Rockstar announces online Social Club for GTA IV
As Grand Theft Auto enters its fourth (well, ninth then) iteration, the series is debuting its first console multiplayer feature. Currently, there are few official details on what will be on offer to Xbox Live and PSN users, but it’s probably safe to assume there’ll be the usual array of deathmatch and team deathmatch modes coupled with a few more GTA-specific concepts.
Thanks to Xbox Live’s Achievements, being able to keep track of your friend’s scores online is what we’ve come to expect from modern games. But with GTA IV being released on both PS3 and Xbox 360, each individual’s closed systems make it difficult to keep track of how your friends are doing if they own a different console. Therefore Rockstar has invented a work around – the Rockstar Social Club.
The Social Club website will keep track of your multi- and single-player progress, chart the leader boards and even map all players’ criminal activity from aggregated single player games to show off Liberty Cities hottest crime spots.
The site will also rank stats like time spent playing, distances run, bullets fired, and so on. The “100% Club” will reward the first 100 players to play the game to completion. They’ll win a rare commemorative ‘key to the city’.
And there will no doubt be a whole ton of extra competitions and challenges added on later as soon as Rockstar thinks them up. Registration for the Social Club opens on the 15th of April, although you won’t be adding anything to you achievements until the 29th when the game goes on sale.
Grand Theft Auto IV (via Gamasutra)
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2 comments
Of course, by very definition they are proprietary content delivery systems. But when they spend so much of their time trying to emulate the mechanic of a PC’s multimedia experience it would be a welcome change for them to just drop the facade that they are in some way ‘special’. They already came around to supporting DivX and Xvid, or more poignantly: a third party.
If you take video distribution through Blu-Ray, HD-DVD and Downloads as a prime example of a shift in thinking, when the physical formats are long dead and buried for games consoles, will we still be obtaining proprietary ‘versions’ of GTA VI?
eg: GTAVI-en.ps4, GTAVI-en.x3…
Instead of A file that worked exactly how you wanted it to on either. That sounds more expensive to me, not least for the publisher. This is like DRM for games consoles and it’s not really helping anybody in any way.
It would be paid for through ad revenue I’d assume. In the interface, the loading screens… but God help them if I’m busting caps in some war torn desert future and come across a neon billboard for Coke.
Screw that. There should be (and it would fly off the sheleves if there were) a mass-platform-multiplayer ‘Mafia’ mode that pitted X360 users, PS3 users and PC users against each other in gangs. Live. In the same server.
There is no good reason why it could not be achieved. It’s no different to playing online on a PC since not every game playing Mac/PC is built the same either.
It would be a fanboy frenzy. The media would chew ravenously on its ‘digi-religious combat’ motif like a premium rump steak, but it would be THE most fantastic fun.
I for one would love to exercise some frustrated demons by wrapping a nine iron around the head of some unsuspecting iBoy on the corner of Baker Street.
It’d be like a kind of virtual therapy. :o)
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