Patches .....

[draconia34]

has anybody realized how big patches are becoming ?

do the developers actually test their games or do they just thrash them at the economy and say : HERE TAKE THIS %^& and let us know if there are any bugs . so we can waste your intertrons on downloading pointless patches we could have fixed in development and testing .....

like for instance cod WAW . SERIOUSLY !! over 1.5 gigs patches ? and don't even mention Gothic 3 ... oops to late ! and then fallout 3 .... no comment.

what happened to perfect games like Freelancer . it had one patch and it was to fix a text error.

its not going to help trying to save time and money , throwing useless buggy games at us. your ratings will suffer . and your sales will drop ....

now im REALLY NO expert in cash flows for companies . but even my own common sense led me to this thought..... i know games are becoming bigger, but that is no excuse for fixing pointless glitches, crashes, and bugs .


.... game developers should really wake up now. your killing the pc market for gaming.

what do you guys think ?

 

[Leopardos]

True , im a gamer since the Team fortress classic release ,
i dont remmber that i saw patchs for anygame just to fix bugs before like i do this years ,
i.e : Counter-strike , there was alittle bugs , but hey , there wasn't that biiiiiiiiiiig bugs ,, just 1.3 and then 1.4.. .. .. they just change stuff not fix bugs ...
Hell , i used to play like crazy 4-9 hours a day ... and wasnt enough for me ...
now, i dont play alot cuz there is nothing worth to burn hours on ..really , we want new games to have fun with ...
Im waiting for WOLFENSTEIN , i pre-ordered it ... its the FPS MOTHER !!!!
i hope that i will play it while having ALOOOOOOOOOOT of fun , without looking at my clock or get bored after 2 hours or so ...
old days .. will they come again ?

 

[draconia34]

lets hope so diablo 3 i pre-ordered , now even without LAN option its still going to be fun . because lets face it . you cant stop hackers so d3 will have LAN sooner or later.

cs was fun , true, even css . that was a ball lanning with buds and laughing at the insane amount of bots we had to face on aztec.

good old days , might return with d3 and wolfenstein . even cod mw2 but who knows , lets hope something good comes out sooner or later.

i was recently at a 3 man lan , playing l4d coop and cod world at war zombies and coop mp. and cod4 with bots ,now that was some serious fun. a bit different. but still very fun.

cod mw2 will bring back alot of cs memories with the guns that will available

i think they will be easy on the patches since its infinity ward and not treyarch

 

[Leopardos]

well , as i see my self a "gamer" an old gamer , i missed few things that years ,
like diablo and starcraft ... they'r not my type , but hell the new diablo looks AWSOME ...
i will order it later , its still early to order now... they didnt say anything about the release date at all yet ... so i will wait
right now , im playing Quake live , and Battlefield 2 ... this games isnt that old ... but they'r the best ATM ... unlike the new games ... as i see , the games which long live because there is a real skillz ,
as i remmber i played counter-strike for 6-7 years :O i went to lan parties , i was famous i cant imagine my self playing any game this years for that long ...
iwas imba in counter-strike

 

[draconia34]

haha i still play bf2 aswell . local is great with the servers always full. you should try the nations at war mod . it adds alot of things like quad bikes and offroad bikes. a few guns from cs are in there too. its like a mix-match with bf2,cod4,cs . all in one. even the deadly p90 is in there.

starcraft i tried once. but left it there. wasnt really for me aswell. but i have been playing diablo 2 online since the expansion came out hectic .

i wish more games had such a big variety. they would have been more successful. instead of worrying about the latest and up to date shiny graphics. look at d3 for eg. its got medium style graphics but its going to be HECTIC FUN !!

 

[bpogdowz]

Doesn't really bother me I have to download games anyways let alone patches and I have 2Mbit it's plenty fast. Would suck to be you if you have 1.5Mbit and slower. Get a connection.

 

[Leopardos]

doesnt really bother you playing a game u bought which is buggy for 2 years , and after the 2 years the game is not buggy anymore ? or wait 2 months for the game to get released without bugs ?
what u saying isnt true , no one want to buy buggy game ... because after they fix all the bugs the game will be dead and no one play it.

 

[ainarssems]

1.Games get more and more complex therefor more possibilities for bugs and harder to find.
2 .Game engine
is built by one company and game itself by another that makes it even more difficult and some parts might be even built by somebody else.

3. There is much more hardware and software variations then used to be again making it difficult to ensure it will run flawlessly on all configurations.

4. They need to do it fast to deliver game to market or else by the time game is released it will be obsolete in terms of engine, graphics etc. Or they will neeed to rebuild it several times during the development to catch up with new tecnologies eventually never finishing game like Duke Nukem Forever.

Solution:
1. Stop moaning and keep updating.
2. Play old games.
3. Get a console. (well that is not really solution as they need patches as well but less then PC)
4. Don't play at all.

PS. It is not only games , all kinds of software need updates, look at Windows, they have updates almost every week.

 

[draconia34]

not everybody has fast enough internet ! lol we have 4mb lines in south africa. and 20mb soon. gaming magz bring out the patches so why spend a gig worth of download wasting time for a games mistakes to be fixed when it could have been fixed in development. or when you could be playing your fav game but instead have to wait for a patch downloading ? see where im going ?

buying games on dvd from a store ads up to the collection and mine looks like a library on its own . it really depends what people prefer to do. you could download. great good for you. or you could buy the game from a shop. plain and simple.

