In Defense of [the] Game Patch

[GameBanshee News]

Tales of the Rampant Coyote has published a new article that looks at the pros and cons of game patches, and why they seem to be so much more prominent in modern times.

But you can't compare Pong to Oblivion and say, "Oh, look, they are so sloppy these days... look at how many bugs Oblivion has compared to Pong."

I mean - it's Pong. You can test the whole game in about five minutes. And you STILL had bugs in some games in that era with scores that would wrap around from 255 to 0. Or that bug in the arcade game "Sinistar" (yes, in the arcade) where a player could - on demand - get himself shot simultaneously with getting himself eaten by Sinistar when down to only one ship... which resulted in 2 kills at the same time, taking his number of lives UP to 255. I don't know if they ever patched that one. It still has that bug in an emulated version of the game (complete with a video where one of the developers talks about the bug).

In the past, they simply tried to keep the issues secret to keep their happy customers from knowing that there were problems. Nowadays, there's more open communication, so the happy customers discover that all might not be well in their games. Personally, I'm for better communication, even if it might alarm customers.

Hey, I've been on the disaffected customer side of things, too. It happened to me with no less than Ultima VII part 2: Serpent Isle. To this day I have never completed it. I'll bet most of you old-timers who played Serpent Isle had no idea there was a game-killing bug that only seemed to affect players running the game on a Cyrix 386/40 CPU (according to the tech support guy who could only offer apologies to me at the time).

Thanks, RPGWatch.

[Tricky]

I wonder how many lines it would take to program Pong in Basic. That's just about the only thing that article did for me.

[fable]

Who's he trying to kid? The problem isn't patches, per se: it's patches to games that are released in an incomplete state. That's what all the gripes are about; and surely he knows that. It's not that we have minor bugs that can't be caught prior to release. It's that we haven't got systems in place behind the facade of menus, or quest events have gone missing, or crash every 10 minutes on major video card series. This is the problem: not something that could be accidentally overlooked by a large team of betatesters. And no amount of mealy-mouthed sympathy for the people who advertise on the writer's website is going to make that go away.

[Xandax]

Originally Posted by fable

Who's he trying to kid? The problem isn't patches, per se: it's patches to games that are released in an incomplete state. That's what all the gripes are about; and surely he knows that. It's not that we have minor bugs that can't be caught prior to release. It's that we haven't got systems in place behind the facade of menus, or quest events have gone missing, or crash every 10 minutes on major video card series. This is the problem: not something that could be accidentally overlooked by a large team of betatesters. And no amount of mealy-mouthed sympathy for the people who advertise on the writer's website is going to make that go away.

Exactly.
Being a programmer, I know how hard it is to stomp bugs out, and test/debug all issues before it reaches the "consumer". It is practically impossible now a days.

However in some cases we have seen that bugs are known when software is released with known issues, or so serious bugs exists that it just can't be unknown. Games where almost already get the first bug downloaded before you install the game ...... that is not complexity, that is either poor testing (or lack of), or unwillingness to fix before sending software on the market.
Games now are more complex then PONG, and yes, software code can (and is) immensly hard to keep bug free, but releasing unfinished software in this day and age only smacks of one thing ... namely the need to release to bring money in.

Few gamers mind patches to fix issues, balance game etc - what we mind is releasign the uncomplete software, and then practically making us - the consumer, the one you live off - paying to be allowed to test the software.
If I am expected to test, I expect to get paid, either by getting the software for free, or my standard hour price for work.

Unfortunately the masses seems to just by anything if it is hyped enough, so I doubt we'll see this trend turn any other direction.