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Holy crap at Wii U Game Update size.

TheExodu5

Banned

Has Steam been implementing this to some extent? They've been changing the storage format for a lot of games (The Witcher 2 was a problem one) to allow for smaller updates.
 

therapist

Member
Im amazed zombiu is so small considering how fucking long it took to update , like 15 mins.

It was saying under 3 secs left from 30% to the end...weird.

Netflix took pretty long too , maybe 4-5 mins.

Good system but i hope this is just launch stuff , a.k.a i hope it speeds the fuck up.

The system update was painfully long.
 

Vagabundo

Member
Uhh, we judge updates not by size but by the snack you can make while waiting...

PS3: Three course meal, then out on the town. stagger in during the wee small hours and it might be half way there. PSN is slow as fuck.
Wii: lol
360: glass of water if you run
WiiU: ?

fixed that for u.
 
I wish Nintendo would have stayed in the past and avoided DLC/updates (or kept doing it in the limited DS/Wii way). Console gaming is converging with PC gaming, but without all the benefits.
 

Berto2K

Member
Can't wait to get a WiiU. I look forward to spending 8 hours updating before I get to enjoy anything WIiU related.
Outside of the highly needed initial system update, you can play any game as the update is downloading in the background. The update will install the next time you start up the game.
 
If you have an external hard drive, do the updates download to that by default, even for disc-based games, or does it go into system memory? I've never seen an option on where to allocate downloaded data to.
 

Stumpokapow

listen to the mad man
Has Steam been implementing this to some extent? They've been changing the storage format for a lot of games (The Witcher 2 was a problem one) to allow for smaller updates.

That was just a switch to basic differential updates AFAIK; before then, every patch was just a 1:1 file replacement, right?
 

EatChildren

Currently polling second in Australia's federal election (first in the Gold Coast), this feral may one day be your Bogan King.
I wish Nintendo would have stayed in the past and avoided DLC/updates (or kept doing it in the limited DS/Wii way). Console gaming is converging with PC gaming, but without all the benefits.

Thanks to speedy updates on the 3DS, my copy of Mario Kart 7 has had daily ghost records I can compete against delivered while I sleep. And I like Nintendo having the flexibility to quickly patch their games, something I'm sure will be necessary when Zelda Wii U launches with save file breaking bugs like Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword did.
 
That was just a switch to basic differential updates AFAIK; before then, every patch was just a 1:1 file replacement, right?

Yeah, every time Witcher 2 updated, it would download all the same files again, resulting in multiple 15+ GB downloads, which was a huge concern for those with download caps.
 
Came in expecting the worst after reading about the 1 GB system update - as a Steam user I must say those sizes are laughable. Don't have too many PS3 games and rarely play the thing so can't comment on comparisons there.
 

aeolist

Banned
Thanks to speedy updates on the 3DS, my copy of Mario Kart 7 has had daily ghost records I can compete against delivered while I sleep. And I like Nintendo having the flexibility to quickly patch their games, something I'm sure will be necessary when Zelda Wii U launches with save file breaking bugs like Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword did.

Balance patches for Smash Bros might be nice, but who knows if they'll be at all interested in doing it
 

Ranger X

Member
WiiU probably doesn't have incremental updates like Microsoft does with the 360. I think people don't understand why its generally smaller for the 360. It's because you can send only the files where there are changes (generally speaking). So if your game update is through 3 files that changes, you send only those 3 files, hence why sometimes an update on Xbox is extremely small. On PS3 (and apparently WiiU), there isn't incremental updates. You need to send both your data and a new executable file. And executable files can be big! With that mode of doing updates (which is alot easier on the software side) the update size can be anything really.
 

Jellzy

Neo Member
This has probably been explained a 1000 times but who come XBox 360 game updates are so small in comparison to all other platforms?

Even PC games verge on similar sized updates to the PS3 and now what seems like the Wii U also.

