There's currently no way to play Grand Theft Auto 4 on PS5, and there are some notable compromises when playing it on Xbox Series X. Fans have been clamoring for a proper, current-gen GTA 4 remaster for ages, and one former Rockstar Games developer says that such a port certainly seems doable – if not exactly a freebie for the developers.
"It won’t be easy," Obbe Vermeij, who worked at Rockstar during the original development of GTA 4, says of a potential port on Twitter. "There will have been loads of changes in RAGE between 2008 and now. But still; the effort of porting gta4 would be tiny compared to building a new game."
RAGE, of course, is the Rockstar Advanced Game Engine, which is the tool the studio has been building most of its games on since the 2006 release of Rockstar Games Presents Table Tennis. The engine has naturally been upgraded in the years that have followed, and some form of it is believed to be powering even GTA 6, but as Vermeij says, it's not exactly the same tool it was in the '00s. Upgrading an old version of the game to the modern version of RAGE for a current-gen port wouldn't be trivial – at least, that's what Vermeij seems to be suggesting.
Vermeij has previously mentioned his own hopes for a GTA 4 remaster, though he also hopes it launches in a better state than the Definitive Edition of the trilogy once did. The shadow of that maligned release will certainly be hanging over any future remaster of a Rockstar game.
GTA 4 originally launched on Xbox 360 and PS3, and the notoriously challenging hardware of Sony's machine has historically prevented many of its best games from getting ported to modern hardware. (See also: Metal Gear Solid 4.) "It was much harder getting the same performance out of a PS3 compared to 360," Vermeij says. "The 360 had much better tools to work with."
The 360 version of GTA 4 is backwards compatible on Xbox Series X, but it has its own issues, including a quicktime event in its final mission that's absurdly difficult to complete with the improved frame rate on the modern hardware. For a game as important as GTA 4, it's starting to seem increasingly silly that there's no uncompromised way to play it on a current-gen console.
The best Rockstar games deserve better.
