How Long Will Your Favorite Game Be Supported?
PC gaming has lots going for it. Developers don’t have to get things approved for the platform, anyone can make a game, and sometimes being able to buy and download a full game without needing to scrape around in a desk drawer for a disc or CD key are all nice things. One thing that Windows gaming has against it, for me anyway, is the tragedy of orphaned titles. After a couple of years games might not run due to the latest and greatest Windows patch, maybe a new Windows version shows up that can’t run it properly, and your disc is now a coaster even though it might have been one of your favorite games ever.
Sometimes, however, games buck that trend and get lots of love long past their twilight years. Case in point? Half-Life just got a new patch this week. That’s Half-Life 1, people, not the shiny Source-engine Half-Life 2. That’s the 1998 game. The nineties. Remember them? Apparently Valve needed to close a few exploits in “cvar codes” whatever those are.
I think I’ve only seen patch longevity like this from Blizzard for their insanely successful Starcraft and Diablo 2 games. What are some of the oldest patches you’ve seen for PC games?
Source: VoodooExtreme
Tags: blizzard, burnout paradise, criterion, diablo, diablo 2, half life, patch, PS3, starcraft, steam, valve, XBOX 360
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There are two games that I recall getting patches for a very long time. These would be Quake 2 and Quake 3. Both of these received patches WAY after their initial release date.
Quake 2 was released 12/1997 and the final patch was released 3/2003. That makes for 6 years of patches. If you consider that HL was based mostly on the Quake 1 engine and released in 11/1998, that’s not too shabby since id’s next title was released nigh but one year later.
Quake 3 was released 12/1999 and the final patch was released 5/2006. Almost 7 years of patches.
In terms of support for games and overlap, Quake 2 was support for 3 years after the next game in its series. Half-Life 2 was released in 12/2004 so Half-Life is just barely edging out past Quake 2 in terms of long-term support. Also, I bet we would have seen more official patches from id if they hadn’t released the source for it. Or the corollary, if Valve HAD released the source to Half-Life, then I bet we wouldn’t have seen this support now.
With Steam games are consistently updated. It for their interested to keep patching games when new faster machines comes out so they can keep selling old games. Heck, I rebought Deus Ex and I was happy to find out it still work. There was obviously some patching that let it work on my machine thats way older than the game.
To me, it’s probably SimCity and Marathon. Now both of these have been released to the public for free and SimCity is actually open source, so end-users are diligently making sure SimCity and the Marathon trilogy will run on just about everything out there (the latter, through environments like AlephOne).
The makes me wonder how old a console game has been (on the 360 I guess) when it was patched recently.
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