*EDIT*

Should've waited 1 more minute!

Thanks.
 

Bucca

Fools are always so certain of themselves, but wiser men so full of doubts.
Battlefield 3 on the PS3 has a 1500 MB patch first time booting it up iirc.

EDIT: 1564 MB to be exact, :lol.
 

m.i.s.

Banned
I assumed that Nintendo's server are just slow at uploading and that the Wii U was just slow at installing. Turns out the files was just big. I was just browsing through the System memory and found out that the Update Data for each game is kinda large.

Update data size for each game:
Nintendoland 221MB
ZombiU 18MB
NSMBU 29MB

edit: The video streaming apps are also fairly large, they are between 35-45MB each.

What did the Nintendoland update add anyway?

So it is true. My worst [gaming] nightmare has come to pass. Patches and updates -- on a Nintendo system no less. No wonder dedicated gaming is dying on it's arse and being seriously challenged by nimbler and lighter general purpose competitors.
 
Microsoft's insane restrictive procedures were always good in this regard because developers weren't allowed to do a bunch of updates and were only limited to a small file size. It forced developers to do a good job close to launch and not release a buggy mess. We still get buggy messes but at least we aren't suffering multiple huge patches. I remember downloading LBP for PS3 after the whole hacker fiasco and it took forever for me to get the game fully updated.
 

Bucca

Fools are always so certain of themselves, but wiser men so full of doubts.
So it is true. My worst [gaming] nightmare has come to pass. Patches and updates -- on a Nintendo system no less. No wonder dedicated gaming is dying on it's arse. And about to be replaced by nimbler and lighter general purpose competitors.

Coufw.gif
 

Jac_Solar

Member
I wouldn't put much stock into the size of a patch update as a way to gauge quality or quantity of the actual content. It may vary in size cause of totally random and pointless things like updating the game with some recoded videos/audio -- the stuff that takes up the most space on the DVD/Disc. Or it may be due to compression or the lack of it, which can vary radically in uncompressed/compressed size.

Patch notes, however, are obviously better indicators of quality/quantity.
 

tenchir

Member
So it is true. My worst [gaming] nightmare has come to pass. Patches and updates -- on a Nintendo system no less. No wonder dedicated gaming is dying on it's arse. And about to be seriously challenged by nimbler and lighter general purpose competitors.

Don't you have to redownload the whole game again on the iOS and Android?
 
I had a trial of PS+ recently and it took over 5 hours to get all the patches downloaded and installed (on a 100mb connection).

I really doubt I'd have bothered had I seen how long I'd have to wait when I started a game.
 

lenovox1

Member
Android has background updating (and possibly differential updates, I don't know, I've never thought about it), iOS has differential updates.

So does Wii U it seems, but tenchir was trying to point out that the "nimbler and lighter" platforms aren't so nimble and light.

They do compare more favorably to the 5GB of HDD consuming, 1GB of RAM using Wii U OS. I mean, you'd think Nintendo was using Windows XP as a base for their OS. But that his point.
 

fernoca

Member
All those posting PS3 games, obviously haven't tried The Eye of Judgment. :p
It downloads over 3GB, across over 2,500 files..and installs them individually too.

And of course, you can't do anything else while waiting.

DC Universe Online's patch is like 15GB, but is an online game.
 

Boerseun

Banned
With Ps3 you are talking about GIGABYTES and GIGABYTES of patches needing to be downloaded before you can take your games on-line. And it's been that way with just about every single game I bought for the system.
 

pestul

Member
Don't you have to redownload the whole game again on the iOS and Android?

Yep. Couldn't do the goddamn Angry Birds Star Wars update today to my phone because the updates require double its own size in storage. I ran out of MB. :S

Gonna have to move more shit to SD and I'm already running rooted with Link2SD..

As far as Wii U goes, I believe a lot these systems we're using have been manufactured and sitting in a warehouse for quite some time. The initial patches were going to be huge just because of this. I actually don't mind patches. It shows they still give a shit about the game quality post gold.
 

