Poll: Are you tired of Day One Patches

[SlaveNumber23]

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!'

The game discs they send out are written on a significant amount of time before the public receive them, its not like they can recall all of the discs, patch them and send them out again. The developers have a lot of time between sending out the discs and the public reaching them where all they can do is prepare patches. I assure you it isn't laziness on behalf of the developers, debugging is more difficult than you might think.

 

[J Tyran]

Tired of the patches? No. Tired of the need for the patches in the first place? Yes absolutely many of the problems wouldn't exist if corners where not cut or QA was a bit more thorough,

 

[DiamanteGeeza]

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."

I promise you it's not laziness. We don't want to do day 1 patches either - in the good old days, we'd crunch for the last few months, get the game submitted and, provided it passed first party, we could actually have some time off and see our families. Now, just because the game has been submitted (and even approved), we still have to work round the clock to get the patch fixes in. It totally sucks ass for us, and it totally sucks ass for the consumer.

Why are they becoming so common? Various reasons: AAA games these days are HUGE and very complex, developers are notoriously bad at scheduling, AND publishers are increasingly trying to squeeze up their profit % by wanting the same content with a smaller team and in less time. That equation simply doesn't add up, but most developers are not in a position to day "no way, dude, we simply can't get all this done in time" because they need the money.

I hate day 1 patches, as most of us developers do, but until the public cause some outrage about it and make the publishers see that it is not cool, it's only going to get worse.

By the way - the only people who accuse developers of being 'lazy' are the ones who have never worked at a developer. Working 7 days a week, 16 hours a day, for several months doesn't generally constitute lazy...

 

[ResonanceSD]

What? Would you rather the bugged games (remember Magicka), don't get fixed?

 

[Starik20X6]

I'm sick of patches in general. Call me old fashioned, but the beauty of the old days of gaming meant developers had to put out a polished game or you didn't put out any games after that. Yeah, I get that games are getting exponentially more complex and as such more and more issues are going to crop up and it's getting harder to fix them all, but I'm finding it hard to accept that as an excuse. I can think of two times in my entire life[footnote]Skyward Sword and Other M[/footnote] where Nintendo released a game with a significant bug in it, and one of those times the game wasn't developed by Nintendo themselves. I don't mean to sound like a fanboy, but I have to wonder why they can have such an impressive track record while other companies constantly release games with, to quote Yahtzee, "more bugs than a crack whore with the sniffles".

 

[Clive Howlitzer]

Not sure why I would be. I mean, if a day 1 patch fixes a critical bug that the development team was somehow unaware of prior to launch, why would that be a bad thing?
If the development team is relying on day 1 patches to skip out on Q/A during development on the other hand, that is lame.

 

[dogenzakaminion]

Well...it can be used by lazy developers to release a buggy game on time...but it can also be used by loving developers to fix bugs not found before the game went gold. There's a time window from "finished development" to manufacturing to shipping to release that can be used to polish even further. I don't mind, just hope that the devs use it as potential to make a game better.

 

[MetalMagpie]

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.

Speaking as a software developer, it is never possible to test everything. Modern software products (especially video games) are far too complicated to be able to get 100% test coverage. The best we can do is test all of the most common paths, then cover as many edge-cases as we have time for. And bug testing takes a lot of time, especially as every fix you put in can itself add another bug!

That said, what causes the really stupid bugs to get through is usually either:
a) draconian deadlines set by sales-people, or
b) the programmers just don't give a damn.

I feel very grateful that I have only been forced to launch a known-buggy product once. We spent the first week madly patching.

 

[AD-Stu]

Pretty much what others have said above - I prefer the patch to the bugs, or a day one patch to having to put up with bugs for a month before they're fixed.

In a perfect world sure, the game would be right in the first place and we wouldn't need them. But it's not a perfect world, so...

 

[Nexxis]

I don't mind it too much. I would prefer a day one patch over a major issue just sitting on a game for a few days or weeks before it's fixed. I would like for a game to be released with no errors what-so-ever, but I think that it might be harder to catch all errors before a game's release. And if they sit on a game for too long and push back the release date, it could cost them money which companies do not like.

 

[infinity_turtles]

I remember the olden days, when most games shipped with almost no bugs and the bugs that did make it in were often considered a neat little part of the game by those players that found that particular bug, not something that needed to be fixed. I miss those days.

Patches can be a good thing, in the case of rare gamebreaking bugs, but otherwise I'd prefer a game to stand without them or fail. Bugs can be neat little features, and them being stomped out as they are often makes games, especially ones with simpler mechanics, seem far too orderly.

 

[FootloosePhoenix]

So basically developers can either release a game and listen to people whine about bugs, or release a patch for them and listen to people whine about having to install it. Damned if they do, damned if they don't. That summarizes a lot of things in the gaming industry, come to think of it.

I don't think many people are considering deadlines either and the fact that it's at least a two week period between when the developer has to have the finished product and when consumers can actually purchase it. Not even considering the publisher in this picture, the fans alone would ***** so much if a company said "Hey, we found another glitch in our game, so we're going to fix it and delay the release date another week." And there will always be more bugs. It's freaking impossible to find every tiny flaw in millions (perhaps billions) of lines of code. If every developer wasn't "lazy" and sought and addressed all these bugs before launch, I can pretty much guarantee you that would never play another new game in your life. And I can guarantee you that you and everyone else would be much more upset if a dev kept delaying their releases solely because there's a 0.001% chance your character will get stuck in a wall.

 

[SadisticBrownie]

Not really. Sure, it's irritating, but I'd rather wait a little longer than play a broken game.

 

[dessertmonkeyjk]

I don't even get why you want to patch it on release without any time for reasonable feedback. If it were me, I would wait at least a week to gather enough feedback to act upon then patch the most common problems.

Now if the game was crippled by a bug that makes key features not work then, by god, fix them ASAP.

 

[Something Amyss]

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

And what they're fixing. Some of these are understandable, others unforgiveable.

QA can miss some things, yes. Others make me wonder if you had any QA at all.

 

[ShinyCharizard]

I'm tired of the emerging trend of patches that are above 1 gig plus. Looking at you EA. Battlefield 3 is the worst example of this.