One thing that I don’t understand is: if they have a day one patch ready, why leave it as a patch and not directly integrate it in the game before launch?
I think it’s kind of just an archaic holdover. They have a deadline for publishing the game physically, and while it usually extends to digitally as well, you can update the digital thing. If you get the game directly on Steam or something, you probably won’t even notice the day 1 patch being installed on top of the game, since in many cases it is integrated with the main download and not separate patches you get sequentially.
All day 1 patches truly mean is that they continue working on the game even after the deadline to begin printing the physical copies in time for release.
Which is really dumb. I wish they would just wait to release until the game is done instead of sending a bunch of patches over the first few months after release. It’s that kind of crap that makes me not want to buy games at release or even for the first few months because I know if I wait, I’ll get a better product.
Before digital was a thing, game companies had to fully test their games before releasing because there was no way to patch it later. I wish we would’ve kept the same mindset today, but with the ability to patch in case they missed something.
I remember things like… Different ammo types in Fallout not actually working correctly. Armor Piercing rounds actually do less damage because the calculation is fucked up in the code. Or the biggest fuck up: The slides playing incorrectly if you manage to solve the Gecko/Vault City issue flawlessly. It still plays the ending cards as if you sided with Vault City, instead of getting them to work together peacefully by replacing the president of VC.
Many infinity engine RPGs have game breaking scripting bugs that needed patching or still haven’t been fixed even through user mods.
Anarchy Online straight up couldn’t be installed because the physical media was screwed up. Bought it day 1; didn’t play it until a full year after release when they finally put a fixed installer up for download.
World of Warcraft: Burning Crusade had an issue much like AO’s, with physical media being printed incorrectly and not working.
Just go and find playthroughs of some of these old classics. They just work around the issues. That’s what you had to do. In some cases, like soloing BG1 and 2, these issues were the only reason challenges were possible. lol
Aah, I must have been to young to spot those then lol. All I could remember off the top of my head is driver issues (specially audio, ugh) and reinstalling Windows because install corrupted the system and such.
Lol, some games were certainly buggy, but most games I played as a kid on my NES, SNES, Sega Genesis, N64, and Xbox worked pretty well. I remember by siblings being games testers as high school and college students, but that seems to no longer be a thing.
These days, only indie games seem to work okay day 1, and that’s not even a guarantee. Ever since WiFi became standard on consoles, it seems developers ship games way too early since they know they can patch it later.
Ah yeah, I guess that is true. I think Nintendo really clamped down on quality assurance due to the fact they rose up from the ashes of the Atari era and the global video game crash of the 80’s, that was directly attributed to a lack of quality assurance in the industry.
PC games, though… Oh boy. They were doing way more cool stuff, taking the tech to its limit, but they also tended to be smaller teams from garage companies, so had less resources for QA. Though it still was pretty rare to get a brand new game that straight up didn’t work. I think the only time that had ever happened to me was with Anarchy Online. I bought it retail the day of launch; that shit didn’t even install correctly. I couldn’t play it for a whole year, at which point they patched it and also put up a digital download cuz the physical media was botched.
Yeah, PC games were more rough, but they also often had a mechanism for updates. Sometimes it was a physical expansion pack (I think Warcraft 2 and StarCraft expansions were distributed that way, I forget though), and some had an online updater (I had dialup for most of my childhood so I am very aware of how much that sucked).
However, since I mostly played larger titles, I didn’t have to deal with that. Some games I loved as a kid:
Dark Forces
Lords of the Realm 2
Command and Conquer - most titles
Warcraft - 1&2
Age of Empires
Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear
I don’t remember any kind of patching needed for those games, and these were all mid to late 90s games, and I also played a lot of older floppy games, like ZZT and Scorched Earth, though the latter saw plenty of updates (I think my brother downloaded them at school or something).
Sometime after 2000 or so games started relying on downloading updates on PC, and with the PS3 and Xbox 360, that moved to consoles as well.
Literally every game has a day one patch. They don’t just throw their hands up, say “yay, we did it!”, then stop working. They continue working on the game to push out more fixes because they can and society has accepted it.
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