The highly anticipated Grand Theft Auto V launches on Tuesday but developer Rockstar, and a number of lucky customers who had their copies delivered early, report that Xbox 360 owners should not install the contents of the game’s second disc to their console’s hard drive.
According to reports, installing the second “play” disc results in a number of graphical glitches, where certain textures and objects fail to load on time. Digital Foundry created a YouTube video that demonstrates the issue.
For those new to the Xbox 360, the console allows users to install a game’s data to the internal hard drive. After installation, the game disc must still be inserted into the console’s DVD tray to launch the game, but the actual data loads from the internal drive, reducing noise and wear on the optical drive.
As a large open-world game, Grand Theft Auto 5 requires two discs to play on the Xbox 360. All users must install the contents of the first “install” disc to the console’s internal hard drive and then use the second “play” disc in the DVD tray while playing the game. Installing the contents of the “play” disc is optional and, with the reported graphical bugs, also recommended.
Rockstar claims to be looking into the problem, and promises to have updates on its support website in time for Tuesday’s launch.
Until then, there are two workarounds for players who wish to avoid the graphics bug: don’t install the contents of the second disc and play the game with the optical drive in use, or, according to some users, install the second disc’s contents to a separate location from the first disc’s install, such as using an external USB flash drive. This latter option, which we have been unable to verify at this time, supposedly solves the problem and lends support to the theory that the issue stems from high read demand on the Xbox 360’s internal hard drive.
Grand Theft Auto V launches Tuesday for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. PS3 owners don’t have to worry about the issue described above as that console’s Blu-ray drive allows the game to be delivered via a single disc.
