Console Games Patching...?

Creamy Goodness

now as a pc gamer myself i know the importance of getting patches for games as i know well developers can not test every single combination of hardware under the sun.

but when i see stories like this http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=70807 it makes me think is this a regular occurence for console gamers? is there patches upon patches out there for games?

also what is the need for them i mean let's take the xbox360 example for the sake of it, why are they patching/what are they patching, surely all xbox360's run the game the same so wouldn't they not just test the game before releasing it to ensure patching wasn't needed.

or are they actually releasing new content in these patches and that the word patch is just being mis-used?

steviec

Patching only exists on the 360 right now, though the other next gen machines will probably follow suit.

The machine can generally be counted on to be connected online and to have a hard drive, that makes patches possible. In most cases they're bug fixes, online rebalances and occasionally some additional content.

They're not all that common but certainly getting there. Bad thing? Hmm, I dunno, on the one hand you could say game developers are getting lazy and falling back on patches, but I can think of older games with bugs that were never ever fixed and it's not like there's an epidemic of bugs in new games, they're often fixing things that you'd barely notice, or most commonly online lag issues which I guess only become apparent with large quantities of people playing online.

KdjaCL

If its a game crashing bug your screwed if you have no internet, more meeting ship dates than lazyness. If everyone had the its done when its done mentality publishers be poor and games be better.

All 3 next gen consoles can patch games sad state of affairs.


kdjac

pimpy_c

I think it's a good thing. I remember finding a horrific flaw in 'Knights of the Old Republic' on the Xbox. A patch would have been fantastic!

Clover

patching of console games such as the 360 has it's good and bad.

good : if the game has a problem it can be fixed with the patch (once you have it hooked up to your broadband )

bad : to many games seem to have problems when they are released and some require a patch straight away .

now while i understand it from a pc point of view i don't find it acceptable for a console game which is designed for just one set of hardware . some of the games have either problems with the single player or multiplayer element of the game and should be picked up and fixed before they release it.

BloodBath

Has to be a good thing to be honest. Some developers may get a little lazy knowing they can fall back on patches but games these days are a hell of a lot more prone to bugs than in the past. There are so many variables that it's almost impossible to find all possible bugs/exploits from pre testing. Consoles are almost finished bridgeing the gap between pc's. All they need now is upgradeable hardware.

Creamy Goodness

consoles may have bridged the gap between themselves and pc's but the fundamentals of a console are still there.

they are all the same thing under the box, except maybe hard drive size.

they shouldn't need patching for bugs, anyways isn't that what patching is, finding and stopping bugs. to me it just screams laziness.

now if patches were introduced to games where they make multi platform gaming say a mmorpg played on wii/ps3/xbox360/pc possible then of course i'd be up for it but just to patch a game to fix a faulty texture or something along those lines just doesn't seem right.

0ubliette

The patching for GOW is in response to a complaint about VGA users getting a squashd image when palying on a vga monitor. They fixed the problem, and are going to work on several multi-player issues, probably concerning the nade tag range (i hope). Most multiplayer games need patches at some stage as glitches/bugs only become apparrent after release. Im glad to see epic giving good support to GOW and wish more companies gave a much of a damn as they do about thier products once theyve shipped.

Conar

0ubliette wrote:

The patching for GOW is in response to a complaint about VGA users getting a squashd image when palying on a vga monitor. They fixed the problem, and are going to work on several multi-player issues, probably concerning the nade tag range (i hope). Most multiplayer games need patches at some stage as glitches/bugs only become apparrent after release. Im glad to see epic giving good support to GOW and wish more companies gave a much of a damn as they do about thier products once theyve shipped.

I agree.
Like it or not the more complex games get the more bugs slip through the net. Better that they fix them than pretend they're not there.