GTA V players cruising the streets of Los Santos on PC are getting caught up in the wrong sort of crashes today. Corrupt downloads are repeatedly throwing them out of the game and onto the desktop – and depending on where they bought the game, some players have wound up resorting to a complete re-download. Another bug is preventing others from completing the prologue while benchmarking.
Meanwhile, Rockstar have uncovered an installation bug during preparations for launch – though apparently not soon enough to solve it outright. Instead, they’ve recommended a solution for affected players.
UPDATE 28/04/15:A fortnight into GTA V’s PC life, a new bug has been discovered that affects a player’s garage in GTA Online. If your garage is at full capacity and you drive a new car into it, it will delete one of your saved cars and replace it with the new one, no questions asked. The game is supposed to prompt you to ask if you want to delete a car to make space for your new one, but at current that prompt is not being displayed. Rockstar say the next patch will address this.
For now, to avoid deleteing any of your currently saved vehicles, don’t drive a new car into your garage. Avoid doing the following scenario:
“You are driving a personal vehicle from your full garage in GTA Online.
You exit your personal vehicle to steal any unowned vehicle off of the street.
You leave your personal vehicle on the street, and drive the street vehicle into your garage.
The slot containing your personal vehicle is replaced immediately with the street vehicle without confirmation.”
UPDATE 22/04/15: A week after the launch, and there are still a number of unresolved issues, but there’s also been a couple of patches to alleviate other problems.
Patch 1.01 fixed a slew of bugs, including an issue where GTA Online characters imported from consoles would undergo an extreme makeover. Take a gander at the list of fixes.
Another update removed the need for Windows Media Player which was causing installation problems for players without it, along with fixing other pesky issues.
There’s a 30-page thread on the Steam forums highlighting memory leak issues. If you are a victim of this, there’s probably not a lot you can do until Rockstar acknowledges and fixes it.
One of the most enduring issues is in GTA Online: not being able to play with other people. You might end up in an empty world, unable to join a friend or crewmember’s game. The most common error seems to be that GTA doesn’t think you’re friend is in-game. A solution is to join games directly from the Steam friends list instead of using Rockstar’s method. This works, but it’s a temporary fix. If you join a job with a friend and you both leave at the end, chances are you’ll end up separated again, facing the problems you just overcame.
UPDATE 19:52:There are a lot of theories flying around in regards to the bug from the update below. Apparently it’s not affecting users who purchased a physical copy, so some folk are pinning the blame on Steam. Meanwhile, another suggestion is that it’s a compatibility issue with GPU drivers. One Steam user suggests disabling your Nvidia GPU, starting the game, and then reenabling it.
UPDATE: A post on theGTA V Steam forumsentitled ‘I press play and nothing happens’ is, at the time of writing, 94 pages long. Many posters say that the game fails just a few seconds after start-up. Some are starting to report that their anti-virus software is to blame, and that uninstalling it has ended the issue. Clearly, though, that’s not a permanent solution.
Rockstar’s Social Club servers seem to be struggling beneath their new load. Now some players who’ve weathered the ginormous 60GB download and following unpacking process are facing the prospect of doing it all again.
Our Matt’s one of those unlucky enough to find himself with a corrupted download. Steam can ‘verify files’ and sometimes sort out corrupt installs – but Matt and others who bought their copies elsewhere are restricted to Rockstar’s own client, which offers no similar function.
Elsewhere, players are reporting a benchmarking glitch that occurs if you run the benchmark before completing GTA V’s prologue, causing the game to fall apart when a plan flies across the screen.
Do you go by a particular characterful moniker on Windows? Something with an ampersand, perhaps, or a couple of errant underscores? It might be stopping you from playing GTA V on PC.
The telltale signs are the game hanging while trying to download an update, and an error message that reads: “The Rockstar update service is unavailable (code 1)”.
The workaround is to create a new Administrator User Account for your PC, including only upper- or lower-case letters of the alphabet or numbers 0 to 9.
Importantly – and annoyingly – simply renaming your current user Account won’t sort the problem. You’ll need to make a new one – following instructions from Microsoft for Windows 8, Windows 7 or Windows Vista.
Rockstar are working on a more palatable fix, and directing anybody with other technical issues to the Rockstar support site.
Can you run it? Take the GTA 5 system requirements test at PCGameBenchmark.