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[NullPointer]

Both.

Blessings when performance issues and bugs get fixed and quality of life improvements are made.

Curses when those patches are used to justify releasing a broken or badly performing game, and curses when patches add previously unannounced microtransactions or twist the screws on existing microtransactions.

Its been a real mixed bag. Some of these day one patches have been ginormous too, which is a crappy way to make a first impression.

 

[Dragon Puncher]

Patches are a good thing in the long run, even if they can be pretty terrible in the early goings of a game's release, especially when they somehow make a game worse.

 

[jelly]

It shouldn't be an excuse to not ship on two discs or to start printing discs a month or more earlier.

You ship on two discs or release when the game is complete with only bug fixes and content updates in the pipeline.

None of these mega updates are justified. They are rushing the games to retail while still finishing them at the studio.

 

[phyrlord]

We live in a world where games can be patched post release. I think of the dozens of games I've purchased on PS4 and Xbox One, all but one or two have had a patch of some size. A few have been pretty tiny, while others have been upwards of 20GB.

Do you believe that a developer being able to patch their game is making the industry a better place?

Or would you prefer a world where patching didn't exist ?

Are blizzard games allowed to be an exception. All blizz patches are usually awesome.

 

[balladofwindfishes]

Games like Dota 2 couldn't even really exist without patches. Patches also keep games alive for, basically ever. TF2 has no business still existing, and yet here it is getting weekly bug fixes and quality of life changes, along with major updates occasionally.

For the first time ever, they were able to balance Smash Bros after it was released, and it's transformed into the most balanced Smash game to ever release, along with being able to bring back beloved characters, stages, and add new characters and stages to enjoy. Games like Mario Maker, Mario Kart 8 and Splatoon have been vastly enhanced thanks to patches as well.

Patches are great, and a few games every so often releasing in a terrible condition because the publishers can use patches as a crutch don't take away from the piles of games that were greatly enhanced via patches.

 

[OrbitalBeard]

A blessing.

You cannot compare games made by a half dozen people 30 years ago to games made by a team of 100+ today and use it as an argument for a world without patches.

 

[Unknown One]

Blessing. Games that are made these days are very complicated, unlike games of the past. It's bound to have countless bugs. You won't have to buy another updated copy of a game due to patching.

 

[erawsd]

Absolutely a blessing.

I remember back when I had the WWF No Mercy save glitch, I had to pack up the game and ship it to THQ to get a new one like 3 months later. I've never finished Zelda Twilight Princess to this day because I got a bug where you get trapped in a room and can never leave.

If you think developers are abusing the patch process and launching games in an unfinished state then just wait them out a few patches.

 

[ExitPlanetDust]

A mixed bag.

In the past, games had to ship with as few bugs as possible. A full recall was a huge expense and not worth the risk.

Of course, bugs slipped through, but for the most part games more 99% playable in most situations.

Now though, how many games have a day one patch? How many in the first month are still riddled with poor optimisation and 'game breaking' bugs.

What will happen in 10 years and you reinstall a game from a disc, but the servers are down. You'll not be able to play the game 'as you remembered it'.

In today's world, patches can be an excellent addition.

But too many games are now released to hit release date 'unfinished' because they can day one patch.

This. This is what concerns me the most. Enough to call patches a curse. As much as patches repair and improve games (remember the update to GTA PS4/XBO that fixed major control issues?), I dread that day in the future when I reinstall a game, only to find that it's barely playable or a completely different experience than what the developer eventually patched it into.

 

[Darkstorne]

This game would be remembered far more fondly if patching had been as prominent back then as it is today:

 

[gabbo]

This game would be remembered far more fondly if patching had been as prominent back then as it is today:

PC patching was that prominent, Lucasarts however, was never big on it.

 

[dragonzdogma]

Blessing. Games that are made these days are very complicated, unlike games of the past. It's bound to have countless bugs. You won't have to buy another updated copy of a game due to patching.

define "past"
Atari era, 8 bit, 16 bit, 64?

 

[Finaika]

Blessing for PC gaming.
Curse for consoles.

 

[Sheriff_Battlesnake]

People abuse it. But it's a blessing.

 

[TouchMyBox]

If you all showed some restraint and didn't buy games day 1, it would only be a blessing.

 

[Darkstorne]

PC patching was that prominent, Lucasarts however, was never big on it.

