When Patches Attack!

By Joe Haygood | April 25, 2008

For many, many years, PC gamers, including myself have always had to deal with one thing that has never bother console players until recently - patches.  It has always been that you would buy a console game and never have to worry about post-release fix.  It made programmers sit up and take note that what they were doing was right.  They even double and triple checked their work, because a wrong move would cost the developer a recall if the problem was big enough.

On the PC side of the equation, developers have always had the option to fix things later by patching.  I remember the first serious bug that I ran into was in King’s Quest V, near the end of the game.  I swapped to disc 7 (go 3.5″ floppies!) and got an OOPs error.  It was a malloc, or memory allocation error.  After a few calls to tech support, I fould out that the issue had come about due to my installing the VGA version on top of the 16 color EGA version.  No biggie, just wipe out the install, but it was not that easy.  I had to get a “patch” in order to fix it.  This was an unheard of issue for me.  My games had always worked.  So I logged into the Sierra BBS and got the patch, applied it and moved on.

Console gamers, especially in this generation are starting to get the feel for patches, and it is really starting to shock them at how painful the process can be at times.  Looking at two recent examples, we have Bully from Rockstar and Burnout Paradise from Criterion.  Both had to get patches due to a development error, and both came up causing more problems than they fixed.  Of course console owners have complained, arguing why patches are needed, make the game right in the first place, and I have to laugh.  Only now are they starting to see the error of what happens when you put permanent storage into a console.  It now gives license to the developer to just fix problems later and ship for fiscal release.

It is sad though, because I was always envious of console games, because as time went on, I seemed to be downloading a patch a week for my various games, because developers would just say “F–k it, put it out and shovel a patch out later.”  Console gamers, never had this issue.  They never had to search BBS boards for patches, and it was unheard of in the console world to have to uninstall a game or copy save games to another storage device while you fixed the game.  They just popped a cartridge in and played the game.  Sweet and simple, without a lot of headache.

Now, it is routine to buy a console game and within a week, have to download a fix.  As a matter of fact, some games are starting to get the evil shipping day patch, which is even worse, because it means you have to download a patch before you can even play the game in the first place.

I do feel for my console breathern, as it is a tough thing to deal with patches, but bad patches are even worse.  Ask anyone that played Battlecruiser 3000 if you want to hear a novel on how a bad game, with even worse patching can ruin your expectation of a game.  Lets hope that the console game developers start to take a little more pride in their development cycles and make sure to bring a solid, well designed game to market.  Patches are suppose to be last resort fixes, not an aid to meet a release date.