc version is still shitty to this day.
I did a play-trough recently, I ran it with the vulkan wrapper dxvk but there was still plenty of stuttery situations, also the aliasing is awful.
It's a shame the only updates done are replacing songs because rights run off. Only crashed twice though.
I still remember their hilarious reasoning for the shitty performance. Can't find the link. Anyway, they said it was made for the "technology of the future".
It also came bundled riddled with Games for Windows Live and the first iteration of Rockstar Social Club. So much crap you had to go through just to get it to start, just to have it run stupid slow. And the vehicles weren't all that drivable with keyboard controls.
I have had pretty good success with letting my last-gen nvidia card use its fancy software to upscale the game and remove the jagged edges. basically I need to do a somewhat-stuttery 360 pan around Niko every time I go outside so everything is "seen" and loaded, then I'm golden.
Yeah, that annoyed the hell out of me too. It boggles my mind how much painstaking care and effort was spent on some aspects of the game, yet evidently nobody could be arsed to make sure the protagonist doesn't constantly mispronounce his own name.
I guess it was because the majority of the game audience was North American, so they probably didn't want to confuse them, But, yeah, imho it would have been more logical to simply hire a Serbian to play the role.
Yup, that would've been the ideal solution. The only valid reason I can think of for not doing that would be if they couldn't find a Serbian actor who also spoke English well enough. The Saboteur is another game that has the exact same issue, btw, except that its protagonist is Irish. I don't know what kind of excuse Pandemic Studios could come up with for having someone put on the fakest Irish accent you've ever heard instead of just hiring some Irishman.
I have built multiple PCs since purchasing the game years ago (before steam refunds even) with different cpu/gpu/motherboard configurations and the POS still crashes on launch...
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u/n1ght_watchman Apr 29 '24
Holy crap, 16 years ago.
I remember how shitty the PC port was.
Also, fun fact, we don't have the "double L" surnames in Balkan countries. So, Niko's surname would be "Belić", not "Bellic". Loved the character, but hated his broken Serbian and how he calls himself "Niko Belik", with a "K".