Ruined by Technology
Binged GTA 4 this weekend to learn that the final mission is unbeatable.
So.. it’s basically impossible to perform this quick time because the game was programmed off a certain frame rate for how many taps. Playing this on the new Xbox means I have to essentially tap A about 50 times in a single second. Spent roughly 18 hours to not be able to finish the game, yay.
EDIT: To those of you suggesting I disable FPS boost, I can’t. In console settings both Auto HDR and FPS boost is grayed out.
Edit 2: it’s automatically scaled to 60fps on the series x, I’m going to attempt to use a massage gun on my controller. What have I become.
EDIT 3: Massage gun was unsuccessful, starting to think I’ll have to do this knuckle trick yall are recommending.
EDIT 4: YALL WE DID IT, my three ruined knuckles did it! Let’s hope I actually finish the mission and can fly well. Hijacking top comment to show proof.
Thank you to everybody for your advice and help. <3
The game was simply trying to fully immerse you in Niko's struggle to get back into the helicopter. Any easier and if wouldn't have seemed like the protagonist was in any real danger, like the quicktime events in the spiderman 2 ps5 game where you literally can't fail. Masterful gambit, Ravo Brockstar.
Back in his youth, it would have been easy for him. 10+ years later, the world feels like it's moving faster, blurrier, and his joints hurt a lot more. Immersion.
There is a video on YouTube that shows how to do it with two fingers. I had this issue when achievement hunting this game myself and the two finger trick got it in about 3-4 tries
Wouldn't need to, and would hate to break the neat structure of split game and save data set by steam, conveniently launched through Proton without hassle.
So it comes either down to the environment (Linux, ProtonGE, wayland compat params) accidentally fixing something (but not the garages), or the fix is also patched into the complete edition (but also doesn't fix the garages)
As a person who has programmed illicit and unapproved mod/patches for games before - that's fair enough.
I mean, if I fix something while cracking your game (or making a cheat mod/any other mod devs don't like), I clearly don't believe in intellectual property and represent the radical open-source perspective - so by all means, please enjoy it. No reason paying customers should miss out - my only objection is that the whole thing isn't GPL.
I played it vanilla, or actually watched the end from the youtube because the game kept crashing in the last mission :) I think there would have been some workaround like disable some cpu cores or something but I got too frustated :P
Also one of Franklin's missions that you start at Simeon's. As you approach to start the mission, he's making a deal with a customer and the car just starts sliding for no reason, interrupting the deal and causing the mission to fail.
Its funny how bugs can be fixed by capping the framerate. I had a bug while playing Tomb Raider on pc that made a puzzle unsolvable until I capped the fps at 30 and it magically worked
If engine physics are tied to framerate, then the more frames you have the faster (sped-up like pressing fast forward) the game will run.
The game is asking you to spam a button, and probably has a hidden ingame meter that goes up and down depending on how fast you hit it. If the engine is sped up, then the meter is dropping down at a faster rate. That is making it more difficult.
I don't know the specifics of this exact implementation, but often, timers in old games are frame-based. Many consoles literally didn't have any way of accessing a "real" time (though, by the time of GTA4, I'm pretty sure they mostly did), so what do you do when you need to code something that relies on time?
Because consoles all run on the same hardware (mostly, less true these days), and traditionally are refresh-capped (so 60 FPS in NTSC territories, and 50 FPS in PAL territories), you can expect all your players are going to experience roughly the same FPS. So instead of programming "you need to press the key 30 times in 3 seconds to succeed" you do "you need to press the key 30 times in 180 frames to succeed" -- works great until somebody runs the game on something faster without capping the FPS.
Use your point and middle finger knuckles and brush them across the A button as fast as you can (be careful not to hit Y when he's entering the helicopter)
I remember using an unsharpened pencil to get through the torture scene in metal gear solid way back in the day. Same concept as the battery but I felt I had a little more leverage.
My brother and sister used to do this when playing Track and Field. They found putting their hand inside of a sock or wrapped in their t-shirt made it easier and more comfortable. I could never get the hang of it and had a controller with a macro that spammed the buttons instead lol
That’s like a core gaming memory for me. I regularly had to call my aunt and ask her for advice because she had the walkthrough printed out and put in a binder lmao.
