Day One Patch Coming To 'The Division'

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hellwig

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Ah, remember when the studio would release a game, and you bought it on a ROM (game cartridge, CD, etc...), played it on a device that had never heard of the internet, and got hours of gameplay out of it?

I know the technology now days is a lot more complicated, but shouldn't these companies also be a lot better at their jobs by now?

I guess I'm just getting too old.
 
Back in the old days games were coded, mostly directly for that sole machine.
Today games company's to save time port the games from one format to another.

The end result is when porting a game from one format to another is game coding is a lot more rough and loose.
The end result is day one patches, or patching.
Saves money than having a team of coders ect for each format the game is released on.
Your not getting old Hellwig. Just time, and money is saved. More profit made.
 

alidan

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Ah, remember when the studio would release a game, and you bought it on a ROM (game cartridge, CD, etc...), played it on a device that had never heard of the internet, and got hours of gameplay out of it?

I know the technology now days is a lot more complicated, but shouldn't these companies also be a lot better at their jobs by now?

I guess I'm just getting too old.

i also remember back in the day needing to upgrade entire systems, from cpu, video card, and audio card just to run games... its a consequence we have now, pretty much any system/configuration can run a game without to much issue, it all comes down to horsepower, but that also means there are a few million configurations and several trillion different ways the os/programs and conflict with the operation of the game.

you cant get every bug in house, and even then, you can keep a game inhouse for longer and try to stamp out every bug, or release the game and patch... personally i'm a big fan of getting games faster and relying on a few patches.

with that said, the majority of the issues above sound like "the game went gold, and we are still working on improvements" opposed to bug fixes, along with catching glitches in house at 0 hour.
 

icepick314

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also the games are in gigabytes, not kilobytes...

you can't expect them to run perfectly every single time...

I played last night for couple of hours and didn't run into any significant glitches...surprised how smoothly it ran in mostly medium setting with few high to very high settings for textures and details....
 

ErikVinoya

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you cant get every bug in house, and even then, you can keep a game inhouse for longer and try to stamp out every bug, or release the game and patch... personally i'm a big fan of getting games faster and relying on a few patches.

Coming from the software development industry here. This is a very popular approach done in software development these days.

Instead of using huge resources for development and QA right off the bat, people tend to divide development into cycles. Try and get as much as possible into the first cycle, release, then start picking out features/fixes to be done on the next cycle

I think this is due to the fact that its much easier to release patches today (internet) than it was on the 80s/90s, so why not take advantage of the technology.
 

hellwig

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This assumes your customers are willing to WAIT for a solution. If I go to a store and buy a product, I need to know that product works, not that, if I pay them today, eventually they'll get it working.

The "agile" methodology you reference presumes that someone is paying you to develop the software. You don't have a viable product until the end. If I go to a store, and buy a pre-packaged game off the shelf (Yes, some people still do that), I'm not anticipating I need to fund the Development of said game! I just want a game that works. I'll wait six months and THEN give you my money, not spend the money now, and wait six months for something useable.

If you want someone to fund the development, that's an agreement you must make up front, not saddle your customers with, by surprise, at what the customers think is "the end".

"I'm going to sell you a car for $30,000. It only has three wheels, no engine, and the seats aren't installed yet, but man, would you listen to that RADIO!" I think the problem is, the people deciding NOT to deliver final content at first, aren't really asking the customers if that's what they want, it just happens to be what they give the customers.

Video games used to be fixed cost. I.e. new titles had a general pricing range ($30-60). You bought a game, and that was that. Now, you pay $60 for a game, they offer a few patches, and then the functionality you actually wanted is a $15 DLC. That benefits the developers, but NOT the customers, not in any viable way whatsoever. Oh sure, you get a game "early", did that really change your life, if for 6 months the game was crap?

</rant> <!-- sorry -->

 
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