Poll: Are you tired of Day One Patches

[Ironbat92]

MoH: Warfighter, Silent Hill HD for PS3, and now ACIII have gotten day one patches. This is starting to get annoying now and strikes a sign of laziness on developers. "oh no, we forgot to fix something. oh well, we can just fix it when it comes out, and make gamers suffer through the long install times, especially on the PS3, even if it's for a game released more than a decade ago."

 

[Erttheking]

On the Xbox it just makes it so that I have to wait 30 seconds, so it's not that bad.

 

[skywolfblue]

I'd say "It depends on how big the patch is".

It makes sense for devs to use the time between Gold Copy and release to fix any bugs that managed to slip through their net. But when it becomes an excuse to ship an extremely buggy game, that's not cool for the people without an internet connection.

So if they had only a few things to fix and it's a small patch, I'm peachy with it. If they have to fix half the damn game that's ...well... un-peachy.

 

[Pink Gregory]

^ this; why not use the time to fix things that would just have to be patched anyway?

If anything it's better than the bugs that do get ironed out have immediate fixes available; of course ideally something should be released with no bugs at all, that goes without saying, but it's not a perfect world, so why not at least try?

 

[TephlonPrice]

I hate it, especially in the case of games that require excessive patching.

There is no excuse, especially these days, that modern games need excessive patching on RELEASE day just to become remotely playable. No excuse. All that time & money and you still can't get your shit to play properly?

Remember: you only get one first impression. And if that impression's a shitty one, don't expect me to stick around then.

 

[teqrevisited]

I appreciate that they try to fix things etc, but as someone who is stuck in an area with a communications infrastructure based on pre-war hardware my internet connection is utter arse and it takes me a considerable amount of time to download anything. When my area catches up next year I'll probably not mind them as much.

 

[Qitz]

Tired that they just seem to think that day one patching is a viable solution, yes. Tired that they'll actually fix bugs day one if they find a problematic one, no.

I can get along with some problems just popping up without ever running into it while testing and fixing it if enough people run into it but yeah, there is some amount of lazy BS to it in that some of the major bugs that required day one patches REALLY should have been fixed prior.

 

[Conza]

You know, there is a gap between 'that's a wrap' and release date which they may decide to continue testing, and if they found something within that time, a small patch to correct it is welcomed.

Yes I know, ideally, they'd test everything before the cut off, so any problems they found could be developed before the 'wrap' point, but if they can't do it, this is the next best thing.

 

[Fractral]

I don't see the problem. Why can't the devs use the time between the game being sent out to start production and it being released to fix bugs? Its better than the alternative. Although I do remember being slightly concerned upon starting FF13-2 and seeing about 20mb of patches.

 

[distortedreality]

Can't understand why anyone would be tired of something that fixes gameplay issues.

Let's face it - no game ever ships perfect, and if they spot and fix problems in the space between a game going gold and the release date, then I don't see why anyone would be against getting that fix asap.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

I like them a lot better than day one bugs.

 

[FalloutJack]

Actually, I'm sick of patches overall. JUST FINISH THE GAME. That's the ups and downs of business. You FINISH your product and you put it out. If they don't like it, then you take the loss and learn something. In short, this is just laziness.

 

[Doom972]

I prefer the game to be as bug free as possible, as soon as possible. I don't know how much of an annoyance it is on other platforms these days, but on Steam it just downloads the updated game files in the background.
When I used to get retail copies, they were all UK copies, which usually came with the day one patches that Americans had to download.

It might be a bit annoying, but isn't it better than having a buggy or even broken game?

 

[Nieroshai]

The point of the day one patch isn't that they didn't fix it til now, or they withheld on content; it's because QA testers keep checking for bugs even after disk printing, up until release. I have no problem with this. I'd rather wait a minute than bug out.

 

[Snatcher]

Day One Patches are just another barrier that get in the way between me and my game.

 

[EmperorSubcutaneous]

As people have said, there is a good amount of time between when the disks are printed and the game actually comes out. It's better that they keep doing testing on the game during that time and ironing out any issues than just sitting on their thumbs and then working on the problems after the game comes out.

Also, I don't understand why so many people attribute this kind of thing to laziness. Usually release dates are set by people higher up in the corporate ladder who aren't involved in the process of actually creating the game, often in order to please the stockholders or to get their product out before the competition or for some other reason, and usually before the game is as complete as the people who worked on it would like it to be. It's a shame, but laziness has nothing to do with it.

 

[SlaveNumber23]

I'd rather have day one patches than day one gamebreaking bugs. Debugging is more difficult than you might think and day one patches only ever result in downloading a small patch, the issue is nonexistent really.

 

[rwllay]

I'd rather they patched any bugs sooner than later, though that said they should probably have fixed those before release, but hey publishers need to push games out as quickly as possible right?

 

[DrunkOnEstus]

It appears that more than ever, home consoles having an internet connection has opened the doors to use this as a crutch and meet strict deadlines. PC users have dealt with this crap for way longer.

When I lived in Indiana, my brother in law couldn't get broadband because we were in fuck nowhere, and it really screwed him. The new Xbox firmwares and UI came on the discs for newer games, but often his copies of games could be buggy and for a couple were rendered unplayable. If the bugs are easily fixed enough that there can be a patch between gold and pressing, it should be possible to have them in the final code. They had to for years when consoles couldn't get said patch.

 

[DracoSuave]

Can't understand why anyone would be tired of something that fixes gameplay issues.

Why would people be upset about something that fixes gameplay issues?

Perhaps it's the 'They shipped it with gameplay issues that required immediate patching' part.

It's not a recent thing, mind you. PC Games have been like that for... oh almost two decades now. 'Hey, there's the internet now we can ship it incomplete!'