I always just use both my thumbs. Just hold the middle of the controller with your left hand, keep your thumbs still over the A button and use the rest of your hands to shake the controller so that your thumbs keep hitting the button over and over really quickly.
The key is to not actually use your thumbs. Let the rest of your hands do the work. I just tested to see how quickly I could press the A button by actually moving my thumbs to tap it and it's was much harder and slower to do
I've seen Tetris players use a similar trick where they keep one finger just on the button, then roll their knuckles across the back of the controller to bump the button up against their finger rapidly.
GTA IV is known to be spaghetti code, it was an incredible game especially for the hardware it released on but R* was on some crazy shit to make it happen
That's not really how game development works, you develop the game on pc sure but there's a lot more to getting a game running than just the code, especially on PC where you have to optimize for many different configurations and parts, AMD vs Nvidia GPUs, Intel or AmD cpus and so forth. Generally speaking you are also designing it and testing it for the Console Devkits too in mind, things will likely not run correctly if you just ran them on a PC but does on the console. Porting games in recent years has become much easier though as consoles have become much more similar to PCs in technology and hardware compared to the 360 and PS3 eras when they were very different (Especially the PS3 with it's weird custom Cell processor).
Rockstar's pc porting has definitely significantly improved though, GTA 4 was one of the worst PC ports of all time and it's only just recently through 15 years of dedicated modders and fans that you can get the game to run smoothly even on high end hardware that wasn't even thought to be possible back then but (likely because of the backlash) Max Payne 3 and onwards have all been quite good on PC, even then there's still some issues like how RDR2's cloth physics don't work right above 30FPS because that's what consoles targeted at the time, if you go above 60 on PC they completely break with the ends of the duster coat in particular often floating in the air for me.
Even the earlier releases in the 3D universe (III, VC, SA) had janky engine code that relied on FPS for physics calculations. Not unplayable on modern hardware, but pretty far off the intended experience. Thankfully community patches exist (for the PC versions at least).
Yeah it's not a game from 1995 or something like that where people just assumed the framerate or cpu clock would never change, that's a major oversight.
Call of duty 4 had movement heavily dependent on FPS, with 125 you jumped higher than with less... With 250 you were better able to control movement in air, but didn't jump as high as with 125 and with 333 you jumped even higher, but strafing was a bit different... And the more fps you had, the finer tiny movements you could do, so with 900+ exploiting elevator bug was much much much easier than with less ... That's 2007 game
I'm pretty sure Black Desert Online, a 2017 MMO with still around 30k players daily nowadays, have it so higher FPS = higher DPS, since it's somehow tied to the animations ? I never played much of it, but I remember hearing that a while back and being dumbfounded
Ill take a stab at explaining why this might happen. Let's say you have a 3 hit attack combo. If you code it without any kind of input buffer, the low framerate client might overshoot the start of the input window for each transition, while the high framerate client polls input more frequently so the moment the transition is available it fires at the very start of the transition window. So even though you are mashing attack, the high framerate person might transition earlier, and depending on how the game works I could see it affecting DPS
The solution to this is a system that substeps at a fixed rate istead of being tied to render rate, which would fix this and the gta4 issue.
Was call of duty 4 based on the quake 3 engine? At least distantly?
In quake 3 (and games built upon its engine), these exact FPS thresholds you mention were used to control strafe jumping too. So really, it's a 90s exploit that persisted to a new 2007 game.
"IW" engine was based on quake engine, so yeah, cod 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8... Have similar movement and some of the same behaviours as quake
It is less pronounced in newer titles, and the reason why it's so obvious in cod 4 is sprinting, because the faster you move, the more it helps you to exploit it, since in cod 1 you couldn't sprint, it's not that crazy...
It’s GTA 4, it had ps3 RAM size of 512mb. Might’ve saved them resources by using the frames as a timer rather than running many of them in the background.
