It's not about the type of game. The new standard should be about releasing a finished game. Not a buggy mess with day one patches.
this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2023
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Day one patch is fine. It's just an odd remnant of buying physically as the discs have to be pressed and shipped several months ahead of launch while the Devs carry on working. Digital owners just download the latest build on launch.
If there's a patch and the game is still full of issues, thats another story.
So pressing unfinished games on disks is fine for you? They should release a finished game. What if the console shop or server goes offline? How can you play it then? For preservation, day one patches are a nightmare.
I'm glad to see the trend of releasing more games for pc beside their console counterpart rising. It makes preservation easier.
Even if you press finished game, you still find tons of issues to fix before the release. It should be treated as bonus polishing time though, not time to finish the game.
Pressing unfinished games is a trade-off and a lesser evil than instead choosing to distribute games digital only. One alternative would be to delay all launches until multiple months after the game is considered “ready,” but that would likely impact revenue streams in a way that the people making those decisions would never agree to. It would also upset the 80% of the market who buy games digitally - why should their release be delayed?
Would you prefer for physical releases to not be available until 3-6 months after the digital release (and more frequently, for there to be no physical release at all)?
What’s the problem with day-one patches? I’d much rather have a game with a day-one patch than a game that needs a patch 1 year after its release
Game + day-one patch is essentially the initial state of the game
As usual, people have no idea of the complexity of software. Games are extra complex. Games that are meant to run on an infinite variety of hardware combinations are worse. And it's not any game, it's an expansive RPG with hundreds of hours of gameplay and paths.
It's impossible to ship this kind of product bug-free, and it's quite probable that it will never truly be bug-free. A day-1 patch is obviously expected, and bugfixes in the following weeks mean that devs are closely monitoring how it goes, and are still working full-time on it. That's commendable.
my only problem with them is that they can tend to be a bunch of extra data to download, rather that including it in the first download
Day one patch means they released an unfinished game. They haven't done enough testing before physical production. Also fucks over the people with a slow connection.
A patch 1 year after release is fine. Some people found a rare bug which can be fixed. If the game gets patches 1 year or longer after release tells me the developers have love for their game and/or community for fixing it long after they had any obligation to.
A day-one patch is the day of the release, so it counts as included in the release in my books.
It doesn’t mean « they haven’t done enough testing before physical production », it means they took advantage of the inevitable several weeks or months between start of physical printing and release.
And of course a patch 1 year after release is fine. What I’m saying is that I prefer a broken game that is fixed on release day over a broken game that is fixed 1 year later.
What about a working game instead? They could just delay the launch until they've finished what would've gone into a day 1 patch before going gold.
If they did that, they could:
- start working on an expansion
- give the dev team vacation time as a celebration for going gold
- start work on the next game
- do a bunch of play testing to reduce the need for patches a year after launch (i.e. catch more bugs)
In other words, a studio shouldn't go gold until their TODO list for launch day is done. That should be the standard, and it seems to be what BG3 did.
BG3 had a day-one patch, and is at its 6th hotfix now. Does it make it a broken game?
With the scale of modern AAA games it is inevitable, if a studio had to wait until every bug in a game the size of Starfield was fixed to release it, it would simply never release. You have to decide at some point that the game is in a releasable state, and at this moment you start printing discs, then you keep working on it and fixing bugs and that constitues the day-one patch. And don’t worry about the expansion, they started working on it long before the release.
Having a day one patch doesn't make a game broken, but it is a symptom of a bad internal process. Here are the patch notes for BG3 Day 1 (not sure if 100% accurate, but this is the best source I could find). To me, that doesn't sound like anything game breaking.
I'm not saying BG3 is the gold standard for AAA game releases, I'm merely saying it's what we should expect for an average AAA release with some being a little better and some being a little worse.
I'm not saying every bug needs to be fixed. Even older games before SW patches were a thing had a ton of bugs. I'm just saying, the game should play well even if users never patch the game. This is really important for game preservation, so you should always be able to take the game disk and install it offline and play through the whole game and have a great experience. That's not the standard many AAA studios hold themselves to.
Look at this way, you've got everything you needed to fix complete. The game is uploaded the the storefront database. It's now a week before release. There will always be bugs to fix and no game will ever be completely bugfree (especially not games at this scale). At some point you have to release the game, so why not just release what you've been working on since when the game launches?
I'm not saying the game needs to be perfect, but it should be a great experience beginning to end without applying any patches. As in, I should be able to take the game disk and install it without any Internet connection and play through the game with only minor bugs here and there.
This is really important for game preservation (the patch servers will eventually go offline), yet many AAA games are almost unplayable without day one patches.
I'm a huge fan of software updates for games, but those updates should merely improve an already great experience, not be the method to fix a broken game. A broken game should never leave QA.
Why do you prefer broken games at all though? Wouldn't you prefer a finished game at release?
Except that's not what happened in the old days, I've been getting PC game patches for as long as I've been gaming, upwards of 30 years. You're not going to get every bug. Console games just didn't get patched, if it was a buggy PoS it remained a buggy PoS.
What devs see is "all those other devs are too lazy to make a good game".
What players mean is "all those other games are full of micro transactions and sell missing content and features as dlc", which is not the same thing.
What players want to be addressed is the bad influence investors have on the products. Publishers aren't interested in publishing good games, they only care about money.
Devs don't go about making a game only for the money. Most of them would rather do it the same way Larian does it, focus on quality and provide a good gaming experience, but their hands are tied.
So the message gamers try to get out goes to the wrong recipients, and it's obviously being taken the wrong way.
Pretty obvious and epic communication fail.
And that's why I generally prefer indie games. Many indie games are made with passion, with money being down the list of priorities. AAA games are made with money first, though there is certainly passion as well, it's just not the top on the list. As studios and budgets get bigger, so will their expectation of profits.
So if you want better games, buy from smaller studios. Show them that you value passion over high budget.
The only reason this is still a discussion is because game journalists have nothing else going on and half of them are AI by this point