It was primarily a console game though. They weren't going to create a massive patch for the ending that only the smallest part of their consumer base would benefit from. Especially knowing that less than 30% of players reach the end of a game on average. Not when patching games was almost unheard of.

If you all showed some restraint and didn't buy games day 1, it would only be a blessing.

Very much agreed. Would also force devs/pubs to be more lenient with those review embargoes if we waited for them.

 

[thebloo]

This. This is what concerns me the most. Enough to call patches a curse. As much as patches repair and improve games (remember the update to GTA PS4/XBO that fixed major control issues?), I dread that day in the future when I reinstall a game, only to find that it's barely playable or a completely different experience than what the developer eventually patched it into.

When PSN/Live will go down, you will know. At least on PS4 you can download patches on your PC, I'm guessing it also works on X1?

If you all showed some restraint and didn't buy games day 1, it would only be a blessing.

Any industry with no day 1 buyers is a dead industry.

 

[Goldenroad]

A big old 18 GB blessing.

Having said that, I don't have a bandwidth cap, but I can totally understand the other side of the argument.

 

[Mivey]

it's a blessing
FF type 0 motion blur patch saved the game from being returned to game stop.
Wish games had better Quality inspection tho, I don't remember snes or genesis games being so broken.

That is also a related to increased software complexity. If you use the same "amount" of QA for increasingly complicated software, the quality will decrease. Maybe more modern methods could help? (Formal verification of "critical" code, model checking) Those would also increase the cost of QA though. I guess the current way of letting your users be beta testers is cheaper and also safe since games are not considered as important as, say, pacemaker software.

 

[Gaogaogao]

both, depending on the dev and game

 

[MikeDown]

curse, chews up bandwidth and disc space; allows developers to become lazy to push the game to market, tweeking things post lauch as they feel like it

 

[theWB27]

I really don't see how people can say patches are a curse. Games weren't released in a perfect state pre patch days.

Devs haven't become lazy....games are more ambitious. There's more code, there're more moving parts. More things to get lost in qc.

Nostalgia is a helluva drug.

 

[Anon67]

It's usually a blessing since devs can improve on some problems, balance out stuff, and even add more content, though there are times when it is a curse. One could say that patches are a reason for why broken games are shipped.

 

[gabbo]

It was primarily a console game though. They weren't going to create a massive patch for the ending that only the smallest part of their consumer base would benefit from. Especially knowing that less than 30% of players reach the end of a game on average. Not when patching games was almost unheard of.

For the console edition, yeah. Still their pc games usually got patches, but what would have been required of to fix/finish KOTOR2 would have fit in size with expansion packs at the time.

 

[Inuhanyou]

its a cursed blessing. Its supposed to be a good thing, but more often than not, it is undermined and abused in order to justify launching an incomplete product so it can be patched to adequate condition later on

Games this buggy would not have been accepted in the 6th or 7th gens. You have to go back to the NES and before to think about the state games often times are launched at today, like Unity being only one example.

 

[KKRT00]

It was primarily a console game though. They weren't going to create a massive patch for the ending that only the smallest part of their consumer base would benefit from. Especially knowing that less than 30% of players reach the end of a game on average. Not when patching games was almost unheard of.

KOTOR games werent primarily console.

 

[ExitPlanetDust]

When PSN/Live will go down, you will know. At least on PS4 you can download patches on your PC, I'm guessing it also works on X1?



Any industry with no day 1 buyers is a dead industry.

I thought this was only specific to OS updates and firmware. AFIK, game updates and patches can only be downloaded and installed on the PS4 itself.

 

[Krammy]

The idea and method of delivery are a blessing. It takes away the concept of having to reprint the cartridge or disc if there's a game breaking bug.

However, I feel like most developers take advantage of this and use it as an excuse to rush out broken games, which then falls onto the consumer to download large, and often cumbersome patches (Silent Hill HD Collection comes to mind, with a multi gig set of patches that barely fixed anything). At that point, it starts to feel like more like a curse or monkey paw, but again, it really falls onto the developer.