Ranger X

Member
Microsoft's insane restrictive procedures were always good in this regard because developers weren't allowed to do a bunch of updates and were only limited to a small file size. It forced developers to do a good job close to launch and not release a buggy mess. We still get buggy messes but at least we aren't suffering multiple huge patches. I remember downloading LBP for PS3 after the whole hacker fiasco and it took forever for me to get the game fully updated.

However LitteBigPlanet is an exception. Its game design needs those update so the game can be played seemlessly with anybody and in any level regardless of all the different DLC people might own. This is actually an awesome feature but as with all great things, it often comes with a price! ;)
 

Oppo

Member
With Ps3 you are talking about GIGABYTES and GIGABYTES of patches needing to be downloaded before you can take your games on-line. And it's been that way with just about every single game I bought for the system.

I have not seen too many that were actually in the gigabyte+ range. I can't even think of one except maybe LBP.
 
What did the Nintendoland update add anyway?
The same thing every Nintendo update does: "This update provides behind-the-scenes fixes that will improve the overall system performance".

These are "holy crap" file sizes for people in 2012? Seriously? Where in the world is dial up still used?
The white Wii U only has a few GB storage and using an external hard drive formats (read: dedicates) the entire partition (or possibly entire thing) into a format encrypted with the systems private key making it unusable for anything but Wii U and that Wii U.

It seems weird how Nintendo have always seemed against patching and 'the box we ship is the game' kind of thing, and then day one WiiU there are patches for both of their games.
Nintendo always did bugfixes and tweaks on thier games. I think it was just trying to make "Wii can't do patches" argument backfire with a arrogant "unlike our competitors, we release our games bug free"*

*-Partial list of many exceptions: Zelda TP, Zelda SS, Fire Emblem RD, Metroid Other M.
 
OP has obviously never bought Dungeon Defenders on Steam.

I hate you for reminding me about this game. I turned off automatic updating for it because of how often it was patching, it then re-installed the entire game on its own and turned automatic patching back on. It took an uninstall to get it to stop.
 

Stumpokapow

listen to the mad man
Pretty sure I heard somewhere from Valve patching TF2 that they had to put the extra stuff into DLC because MS didn't allow patches to bigger then like 2MB.

Pre-NXE the patch limit was 4MB. Now it has been lifted, but I still don't think I've seen a patch above 15-20MB.

*-Partial list of many exceptions: Zelda TP, Zelda SS, Fire Emblem RD, Metroid Other M.

Super Smash Bros Brawl (like TP, homebrew vector), Super Paper Mario (EU recall), Mario Party (EU recall), Endless Ocean (JPN recall), Fatal Frame 4 (many known crash bugs)...
 

SkylineRKR

Member
WWE 13 for Ps3 had a 600mb update and I still don't know what it changed, perhaps the slideshow framerate during certain throws which are reduced somewhat.
 

Satchel

Banned
Is that all?

Go play Resistance 3, LBP or Gran Turismo for the first time OP.

Probably 95% of 360 game updates are only 5mb or less.
 
However LitteBigPlanet is an exception. Its game design needs those update so the game can be played seemlessly with anybody and in any level regardless of all the different DLC people might own. This is actually an awesome feature but as with all great things, it often comes with a price! ;)

I would rather have them be optional and allowed to download them as I join a session that requires it. Instead of being forced to download them all in the initial install.
 

Jac_Solar

Member
Wait, wait, wait, I think I misunderstood. People are complaining about having to download patches for their games? What?

The devs/publishers "Hey, we fixed certain bugs, possibly added new content, here you go. Free of charge"

The people "Oh man. Not again."
 
Those aren't bad compared to some PS3 patches and steam.

Also after checking out that auto update thing for PS+ its a very awesome feature but shouldn't be behind a paywall imo
 
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