Well, it it is, I'd appreciate it, especially if it's the GOTY version. Been regretting pre-ordering the gog version ever since they put out the DLC and it always cost more/got lower discounts than getting the GOTY version. I refuse to pay extra as punishment for pre-ordering a game (same reason why I won't pre-order Cyberpunk).

True :(
Denuvo should be outlawed :) Ive read an article where the pirated version of a game run way better , what a joke.

Thanks for saving me 90gb of bandwidth.

Should have known Rockstar was too shit to actually put out a non-crippled game.

Thanks for saving me 90gb of bandwidth....
i cant believe how hyped i was before this game came out. now if i claim it its mostly because i suspect epic pays for these free copies and we help them by not taking them

i saw instructions on their support page for running the game in offline mode end with "Launch GTAV via the Rockstar Games Launcher while online"

But that's precisely what I meant, a proper PC port for me is already a "remaster".

I really underestimated just how deep the DRM would go with this when I left my previous response. The EGS launcher, the Rockstar Games launcher, Rockstar Social Club and some Steam doodads thrown in there for good measure. Sheesh.

You know, the entire reason I became so heavily anti-DRM is because of GTA IV. The game would not even save unless it was online.

I was planning on picking GTA V for free and giving Rockstar and Epic a chance. After seeing how infested the game is with DRM - nope, hell no.

Ah, you haven’t seen a lot of remasters recently then. What they do is strip most of the music out, put some annoying special effects of like chromatic abberation, piecemeal our the content, tie in micro transactions, and then double the price. That’s why it’s so popular at the moment. Not too mention it will require denuvo, steam, r* social club and due to that run extremely badly even on a gtx3080ti dual setup!

I just redeemed the game fine with the Epic client. Not going to install it yet because I don't think my current PCs can handle it... or maybe I could try it for shits and giggles, maybe I will be surprised how well it runs?

When people said the site/service is down, I guess they meant the Epic web pages (which, I guess, you need to visit if you don't have the client installed yet). So I guess Epic is seeing quite many new Epic client users now, trying feverishly to download the client from their web pages.

I guess it has extra layers of DRM, but since it is free, I don't feel like complaining... I promise to buy it for real monies if they ever officially release it DRM-free (preferably on GOG). I think I've used like over 100€ last few weeks on DRM-free GOG games, I vote with my wallet.

"used to be", so does GTA IV still have limited installations?

Just to know whether I should try it now, don't want to waste limited installations on trying... I hope that limit is gone, as well as requiring Windows LIVE account as isn't it defunct already?

I see though that on Steam GTA IV was "upgraded"(?) to GTA IV Complete recently, March 2020.

Yeeaah, the activation limit has probably been gone for a while now.

GFWL being defunct turned the DRM into even more of a clusterfuck, since you now had to sign in via an XBox account. There was also a serial key that I had to punch in God knows where...

The recent patch - apart from removing multiplayer - really turned it into far less of a DRM nightmare. Now it's launched via Steam and it makes a check via the Social Club every time you start the game (kinda like what Max Payne 3 did). Savegames should work fine now, same goes for Steam achievments.

Still, even though the DRM is significantly less of a headache than it used to be just a few months ago, I heavily recommend AGAINST spending money on GTA IV. On a purely technical level, it is an absolutely piss-poor game. The performance is nothing short of horrendous, even on fairly recent systems. For example: I can play Kingdom Come Deliverance in Ultra, with HD textures and at a 1920 resolution at 50+ frames per second, while 11 years old GTA IV usually drags around 40 FPS and sometimes falls significantly below that. It is incredibly poorly optimised and from what little I've played of the game, it seemed nowhere near as fun as any of the GTA III-era games.

It's a pretty bad game. I'd stay try #5 instead, at least that one is free at the moment.

I liked the game but I agree that the performance was really bad. From 70+ fps to 30fps just by moving the mouse to look somewhere else. I tried to lock the game to 30fps to see if I had a smooth experience but no luck.

I'm not a person to give up on a game and GTA IV, IMO, is a good game, so I put up with the performance and finished the game and the Episodes From Liberty City. No regrets!
That would be awesome, but unfortunately GOG doesn't have the financial power as Epic does (not even close!!).

I'd be glad if we could have GOG Connect games more often.

No worry, I've had GTA IV on my Steam account for a long time, I guess I got it cheap on some bundle sale or something, not sure.

I decided to install it now to see how it runs on my aging gaming laptop. The HW (minimum?) requirements on the Steam store page look quite meager, my laptop has far higher specs than that. From the Steam page:

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS
OS: Windows 7 (plus Service Pack 1)
Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo 1.8GHz, AMD Athlon X2 64 2.4GHz
Memory: 1.5GB
Graphics: 256MB Nvidia 7900 / 256MB ATI X1900
DirectX Version: DirectX 9.0c Compliant Card
Hard Drive: 22GB of Hard Disc Space
Sound Card: 5.1 Channel Audio Card

About the possible performance issues on modern PCs, could it be a similar issue as with e.g. the first Crysis game which doesn't take advantage of several CPU cores that well?

Already a long time ago I recall there being some GTA IV mods that are supposed to make it look much better than the vanilla version; not sure if they help with the performance issues, or just increase them? And are they even compatible with this recent GTA IV Complete update?

You might have gotten it from the same Rockstar bundle I got it from a few years ago.

Feel free to let me know how it runs on your laptop, I'm curious! It ran like shit on my 10 years old PC, likewise on my 5 years old laptop and kinda barely runs adequately on my fairly recent machine. I haven't tried any mods yet, since I figured I might as well try all the games I bought during the past decade that I hadn't tried before and that run well out of the box. (Funny thing is: Max Payne 3, which uses the same engine and has much more detailed graphics ran like a charm even on my old PC).