 

[Hawkeye 131]

A bit of both really, in cases like Battlefield 4, Halo: MCC, Destiny and Assassins Creed: Unity they use them almost as a crutch or as a life line of sorts primarily to fix bugs, glitches and issues with the game. Which is fine but I feel like when a game launches with so many issues and problems that it requires months upon months of patches and updates to fix or if it requires 10, 11 or 12 different updates or huge 20 gig patches I begin to wonder if the developers deliberately and/or knowingly shipped the game in the first place solely banking on fixing the game through updates instead of doing proper QA testing in the first place. And to be honest nowadays I just don't have the patience or tolerance to deal with broken games. As a gamer and a consumer quite frankly I don't really care how easy or hard it is to develop, maintain or patch/update a game. It's none of my business, as a consumer I really only care about the final product and that I am entitled to a working product. Last few years have been really hit n' miss in these regards. There are new games coming out all the time from talented dev's who actually respect their players so why waste my time and money waiting on some shotty untrustworthy dev I fix their busted game when I can just take my business elsewhere. It a big reason why I stopped buying EA and Ubisoft games.

 

[emb]

I think the negatives outweigh the positives by a bit. It's just part of the world we live in though, and it's not going to change.

 

[BouncyFrag]

It's an incentive to hold off on buying games at launch that will save you money.

 

[iceblade997]

Annoying in the first month of release.
A godsend a couple of months after release.
Disastrous in years to come.

Agreed here. It seems sadly like it's being used as an excuse to let games get pushed out of the door, then "fixed" later, regardless of whether or not a delay would've been better (Arkham Knight PC as an example). Sure they're letting some games get more life than they might otherwise (someone in here referenced TF2) but I keep wondering what's going to happen when you get an Xbox One or PS4 say 15 years from now and try to pop in an SP game that needed a day 1 patch, but the servers have been shut down. It's going to be bad for preservation, unless we get methods that allow you to back up patches elsewhere (but even then that's not such a workable alternative). I'd prefer that games were to have even longer dev cycles, but more consistently release without as many bugs, than to have to deal with games that need multiple patches over their supported lifetime. And that's just talking about patches, not the sizes which is another issue.

 

[hesho]

both i think...

while legit bugs and such do get past QA (blessing) that can get patched out...

the fact that the end user has BECOME the QA tester is the curse...

 

[yongeandcollege]

Blessing.

 

[Kagoshima_Luke]

This article and the comments are pretty interesting in retrospect. A lot of hostility towards the idea of patching console games back then:

http://www.geek.com/games/the-first-patch-to-ever-hit-a-console-is-coming-soon-552151/

 

[grosvenor_92]

A blessing although in some cases they are a curse

 

[Syriel]

We live in a world where games can be patched post release. I think of the dozens of games I've purchased on PS4 and Xbox One, all but one or two have had a patch of some size. A few have been pretty tiny, while others have been upwards of 20GB.

Do you believe that a developer being able to patch their game is making the industry a better place?

Or would you prefer a world where patching didn't exist ?

Edit:

This article, and the comments, are pretty interesting in retrospect. A lot of hostility towards the idea of patching console games back then:

http://www.geek.com/games/the-first-patch-to-ever-hit-a-console-is-coming-soon-552151/

Article is a lie. That wasn't the first console game to get patched. Not by a long shot.

 

[Kagoshima_Luke]

Article is a lie. That wasn't the first console game to get patched. Not by a long shot.

What was the first?

 

[TeddyShardik]

If you need to push out a patch of several GBs in size on release day just to make your game not shit the ved, you shouldn't have released it. Period. I'm so sick and tired of this shit.

In my mind patches went from being great things to get to an expected annoyance once I put my newly acquired game into the console.

It's cool that devs can iron out bugs of course but I feel too many of them or rather their publishers use that as a way to cut costs and release early. Again, if I have to download a quarter of the game I just bought it can fuck right off.
It's gotten as far as me not buying games with huge day one patches anymore.

tl;dr : they were once a blessing, when patch meant just that, a patch and not complicated 5 hour operation on the open brain.

 

[Syriel]

What was the first?

I don't know definitively which was the first, but early console games did have multiple versions released in order to fix bugs. In those cases, the patched version simply replaced the original at retail.

One of the most famous examples is Gran Turismo 2, in which the first run of discs were impossible to complete to 100% and would randomly vanish cars from your garage. Oops.

As far as actual downloading of patches, the X-Band compatible games (such as Mortal Kombat) on the SNES and Genesis downloaded the patches necessary to enable online multiplayer.