 

[Leopardos]

ainarssems, ur right , but they all just rush and rush and rush to release ... no need to rush to catch with new tecnologies , why not to make a Top game with the last technology, and be best game ever like old games ? and the next game with the newest technology ?
if the new technologies screwing us , we dont need it .. give us the last one but better game and gameplay ... the next technology give us next year ..
i hope u get my point "bad english"
and thats the prove why we dont have games like old games ...

 

[Leopardos]

i personaly dont look 2much @ the graphic ... crysis ? lol its the worst game i have ever seen ...
its should be better than team fortress 2 and counter-strike and unreal , because the graphics is awsome .. okey , after we saw the island with water and nice graphics , then WHAT ?!
i want to play a game for 2+ years with other games same time .. not 1-4 weeks and i'll finish the game ...
blaaaaaaaaaaa. ... sorry but im mad ... they screwed the pc games

 

[draconia34]

ainarssems has a point there yeah . i update my avg not because i have to . because i want to . and thats all that needs updating. exept for gfx drivers and mobo drivers when it really is needed. which is like once or twice every few months.

NOTE: when it really is needed.

look at the fallout 3 game for example ? and its a good one too....

theres a bug that occurs when using a slightly older card from last year or the year before... the game slows down. it just does. up to the point of restarting the pc.

now they could have fixed it . but seems the patch has made it WORSE.
if you have a high end graphics card. you dont have that problem.
its stuff like that , that i ended up leaving fallout 3 out of all the games i completed just because its like they didn't care about people who have an 8'series from nvidia. now i have an ati 4830 and it works great.

a little less worrying about the release date and following blizzards example of making proper games. and more games would have been awesome !!

 

[purplerat]

Patches are bigger because games are bigger (and more complex). The average game today comes on a DVD, maybe even two or more. Compare that to a 1.44MB floppy or even a CD where maybe only a few hundred megs are actually being used and it's reasonable to assume that patches would have to scale to the size of the game. Also as was pointed out earlier larger games mean more complex programming and more areas for possible bugs/fixes, but it's still all about scale.

I've heard this complaint before - saying that developers today don't make games with the same quality as before and that's why more/bigger patches are needed. But it's really not true. First of all people tend to look at the past with rose colored glasses. Whether it be music, movies, sports or video games we tend to forget about the bad and exaggerate the greatness of the past and over react to modern issues to give the impression that things were just better way back when.

Think about games 15-20 years ago, but honestly. They were hardly perfect but we really didn't expect bugs to be fixed because there really wasn't a distribution system to get free patches out to customers. So you just dealt with them and didn't really worry about them because what could you do? It just became a part of the game.

One major issue for PC games was that unlike today they were not developed to work as seamlessly with such a wide range of setups or with any sort of standardization. Just getting a game to run on a random PC could be extremely tedious. The idea of just popping in a game, installing and playing would have been laughable. I remember having a separate boot disk to go along with each game that I owned because each game required a different system configuration in order to work properly. If a particular game didn't quite work so well with your particular hardware you didn't get a patch - you wrote one. And sometimes a game just never worked. I have a handful of games that I bought throughout the 90s that I've never played because they never worked at all. Not because my hardware wasn't good enough but just because that developer didn't design that game to work with my particular hardware even though spec wise I had enough power to run it.

The truth is that games today are flat out better than games 10,15, 20 years ago. Some developers do take advantage of the ability to fix/update games after they've been released but that is really a good thing. It allows games to get out there and be played and then be fixed if needed. But in my opinion that's a lot better than either having a game be released maybe with fewer bugs, but ones that will never be fixed or for games that may be really good being shelved and never released because fixing minor bugs (that could be patched later) would push the cost over budget. As a gamer in 2009 you're much better off than anytime before so stop bitching.

 

[draconia34]

lol , thats taking the clock way back 10-20 years ago. im not complaining about stuff like that. its how big patches have become. look at farcry 2 , more intense in every possible way than cod waw but the patches and the amount to download is far smaller.

better programming = better gaming = less downloading = more playing

now the AI for fc2 is still something to be perfected. but thats about it. all the patches together total a few 100mb's .

check cod waw and each patch is like 200-500mbs each.

again.....
better programming = better gaming = less downloading = more playing

 

[wargfix]

While i agree to some extent about patches becoming bigger due to games being bigger and better etc.

You're missing out a big thing with cod world at war... they aren't only patches, but map packs.

Thats why they're 200-300 Mbs.. if you ever read the "patch notes" there are very small fixes. and then... Maps. thats what taking up all those megabytes...

 

[draconia34]

ya , i read the notes . otherwise whats the point in updating not knowing what they fiddled with . ha ha its still no excuse for the one Gothic 3 patch that's 1 gig , .....oh dear seems we left half the game out... sorry here's a patch . plonk it on the net and that's that........just...horrid....

also check how much they fixed in coh with only a few patches for a few mb's. a big patch here and there with maps in it.

now thats how you manage patches!!

i guess could have used bf2 as a better example for lots of big patches.

wonder how big codwaw would actually be without the map packs?
and instead of adding more maps , focus on fixing things.... ?

 

[draconia34]

its really just a debate of who is the better company at making games at the end