Locking game physics and time-mechanics and such behind frame rate was basically industry standard until earlyish 8th gen of consoles. I agree it was really stupid, even then, and there was a reason a lot of developers had the foresight to stop doing it decades beforehand, but it was still really, really common at the time of GTA IV’s release.
Even now you’ll still see it every once in a while, although most developers have wisened up by now.
Some other examples of around the same time are Dark Souls 1, where higher frame rates would cause you to just clip through ladders and/or the terrain, Dark Souls 2, where the amount of damage/hits done by some attacks were dictated by the frame rate, and AC3, where physics enabled objects would go fucking nuts if the framerate was over 60 (80?). I know you’re specifically mentioning QTEs, but the point is more that everything was tied to framerate. Bayonetta, RE4 (some of the ports), and Dead Space all also had/have QTEs tied to framerate, as well.
I know that Pokemon's entire RNG system is based off frame rate, at least in the earlier games. It's pretty interesting because people will "frame hunt" shiny pokemon by clicking the start button at the perfect time in the menu screen to increase shiny RNG odds.
Well, that’s a bit different, since they’re not tied to frame-rate per se, moreso they used framecount to determine RNG tables. It just counts how many frames has happened and generates RNG off that. Whereas these examples are more like “if your game is running at 31 FPS you’ll get one result, and another at 32.”
I believe Pokemon does this all the way up until at least DPP. A bunch of older RPGs also use this, I think some of the final fantasys, dragon quests, etc. Actually, some games even still do this, but there isn’t really much of a point in it anymore since there are a million different ways modern computers can produce (effectively) random numbers. Back then it was way harder.
There aren’t too many ways using the exact frame you’re on to populate an RNG table can cause problems when upscaled. I mean, I’m sure it could, and can, somehow.
Even on 360, i couldn’t even finish this mission so I had to reload to previous save and change the ending, which is something i wasn’t a fan of. Interestingly though when i played it on the Xbox Series, I was able to pass it at easier than I did on the 360.
It's actually possible since I somehow managed to beat it after countless tries... But you gotta rake all of your knuckles or fingers on the button really fast. Like real fast that would make your girlfriend jealous
Those massage guns are fucking intense if you use them like a hitachi wand. Like, they start at a higher intensity than a hitachi's high setting, and they can crank up so high you're not so much vibrating as you are jackhammering.
It was the easiest and most intuitive way for me to rapidly button mash (A) at a really fast pace. Just align your knuckles or fingers with the button, then rake them left to right fast.
You'll know that you're doing it right when Niko slowly pulls his ass up into the helicopter cab by the halfway point where he'd fall when you fail
I found it to be easier to use your tip of a finger and quickly brush the tip of the nail over the button. It would slide over without catching the sides of the button.
It's a shame you're playing on Xbox so you can't cap the FPS limit.
My only suggestion, which is extremely impractical, is to buy a fast massage gun. Set to max speed and hold it near the A button to press it quick enough. Though it's probably not worth the effort or money - unless if you really wanted to beat it. I'll admit it's a bit unhinged, but all I can think of sadly.
You have to disable FPS boost in the Xbox settings for this mission unfortunately. On the PC version, you can get the Fusion Fix mod, which fixes most framerate related issues, but the PC version isn't a great port and can't run at max settings due to it being a 32-bit application, which limits its RAM and VRAM usage to 4 GB
You're getting bad advice here. GTA IV runs at 60FPS on Series X and there's nothing you can do to change it. You need to absolutely bash the buttons manically to have a chance of beating the mission. It is possible.
That may work, I ran my knuckle back and forth over the button. A key tip is it doesn't matter if you accidentally hit other buttons so don't worry about that. FYI, it still took a few times and resulted in some blood...
Unfortunately even on 360 GTA IV isn't technically capped at 30fps, it's just that the hardware wasn't good enough to go past that. Series X boosts it just by being better hardware, and there's no way to stop that.
When I was a kid, I was attempting to beat MGS2 on Extreme.
I got to the part where you have to mash X to hold your breath during the torture scene.
I tried for days and days, and couldn't mash it fast enough or for long enough.
In the end, I got the idea to use my electric toothbrush. I put it on the X button, and the vibrations came in clutch and let me pass that section easily.
I did the same thing for that one star fox GameCube game with the dinosaur soldiers during some temple trial button mash bs. I'm sure it's not actually as hard as I remember, but I couldn't do it and the massage gun worked.
Amazing that this is still an issue all these years later 😒 I really want to blame Rockstar for this one since they're the ones that tied the animation to frame rate. But realistically Microsoft should be the one putting out a patch since it's more of an issue with BC unlocking the frame rate.
Stuff like this happens in modern games too, it’s so annoying. In God of War: Ragnarök you can’t complete one of the puzzles if you play with high fps. I had to change settings to high fidelity to be able to do it and I only figured it out because a guy mentioned it in a comment on Youtube…
Thank god modern games have more disability accommodation settings. Even when not this impossible I can't stand quick time events, especially button mashing ones.
I finished this on the series X last week after 3 tries - rub your fingers back and forth over the button like you're aggressively rubbing a clit. Worked for me.
Damn, welcome back bugged Xbox release of True Crime: New York City. "If I had a nickel for every time game progress was hardware/software locked by a button mash scene and a character hanging from a moving object flying in the air, I'd have two nickels, which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice."
Grab something you have laying around like another controller or a dildo.
Get it vibrating and practice using that vibration to tap the button for you. Might have to position the toy using some chip clips or something that can grip it and the controller and a few rubber bands.
Not saying this is guaranteed to work but it could help get you close.
Reminds me of the tug of war you had to beat in Star Fox Adventures to progress the story or whatever the hell it was. You had to jam the A button a billion times to beat the last one.
Had to break out the old spoon trick of rubbing a spoon over the button to keep it going
I remember how in Final Fantasy X from PS2, Lulu overdrive's mechanic is about doing turns on your joystick to repeatedly cast the same spell, but due to the game's limited frame rate, the overdrive is dogshit becuase your input is limited.
This is because the game treats a joystick "circle" as making four inputs: up, right, down, left. As the game is limited to 25 FPS, you can only put up to 6 circles per second.
So, like, for a small spell, which requires less "spins" for each explosion, you can get a high multiple of spells and reach the limit of 16 casts in one; but for Flare which requires 24 -spins- for a single cast, it's digitally impossible to reach the cap, even if you time the physical side of things perfectly so as to not miss any input, best you can do is 5-6 casts.
It's honestly unbelievable that this same type of shit that used to plage old DOS games when played on modern hardware still keeps happening to this day
How does a game even get ported to a console without them updating any frame rate tied code to work with the consoles default frame rate? Or are you playing a physical copy from an older console?
Me with the Ezio trilogy, beat the first one and found out I can't play the second one because the first mission has a timer tied to frame rate that makes succeeding impossible.
If you’re on Xbox series x, the settings for 30 fps and auto HDR are set by Xbox’s internal settings, which then reflect on the games you play. Give that a try.
Lol, residential evil 5 has a similar problem with a boss. You have to pick up a flamethrower half way though the game and melt the boss to damage it. Problem is the flamethrower is tied to framerates and just stops working on new hardware. So you are unable to beat that unskippable boss, UNLESS you buy a rocket launcher and 1 tap the boss with it. So stupid.
I don't have accessibility issues myself, but I absolutely love when devs add the accessibility option to just hold the button instead of mashing it. Button mashing isn't a skill, it's not fun.
Wild that they just bump the framerate without fixing this first lmao. On PC you can download "fusionfix" which has a lot of bugfixes and also fixes this issue when running at high FPS.
Oh I know this feeling lol - seeing this screenshot was a trip 😩. Glad you figured out how to get around the frame rate issue - same thing happened on my Steam Deck
OG re4 has a similar issue on pc at least. QTEs are murder on 60fps. They're all doable but one specifically, the QTE for Leon to pull himself up after the giant Salazar statue breaks the bridge Leon is on, is absurdly hard to the point I have to lower the fps back to 30 to reliably do it.
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u/Waste-Total624 Aug 23 '26
Oof, this is on console too? The fix on PC is to manually cap the framerate, but idk if there's a 30fps mode for consoles when playing older games.